Susanoo

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When Izanagi came back from the land of the dead, the pollution of the grave on him, he went down to a river-mouth in Tsukushi and washed. From the things he cast off and from the water running over him kami came into being one after another, and at the last washing three children of surpassing brightness were born: from his left eye Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the sun; from his right eye Tsukuyomi, the moon; and from his nose, last of the three, Susanoo-no-Mikoto — the name often glossed as the Impetuous Male. The father divided the cosmos among them. The sun was given the Plain of High Heaven, the moon the realm of night, and to the youngest he gave the rule of the sea. Of the three it is the storm-child whose story the chronicles tell at the greatest length and with the least reserve, and the telling does not flatter him.

The birth out of washing is worth pausing over. In the logic of the kami world a person who has been near death or filth is polluted, and the pollution is removed not by penance but by misogi — the rinsing of the body in clean running water — out of which, in this first instance, gods are generated by the dozen. The three bright children are the last and highest yield of that purifying. Susanoo is thus born already at the far end of his father’s contact with the grave, the child most marked by the underworld even as he is washed clean of it; and his first recorded wish, to follow his dead mother down, reads almost as an inheritance of the circumstance of his making. The storm is born of water and grief together.

The exile and the rampage in heaven

Susanoo did not govern the sea he was given. He wept and howled instead, year upon year, until his beard grew long down over his chest, and the mountains withered under his grieving and the rivers and seas were dried up. Asked the cause, he answered that he wished to go to his mother’s land, to the underworld where Izanami had gone. The answer enraged Izanagi, who drove the son out with a curse — the first of the expulsions that mark this figure, the exile being as native to him as the storm.

Before he would go down, Susanoo announced that he must take leave of his elder sister. His coming up to heaven was itself a violence: the mountains and rivers shook, and the whole land quaked under his tread. Amaterasu, doubting his intent, met him armed and ready, and to prove that his heart was clean the two performed an ukehi — an oath-ordeal in which the truth of a claim is read off the outcome of an act. Each took something of the other and broke it and breathed it out. Amaterasu chewed the long sword of her brother and from the mist of her breath came three goddesses; Susanoo chewed the strings of curved magatama jewels she wore and from his breath came five male kami. He claimed the gentle children for proof of his sincerity, and called the victory his. The genealogy folded into this contest matters to the larger structure: the five male kami born of the sun’s breath from the storm-brother’s sword are reckoned, in the chronicles’ bookkeeping, as Amaterasu’s offspring, and from one of them the imperial line is traced down. The heavenly descent thus passes, at one remove, through Susanoo’s own blade — a quiet entanglement the compilers neither emphasize nor erase.

It is here that the destroyer shows himself. Flushed with the verdict, Susanoo “raged with victory” and worked havoc on the heavenly fields. He broke down the ridges between his sister’s rice paddies and filled in their irrigation ditches; he scattered filth in the hall where the first-fruits were to be tasted. The chronicles dwell longest on the last and worst act. He flayed a heavenly piebald colt — skinning it backward, against the grain, a deliberate inversion of the proper way — and flung the carcass through the roof of the hall where Amaterasu and her women sat at their weaving. One of the weaving-maidens, startled, struck herself against the shuttle and died.

At this the sun withdrew. Amaterasu went into the rock-cave of heaven, the Ama-no-Iwato, and pulled the stone door shut behind her, and the High Plain of Heaven and the Central Land of Reed Plains alike fell into unbroken night. The drawing-out of the sun — the dance of Ame-no-Uzume, the laughter of the gathered kami, the mirror held up at the cave’s mouth — belongs properly to Amaterasu’s story; but the darkness was Susanoo’s doing, and when the light was restored the eight hundred myriad kami turned to the cause of it. They imposed on him a fine “of a thousand tables of restitutive gifts,” cut off his beard and the nails of his hands and feet as a purification, and expelled him from heaven. Twice now cast out — once by his father, once by the assembly of the gods — the storm-child came down to earth.

Susanoo-no-Mikoto, from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s series on Japanese history. Woodblock print, Meiji period. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The serpent and the sword

Susanoo descended in the land of Izumo, at a place called Torikami at the headwaters of the river Hi. Coming on a pair of chopsticks floating down the current, he followed the stream upward, reasoning that people must be living above, and found an old man and an old woman with a young girl between them, all three weeping. The old man named himself Ashinazuchi and his wife Tenazuchi, children of the mountain-kami; the girl was their daughter Kushinada-hime. They had had eight daughters, the old man said, and seven had been taken, one each year, by a thing that was coming again now for the last.

The thing was the Yamata-no-Orochi, the eight-forked serpent. The Kojiki gives the old man’s description of it: “Its eyes are like red cherries and it has eight heads and eight tails. Covered in moss, cypress and cedar, it spans eight valleys and eight peaks, and when you look at its belly you see blood oozing out everywhere.” It was less an animal than a stretch of mountain country gone monstrous and hungry — the flooding river itself, some readers have seen, the eight-headed inundation that drowns the paddies year on year.

Susanoo asked the parents for the daughter, and being granted her he turned her by his power into a close-toothed comb and set it in his own hair. Then he ordered the old couple to brew sake refined eight times over, to build a fence with eight gates, and to set behind each gate a platform bearing a vat of the liquor. The serpent came as it always came; and each of its eight heads dipped into a vat and drank, and the eight heads grew drunk, and the whole length of it lay down and slept. Susanoo drew his ten-span sword, the Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, and cut the sleeping thing into pieces, until the river Hi ran red. When he came to the middle tail his blade chipped against something within. Splitting the tail open, he drew out a great sword — Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven, later and better known as Kusanagi, the Grass-Cutter.

