The Story of Kushinada-hime and Susanoo

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kushinada-hime, goddess of rice fields, and Susanoo, storm god and brother of the sun goddess Amaterasu; the elderly couple Ashinazuchi and Tenazuchi, parents of Kushinada-hime.
• Setting: The land of Izumo, on the earthly realm called Ashihara no Nakatsukuni, after Susanoo’s banishment from Takamagahara - the heavens; drawn from Shinto mythology as recorded in the Kojiki tradition.
• The turn: Susanoo, encountering a family on the verge of losing their last daughter to the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, offers to slay the creature in exchange for Kushinada-hime’s hand in marriage.
• The outcome: Susanoo kills Yamata no Orochi with sake and a divine sword, discovers the blade Kusanagi no Tsurugi inside the serpent’s tail, presents it to Amaterasu, and settles in Izumo with Kushinada-hime as his wife.
• The legacy: The sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi, found inside Yamata no Orochi’s tail, became one of the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan; Izumo became an enduring center of Shinto mythology, associated with the descendants of Susanoo and Kushinada-hime.

An elderly couple stood weeping beside the road, and the sound of it stopped Susanoo where he walked. He had been wandering since his exile from Takamagahara - cast out by the heavenly assembly after he defiled his sister Amaterasu’s palace, frightened her into a cave, and left the world without light. He came down to Ashihara no Nakatsukuni with nothing decided, moving through the province of Izumo with no particular destination. When he found Ashinazuchi and Tenazuchi, he asked what had brought them to this state.

They told him. They had raised eight daughters. Every year, the serpent Yamata no Orochi descended from the mountains and took one. Now seven were gone. Their youngest, Kushinada-hime, was all that remained, and the time for the serpent’s return was close.

The Serpent That Covered Rivers

Yamata no Orochi was not the kind of creature that could be doubted. Eight heads, eight tails. A body so vast it draped itself across whole valleys, with moss and pine trees growing along its spine and eyes the color of winter cherries - deep red, without warmth. It had terrorized the region for years. No one had challenged it. The family had simply waited, year by year, for their number to diminish.

Susanoo listened to the description. Then he looked at Kushinada-hime.

Her beauty struck him - not as a minor detail but as something that settled into him and did not leave. He told the family he would kill the serpent. In return, he wanted Kushinada-hime as his wife. Ashinazuchi and Tenazuchi, who had spent years watching daughters disappear, did not deliberate long. They agreed.

The Comb in His Hair

Before the serpent arrived, Susanoo transformed Kushinada-hime into a comb and tucked her into his hair. It was a practical solution - she would be present but protected, close but out of reach of eight sets of jaws. Then he turned to the preparations.

He instructed the family to brew sake and to fill eight vats with it, setting each vat on a raised platform along the paths where Yamata no Orochi was known to travel. Eight heads, eight vats. The logic was simple. Whether the serpent would cooperate was less certain.

It did. When Yamata no Orochi came down from the mountains, it found the platforms waiting, each one holding a vat of rice wine. The creature lowered each of its eight heads into a vat and drank. The sake was strong and the serpent was not cautious. It kept drinking until all eight heads were heavy and slow, until the enormous body listed and the moss-covered flanks swayed. The serpent sank toward the earth, drunk, barely able to hold itself upright.

Cutting the Tails

Susanoo drew his divine sword and went to work.

He moved through the serpent methodically, taking the heads one at a time. Each blow was deliberate. The serpent, sodden with sake, could not recover quickly enough to threaten him, though its size meant that even dying it filled the surrounding landscape like a fallen hill. Blood ran across the ground. The heads fell.

When Susanoo reached the tails, his sword struck something that should not have been there. Metal on metal. He cut more carefully and found, buried in the flesh of one of Yamata no Orochi’s tails, a sword unlike any ordinary blade. It was called the Kusanagi no Tsurugi - a weapon that would later be counted among the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan.

Susanoo stood holding it for a moment, then set it aside. He finished the work. The serpent’s body lay across the valley floor, still at last.

Kushinada-hime Restored

When it was done, Susanoo reached into his hair and took out the comb, and Kushinada-hime stood before him again, unhurt and unchanged. The family was alive. The serpent was dead. The bargain held.

They married and settled in Izumo, where Susanoo built a palace for his bride. Standing before the site he had chosen, he composed a poem - the first waka in the tradition, some versions say - prompted by the sight of clouds gathering over the place where he and Kushinada-hime would make their home. Eight clouds, layering over Izumo. Eight fences of cloud, like a shelter. The number echoed the serpent he had just killed, but the feeling was entirely different.

Izumo remained. The province became one of the most significant sites in Shinto worship, the place where the kami are said to gather each year when they leave their individual shrines. The descendants of Susanoo and Kushinada-hime wove themselves into the myths that followed, generation after generation, in a land that had been saved by a wandering exile and a family that had nothing left to lose.

The Sword Presented to Amaterasu

The Kusanagi no Tsurugi did not stay with Susanoo. He sent it to his sister.

The gesture was not a small one. Susanoo and Amaterasu had not parted well. His behavior in Takamagahara had been the reason for his exile - the defiled rice paddies, the dead weaving maiden, his sister sealed inside a cave while the world went dark outside. Presenting her with a sword of that quality was the closest thing to reconciliation that the circumstances permitted.

Amaterasu accepted it. The sword passed eventually to the imperial line, where it became one of three objects at the heart of Japanese sovereignty - the mirror, the jewel, and the blade that had been sleeping inside a serpent’s tail in the mountains of Izumo, waiting for someone to find it.

Susanoo’s story in the heavens had been one kind of thing: destruction, exile, shame. His story in Izumo was another. He descended with nothing and left a wife, a palace, a poem, and a sword that would outlast every generation that came after him.