Long before Okami existed as a video game, Shinto mythology already told a story about the sun goddess disappearing and the world going dark. In the myth of Amano no Iwato, Amaterasu, distressed and angered by the destructive behavior of her brother Susano'o, withdraws into a heavenly cave and seals its entrance with a boulder. Deprived of the sun, the world falls into permanent night, and the assembled kami are forced to lure her back out with music, laughter and a mirror positioned to catch her own reflected light, convincing her, out of curiosity, to step back into the world.
Okami opens its own story with a deliberate echo of that myth rather than a retelling of it: a hundred years before the game begins, the white wolf form of Amaterasu is said to have sealed away an eight headed demon, Orochi, at enormous cost, and by the time the player takes control the land has fallen back into corruption and darkness in the demon's renewed absence of divine protection, waiting again for the goddess to act. The game never stages the Amano no Iwato cave scene directly, but its entire structural premise, light and life withdrawn from the world until Amaterasu herself intervenes to restore them, is legible only against that older myth, and commentary on the game's mythology has consistently read the opening as a conscious variation on it rather than a coincidence of theme. It is, in that sense, a game built less on borrowing isolated Shinto imagery than on restaging the shape of one of Shinto's own foundational stories, with the player's hand standing in for the mirror and the music that drew the goddess out the first time.