Japan's oldest recorded genealogy begins with kami who came into being alone and then hid themselves — Kuninotokotachi among them. The Kamiyonanayo runs two solitary generations, then five paired ones, from Omodaru and Ayakashikone, the sixth generation overall and the fourth paired, down to Izanagi and Izanami in the seventh, the couple who actually finish the work. They churned the brine with a jeweled spear and drew up the islands. Their first child Hiruko was a boneless leech-child, blamed on a marriage rite performed wrongly, and was set adrift in a reed boat; Awashima was simply excluded from the counted children. Only after the ritual was corrected did the Eight Great Islands come, the land of Japan itself born as offspring.
The founding rupture is a death and a broken promise. Izanami died bearing the fire kami Kagutsuchi, whom Izanagi beheaded in grief; she became ruler of Yomi, and when her husband looked at her rotting body against her prohibition he fled and blocked the pass of Yomotsu Hirasaka with a boulder. Across it she vowed a thousand deaths a day and he answered with fifteen hundred births. Izanagi's purification then produced three motherless children: Amaterasu from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right, Susanoo from his nose. Amaterasu received heaven, Tsukuyomi the night, and Susanoo — weeping for the mother's realm he had never seen — was banished.
From that sibling triangle the tree splits into two branches. Tsukuyomi killed the food goddess Uke Mochi and Amaterasu refused to share the sky with him, which is why day and night never meet. Susanoo desecrated her weaving hall, drove her into the Heavenly Rock Cave, and was expelled from heaven; descending to the earthly land of Izumo, he slew Yamata-no-Orochi there, rescued Kushinada-hime from her grieving parents Ashinazuchi and Tenazuchi, and married her. Okuninushi, a later descendant of Susanoo, eloped with Susanoo's daughter Suseri-hime and built up Izumo, then surrendered it to Amaterasu's envoys in the Kuni-yuzuri.
The sun branch descends toward a throne. Amaterasu's son Ame-no-Oshihomimi refused the descent and passed it to his son Ninigi, who carried mirror, jewel and sword to Mount Takachiho and married Konohanasakuya-hime, daughter of Oyamatsumi — whose rejected elder daughter is why Ninigi's own descendants, the imperial line above all, have brief lives. Their sons Hoderi and Hoori quarrelled over a fishhook; Hoori wed the sea princess Toyotama-hime, then watched her give birth and lost her, a thematic parallel to Izanagi's forbidden look rather than a repetition of it. The Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE) preserve this line because it arrives at Jimmu, the legendary first emperor.
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