Susanoo

More of this collection converges on Susanoo than on any other figure.

The founding monster-slaying. The founding dance. The origin of a demon-race. The plague sovereign. The underworld's examiner. Kyoto's greatest festival.

All one god.

And he begins as grief.

He wept until the rivers dried

Susanoo is the storm god — sea, storm, and fields — and his first act in the record is not violence.

His mother Izanami is dead, in the underworld, and he will not stop crying.

The account is specific and enormous: he wept until the mountains withered and the rivers ran dry.

That's a child's grief, rendered as climate.

And everything that follows is that grief, still weathering.

The rampage

He goes to say goodbye to his sister Amaterasu, the sun goddess — and she suspects him, so they hold a contest, and he wins it on a technicality.

And then he celebrates.

He breaks the paddy divisions. He fills the irrigation ditches. He defecates in the hall where the first fruits are offered.

And then the act that ends it: he flays a heavenly pony and hurls it through the roof of the weaving hall.

A weaver dies — startled, in the versions that spell it out, in a way that kills her.

And his sister, appalled, shuts herself in a cave, and the world goes dark.

(What gets her out is Ame-no-Uzume dancing on an upturned tub so outrageously that the gods roar with laughter, and the sun goddess opens the door because she cannot bear not knowing what's funny. Which is why Japan's founding performance exists at all — because of a tantrum.)

And his fury, vomited up, stands up on its own as Amanozako — a goddess with a hooked nose and a fearsome temper, and the ancestress the tengu are traced back to.

His rage produced offspring. Literally.

They threw him out of heaven.

And then he becomes the template

He lands in Izumo, and finds an old couple weeping.

They've had eight daughters. Seven have been eaten by the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, and tonight it comes for the eighth.

And Susanoo does the thing that every monster-slaying in Japan descends from.

He asks for the girl's hand. He turns her into a comb and puts her in his hair. He has the family brew eight vats of sake, one per head, and build eight gates with a vat behind each.

The serpent drinks. All eight heads.

He kills it in its sleep — and cutting through the tail, his blade strikes something, and out of it comes Kusanagi, the sword that becomes one of the three imperial regalia.

Then he marries her.

Every hero in this collection is following his procedure. The demon king poisoned at his own banquet, the centipede shot with a spit-wetted arrow, the kappa boss beaten with an army of monkeys — the whole canon is Susanoo's method, reapplied.

And then he becomes the examiner

Later he rules Ne-no-Kuni, the root land, and a young god called Ōkuninushi comes fleeing there.

Susanoo puts him through four trials — the snake chamber, the centipedes and wasps, the burning field, the delousing — all survived with the secret help of Susanoo's own daughter, who has fallen in love with him.

And when the boy escapes with the daughter, the sword, the bow, and the koto, Susanoo chases them to the border of the underworld —

— and shouts his blessing after them. Names him. Grants him the land.

The examiner satisfied. He was never testing whether the boy could survive snakes. He was testing whether he could take something and get away with it.

And he ends up quelling plagues and blessing marriages

The pacification arc, run on a first-generation deity.

He was syncretized with Gozu Tennō, the ox-headed plague king — which makes Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto his, and the Gion Matsuri — Japan's most famous festival, a thousand years old, founded to stop an epidemic — his portfolio.

And at Hikawa Shrine in Saitama he is a patron of marriage, worshipped alongside the wife he saved from the serpent.

The god who wrecked heaven ends up as a wedding deity.

The tradition is a genealogy before it is a zoo

Here's what I'd take away from him.

Japan's monster tradition is substantially one family's weather.

A mother's death in the underworld.

A son's grief, which is the storms.

A sister's withdrawal, which is the dark, and the dance that ended it.

A rescued bride, and the sword from the serpent's tail.

A fury that stood up and walked, and became the ancestor of the tengu.

Before this is a bestiary, it is a family, and most of what follows is the consequence of one boy who couldn't stop crying for his mother.