Izanami and Yomi

Before any monster in this collection, there is this.

Izanami and Izanagi made the islands and the gods. And then Izanami gave birth to fire, and the fire killed her, and she went down to Yomi — the land of the dead.

Her husband went after her to bring her back.

The condition

He finds her in the dark, and she tells him it may be too late: she has already eaten the food of the underworld, which binds a person to it.

But she'll try. She'll go and ask the lords of Yomi for permission to leave.

And she gives him one instruction while she's gone:

Do not look at me.

He waits in the dark. And he waits. And eventually he breaks a tooth off the comb in his hair and lights it as a torch.

What the light shows is his wife's body rotting — maggots in it, foul things running over her, the flesh gone.

He runs.

The chase

She sends the shikome after him — the hags of Yomi — and then eight thunder gods, and finally comes herself.

He throws things behind him to slow them: his headdress, his comb, each becoming something that delays the pursuit. And at the pass between the worlds he finds a peach tree and throws three peaches, and the pursuers break and fall back.

Then he seals the pass with a boulder.

The divorce, through a rock

And through that stone, the first marriage in Japanese myth ends in the first curse.

Izanami: Then I will kill a thousand of your people every day.

Izanagi: Then I will cause fifteen hundred to be born.

That's it. That's the deal. Japan's death rate and birth rate, negotiated through a boulder by a divorced couple, and still running at a net gain of five hundred a day.

I don't know of a colder or more magnificent piece of cosmology anywhere.

Everything downstream

Almost every rule in this collection starts in that cave.

The gaze taboo. This is the first "don't look" in Japanese literature and the most catastrophic. Every one that follows — the sea-princess in the birth hut, the fox-wife exposed by a tail, the crane unwinding herself at the loom, the woman who says don't open that room — is a rerun of the moment Izanagi lit a comb.

The pursuing dead. The shikome and the thunder-gods are the underworld's first monsters, and the ancestors of every oni that came later. The Buddhist hell wardens arrive centuries afterward to staff an underworld this myth had already built.

The peach. The founding protective object of the tradition — thrown here, inherited by the boy born from one who goes to fight demons, still present at the edges of the bean-throwing festival.

And the sealed boundary. The boulder at Yomotsu Hirasaka is the archetype of every threshold in Japanese practice. The rope across a shrine gate. The stone guardians at the village edge. The basket raised on a pole. The holly and the fish head at the door in February.

All of it is that rock, miniaturized and repeated.

Two details worth keeping

The food rule is specified. What binds her is yomotsu-hegui — food cooked at the hearth of the underworld. Not merely food that exists there: food cooked there. Eat what the place prepared and you belong to the place.

That single clause underwrites half the food rules in this tradition — the hunger that possesses travellers on mountain passes, the offerings left for visiting spirits, the whole apparatus of what you may and may not accept from something. Residence follows digestion. It's Persephone's clause, running in Izumo.

And the gate has an address. Yomotsu Hirasaka is identified with the Iya slope in Matsue, Shimane.

The boulder is there. You can go and stand at the entrance to the land of the dead, and it is a rock in a field in Shimane, and there is a sign.