The blade was no ordinary spoil, and Susanoo did not keep it. He sent it up to Amaterasu as an offering — a gift from the exiled brother to the sister he had driven into the dark. The chronicles let the gesture stand without comment, and its weight is felt in what the sword became: one of the three sacred treasures of the imperial house, set beside the mirror Yata-no-Kagami and the curved jewel Yasakani-no-Magatama as the regalia that authenticate the throne. The sword is held to rest at the Atsuta Shrine near Nagoya; the regalia are kept from all sight. That the central token of the heavenly line should come up out of a serpent’s tail, in Izumo, at the hand of the kami heaven had cast out, is among the strangest seams in the whole structure — the imperial cult acknowledging at its own foundation a debt to the figure it had banished.

Susanoo-no-Mikoto slays the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi at the river Hi in Izumo. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, woodblock print, 1887. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

With the monster dead Susanoo restored Kushinada-hime to her form and went looking through Izumo for a place to settle with her. At Suga he found ground that pleased him, and said that there his heart was made clear — suga-suga shi, refreshed — and built his palace, and clouds rose up over it. The poem he is given for the moment is set down in the Kojiki as the oldest of all Japanese songs, the first thirty-one-syllable waka:

Yakumo tatsu / Izumo yaegaki / tsuma-gome ni / yaegaki tsukuru / sono yaegaki o — “Eight clouds arise; the eightfold fence of Izumo encloses my wife; I make an eightfold fence — oh, that eightfold fence.”

The storm that had broken the fences of heaven now builds a fence of its own, around a bride, in the land of its exile. The destroyer who skinned a horse and shut up the sun is, by the close of his story, a husband, a poet, and the founder of a line.

The two centers and the afterlife of the kami

Susanoo’s home is Izumo, and Izumo is not the country of the sun. The early Japanese world the chronicles describe has two poles: the heavenly line of Amaterasu, which the mytho-histories carry down to the imperial house at Yamato, and the line of the great land-makers in Izumo, descended from Susanoo. His sixth-generation descendant is Ōkuninushi, the Master of the Great Land, who builds and orders the visible country and then yields it up to the heavenly grandchild in the bargain the chronicles call the kuni-yuzuri, the ceding of the land — for which the great shrine at Izumo is the standing memorial. Susanoo stands at the head of the Izumo side of this double structure: the counterweight to his sister, the ancestor of the older center that the Yamato center absorbed.

Here the source-situation has to be marked. Nearly all of this comes from two books — the Kojiki, completed in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, in 720 — both compiled under the Yamato court to set its descent from the sun-goddess on a written and unquestionable footing. The narrative is not neutral. A storm-kami who founds the rival center and who behaves, in heaven, like a saboteur is exactly the sort of figure an imperial compilation would have reason to cast as the destructive younger brother, his violence the foil against which the sun’s order shines. Some scholars have read the Susanoo of the chronicles as a deliberately blackened figure, and have pointed to the regional Izumo Fudoki — the provincial gazetteer — where his character is gentler and more nearly that of an honored ancestor and field-kami than a vandal of heaven. The brother of the sun may be, in part, the trace of a defeated tradition kept on inside the victor’s book.

What the tradition does not do is hide him or condemn him. He is kept whole — the weeping son, the wrecker of the paddies, the slayer of the serpent, the maker of the first poem — and his ambivalence is left standing rather than resolved. He is the storm: the thing that floods the rice and the thing that brings the rain; the danger and the deliverer in one body. The Norse keep a comparable figure in Loki, the kinsman whose harm and whose help cannot be cleanly separated; the resemblance is in the structural place such a figure holds, not in any shared descent.

Through the long medieval centuries, when kami and buddhas were honored together, Susanoo took on a second life that the modern shrine system has largely effaced. He became identified with Gozu Tennō, the Ox-Headed Heavenly King, a fierce deity held “since the Heian period both as a causer of and protector against epidemics” — the kami who sends the plague and the kami invoked to turn it aside, the same doubleness in a new key. The fusion of native kami with imported buddhas and continental deities was the ordinary texture of religion in the medieval centuries, the system later named honji-suijaku, in which a local kami could be understood as the visible trace of a buddha or a fierce protector-deity; Susanoo’s merger with the ox-headed king belongs to that long settlement, and the tales attached to it, like the legend of Somin Shōrai, whom the deity rewards for his hospitality with a charm against future epidemics, carry the same exchange — shelter the dangerous god, and he shelters his host. This was the deity of the Gion cult at the shrine in Kyoto now called Yasaka, whose great summer festival, the Gion Matsuri, traces its origin to a plague-averting rite of the year 869. To honor the bringer of pestilence was to ask him to withhold it; the storm placated is the storm turned to a guardian. When the Meiji government in 1868 ordered the forcible separation of kami from buddhas — the shinbutsu bunri that broke a thousand years of fused worship — the shrines of Gozu Tennō were required to re-identify their deity as Susanoo-no-Mikoto, and the ox-headed king was officially dissolved back into the storm-kami of the chronicles. The medieval Susanoo, the plague-lord of Gion, was thus written out by decree; the pre-Meiji syncretic reality should not be read backward through the “pure” Shinto that replaced it.

He remains among the most storied of the kami, enshrined across Japan — at Yasaka in Kyoto, at the Hikawa shrines of the Kantō plain, at Kushinada’s Yaegaki Shrine near Matsue where couples still come to ask after marriage, the eightfold fence having become a token of the bond between husband and wife. The figure that holds it together is the one the chronicles refused to simplify: the brother thrown out of heaven who came down and made the world safer than he found it, and whose blade props up the throne of the line that cast him out.

Susanoo killing the eight-headed dragon. Japanese woodblock print. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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