Izanami: In the Nihon Shoki's Main Text, She Never Dies

Two books, eight years apart

Basil Hall Chamberlain published his English Kojiki in 1882. He wrote that the Nihon Shoki "was completed in A.D. 720, eight years after the 'Records of Ancient Matters' had been presented to the Empress Gem-miyō." The Kojiki's own preface is dated to the first month of 712. For 720, the court annal Shoku Nihongi records under the fifth month that Prince Toneri presented the finished work, in thirty books with one more book of genealogy.

Chamberlain found the Kojiki's prose mostly Chinese in build, helped along by Japanese words written by sound. The Nihon Shoki, he found, was written in Chinese and polished to look like a Chinese history. He summed it up: "In short we may say of this work what was said of the Septuagint,—that it rationalizes." His example is a line in variant 6: the pass out of Yomi may be "no distinct place, but simply the moment when breathing ceases at the time of death."

For Izanami, what matters is the layout. The Nihon Shoki prints one account as its main text, then quotes other accounts after it, one variant at a time.

Where the Nihon Shoki keeps her alive

In the main text, after the islands, the pair produce the sea, the rivers, the mountains, the ancestor of trees and the ancestor of herbs. Then, in Aston's translation, "Izanagi no Mikoto and Izanami no Mikoto consulted together" and produced the Sun-Goddess, the Moon-god, the leech-child and Susanoo. Susanoo, Aston's Sosa no wo, wails until the green mountains wither, and "the two Gods, his parents," send him away to the Nether Land, which Aston's note takes to mean Yomi (Aston, pp. 18–20). The fire god never appears in this main text, so nothing in it burns Izanami.

The main text then follows Susanoo up to Heaven to see his sister. After this, Izanagi, "his divine task having been accomplished," builds himself "an abode of gloom in the island of Ahaji," and the sun goddess, hearing that Susanoo is coming, speaks of "the charge which our parents gave to their children" (Aston, pp. 33–34). Izanami drops out of the main narrative, alive the last time it names her.

The variants fill that silence in different ways. The table divides them as the Chinese text does: in Aston's 1896 printing, the quotation marks around variant 2 close one sentence before her death, which the Chinese keeps inside that variant (Aston, p. 21).

Table data: izanami-versions.csv, with the passage, the Chinese wording and the link for every row.

Read side by side, the versions show motif drift: the same point in one myth is filled differently from version to version, and the table records the difference without claiming that one version grew out of another. Even the wording of her end changes: Aston's notes give "ended" for variant 2 and "retired" for variant 3, and variant 6 says she "suffered change and departed." Variants 4, 9 and 10 never state her death, though variant 9 sets their meeting at her temporary burial-place.

How did Izanami die?

In the Kojiki, Izanami is burned in giving birth to the fire deity, and she lies down sick. Deities are born from her vomit, her excrement and her urine, and then she "at length divinely retired," a phrase Chamberlain's note glosses as "died." Izanagi weeps that he has exchanged her "for this single child" and buries her "on Mount Hiba at the boundary of the Land of Idzumo and the Land of Hahaki." Variant 5 of the Nihon Shoki puts her grave elsewhere, at Arima in Kumano.

Izanagi then follows her to Yomi, which Chamberlain renders as "the Land of Hades," and asks her to come back because "the lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making." She comes out of the palace door to meet him. In Chamberlain's 1882 translation, she answers.

"Lamentable indeed that thou camest not sooner! I have eaten of the furnace of Hades. Nevertheless, as I reverence the entry here of Thine Augustness my lovely elder brother, I wish to return. Moreover I will discuss it particularly with the Deities of Hades. Look not at me!"

Chamberlain's note says that one character in the phrase 黃泉戶喫 "almost certainly" stands for a character meaning "a place for cooking," so she means she has eaten "of the food of Hades." Variant 6 of the Nihon Shoki has the same line in other characters, 飡泉之竈: "I have already eaten of the cooking-furnace of Yomi" (Aston, p. 24). By this page's count, no other variant mentions the food.

Why couldn't Izanagi bring Izanami back?

In the Kojiki, Izanami has already eaten "of the furnace of Hades," and Izanagi loses her when he looks at her despite her plea. She goes back inside, and because she "tarried there very long," he breaks off an end-tooth of the comb in his hair, lights it and looks. "Maggots were swarming, and [she was] rotting," with eight thunder deities born in her body. "Thou hast put me to shame," she says, and sends the Ugly-Female-of-Hades after him.

The chase is a run of thrown objects. His head-dress turns into grapes and his comb into bamboo sprouts, which the pursuer stops to eat. At the base of the Even Pass of Hades, three peaches drive back the eight thunders and their 1,500 warriors.

Illustration

Izanagi blocks the pass with "a thousand-draught rock." Across it Izanami vows to strangle a thousand of his people a day, and he answers that he will set up fifteen hundred birthing houses. In Chamberlain's translation the exchange ends: "In this manner each day a thousand people would surely die, and each day a thousand and five hundred people would surely be born."

The variants divide the scene differently, as the chart below shows. Variant 6 keeps the grapes and bamboo shoots and adds a river made from Izanagi's water "according to one account." It has a rock and "the formula of divorce," but no peaches. Aston's 1896 note on this chase sends readers to Andrew Lang's Custom and Myth for "the throwing behind of a comb, which turns into a thicket."

Variant 9 is set at her temporary burial-place. There the peaches come from a large tree by the roadside as Izanagi runs, and the text calls this "the origin of the practice of keeping off evil spirits by means of peaches." Variant 10 gives Izanami's own reason for staying. It comes as a message from the road-wardens of Yomi.

"I and thou have produced countries. Why should we seek to produce more? I shall stay in this land, and will not depart along with thee." (Aston 1896, p. 31)

Lookers and eaters elsewhere

Chamberlain's 1882 introduction calls Izanagi "Orpheus-like" as he visits his wife in the underworld. In Virgil's Georgics 4, Orpheus is leading Eurydice upward under a rule: "So Proserpine had ruled it." At the edge of daylight, "He stopped, turned, looked upon Eurydice / His own once more" (Latin lines 485–491, in James Rhoades's 1921 translation).

In Ovid's Metamorphoses 10, Orpheus must not turn his eyes back until he has left the valleys of Avernus (lines 50–52). Near the surface he looks, and "Instantly she slipped away" (Brookes More, 1922).

The food line has its own parallels. Aston's note on "the cooking-furnace of Yomi" compares it with Ovid's Proserpine, who has eaten seven pomegranate seeds. The note also points to the story of Nachiketas in the Taittiriya Brahmana and the Katha Upanishad.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hades secretly gives Persephone a pomegranate seed to eat before she leaves (lines 371–374). Demeter's first question to her returned daughter is whether she has "tasted any food while you were below." If she has, she must spend "a third part of the seasons every year" beneath the earth (lines 393–400, in Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation). The entry on Persephone's pomegranate follows that seed through five versions.

These are records of the same plot points set side by side: a look that was forbidden and food eaten below. Neither Chamberlain's comparison nor Aston's note argues that one story derives from another, and this entry makes no such claim. In the Kojiki, the plea not to look comes from Izanami herself. In Virgil, the condition is Proserpina's rule.