Amaterasu Hides in a Cave
At a Glance
- Central figures: Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, and her brother Susanoo, the storm god, who are among the highest kami of the Japanese heavens.
- Setting: The heavens and the Amano-Iwato - the Heavenly Rock Cave - in the age of the gods, from the Shinto mythological tradition.
- The turn: Susanoo destroys rice fields, uproots trees, and throws the body of a flayed horse into Amaterasu’s weaving hall, killing one of her maidens; Amaterasu retreats into the Amano-Iwato and seals the entrance behind her.
- The outcome: The gods devise a raucous festival outside the cave; Ame-no-Uzume’s dance draws Amaterasu to the entrance, where the god Ame-no-Tajikarao wrenches the door open and light returns to the world.
- The legacy: Susanoo is banished from the heavens and eventually slays the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, from whose tail he draws the sword Kusanagi - one of Japan’s three imperial treasures.
Susanoo had broken the rice paddies, uprooted the trees, filled in the irrigation ditches with dirt. Then he took a piebald colt, flayed it, and threw its body through the roof of the hall where his sister wove the fabric of the heavens. One of her weaving maidens, startled, drove a shuttle into herself and died. Amaterasu said nothing. She walked into the cave and rolled the boulder across the entrance.
The world went dark.
What Susanoo Did
The quarrel between Amaterasu and Susanoo had a long root. Amaterasu held the sun. Susanoo held the storm. These were not temperaments that settled easily beside one another, and Susanoo’s rages had never been small things - they shook the air, tore up the coast, left the paddy fields in ruin. Still, he was her brother.
When he descended from the heavens in one of his worst fits, the destruction moved across the land in waves. Fields collapsed. Trees came down by the roots. The ditches he had not filled he had simply poisoned. And then the weaving hall, and the colt, and the maiden who died of the fright of it. By the time he was done, Amaterasu had made her decision. She did not argue with him. She did not demand an accounting. She simply left.
The Amano-Iwato
The darkness that followed was not gradual. It arrived all at once, the way night arrives when the eye closes - completely, with no transition. The crops had nothing to grow toward. Cold moved into places that had been warm. Among the eight million kami, fear spread faster than the cold did.
They gathered near the entrance to the Amano-Iwato - the Heavenly Rock Cave - and held council. No one could move the boulder alone. No one could command Amaterasu back out; she was the sun. What they could do, perhaps, was make her curious enough to look.
They decided to hold a festival.
Ame-no-Uzume at the Tub
Ame-no-Uzume, goddess of dawn and of revelry, climbed onto an upturned wooden tub near the cave entrance and began to dance. What she danced was not a solemn thing. She stamped her feet on the hollow wood until the sound rang out across the darkness. She loosened her clothing. She performed an outrageous, uninhibited routine that had nothing sacred about it, and the gathered kami - despite themselves, despite the cold and the fear - started to laugh.
The laughter grew. Eight million gods and spirits, laughing in the dark outside a boulder. The sound of it was enormous.
Inside the cave, Amaterasu heard it.
She had expected grief out there. She had retreated into silence assuming the world would grieve in silence too. But whatever was happening beyond the boulder was not grief. She shifted. She moved toward the entrance. She opened the door - just enough to see - and said: What is this? Why are you laughing?
The Mirror and the Door
Ame-no-Tajikarao had been waiting for exactly that. He seized the rock door and hauled it back, and the light that poured from Amaterasu’s body filled the air before she could retreat. Futodama held up a great mirror so that the light reflected back at her - her own brightness, outside herself, moving in the world again.
The gods at the entrance made a rope and stretched it across behind her so she could not return to the cave even if she chose to. She looked at the mirror. She looked at the light on the faces of the kami around her, the relief in them, the warmth they were already turning their faces toward.
She came out.
Susanoo’s Banishment and the Orochi
Susanoo was not present for any of this. When the gods took account of what had caused it all - the paddies, the trees, the colt, the dead maiden - there was little deliberation. He was stripped of his divine position and cast out of the heavens.
He wandered. He made his way to the province of Izumo, and there he found an old man and woman weeping beside a river. They had once had eight daughters. Seven were already gone. The eighth would go to the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi before the year was out, and there was nothing they could do.
Susanoo killed the Orochi. He filled eight great barrels with strong sake, set them out for the serpent’s eight heads, and when all eight had drunk and the creature lay heavy, he cut it apart with his sword. In one of its tails he found another blade - the sword Kusanagi, the Grass-Cutter - which he brought as an offering to Amaterasu.
Kusanagi passed eventually to the imperial line, one of the three sacred treasures still held by the Japanese throne. Amaterasu remained in the sky. The world kept its light. And the dancer who stood on the tub in the dark and made eight million frightened gods laugh - Ame-no-Uzume - is still remembered as the one who turned the crisis.