Tsukuyomi

Everything in this collection happens at night.

And the night has a warden that the tradition almost never mentions.

Tsukuyomi — "moon-counter" — the calendrical god, third of Izanagi's three noble children, sibling to the sun and the storm.

He is the great absent landlord of the entire yokai world.

The incident

His sister Amaterasu sends him down to visit Ukemochi, the food goddess, as her representative.

Ukemochi lays on a banquet.

And the way she produces it is this: she turns toward the sea and spits out fish. She turns toward the land and game comes out of her mouth. She turns toward the fields and rice.

The whole feast, out of her own body.

Tsukuyomi is revolted.

And he kills his host.

And his sister never spoke to him again

Amaterasu's verdict is absolute, and the tradition preserves the wording:

> "You are a wicked god! I shall never see you again."

And she meant it literally.

The sun and the moon have divided the sky ever since.

They occupy the same heaven and they do not share it. One rises as the other sets. They pass without meeting.

Day and night are an estrangement.

Which reframes this entire collection

Sit with what that means.

The night that this tradition's creatures fill — the road at dusk, the hour when faces stop resolving, the whole territory of the parade — is, mythically, a punishment.

It's the half of the sky a brother was exiled to, out of his sister's sight, permanently, for what he did at dinner.

The boundary hour is the border of a family estrangement. And the monsters live on the far side of it.

And it was about table manners

Which sounds trivializing until you notice how much of this tradition runs on food.

The offerings at the altar. The rice and water and salt renewed daily. The cucumber left for the river-child. The bean-throwing. The vegetable horse so the ancestors can travel. The hearth-ash that turns away the drowned. The instruction to always carry food and never eat the last of it.

How food is given is the tradition's most consistent moral concern.

So the founding quarrel of the sky isn't petty. Tsukuyomi was a guest, and he was fed, and he judged the method and killed the cook.

The offence isn't squeamishness. It's that he received hospitality and answered it with violence — which is the same crime the demon king accuses his killers of, seven centuries later, in the collection's greatest story.

He barely appears

That's the last strange thing about him.

For a god of his rank — one of the three, born from the purification of the creator's face — he is almost absent from the record. He rarely appears. He is described as "generally not very active."

There is a Tsukuyomi shrine in the outer precincts at Ise. There is very little else.

His iconography is nearly empty, and I'd argue that's the correct way to draw him: the moon, alone, with nothing in the frame.

The night has a landlord. He never comes round. Everything in this collection is happening on his property while he isn't looking.