The Creation by Izanagi and Izanami

Standing on the Floating Bridge of Heaven, the divine siblings Izanagi and Izanami are given a jeweled spear by the elder gods and told to solidify the drifting, unformed land below. Lowering the spear and stirring the brine beneath them, they lift it out again, and the brine dripping from its tip congeals into the first solid ground, the island of Onogoro. Descending to the new island, they raise a great pillar and build a palace, and Izanagi proposes that they circle the pillar in opposite directions and marry when they meet. When they meet and Izanami, the female, speaks first in greeting, the marriage produces only misshapen offspring, the boneless leech child Hiruko, who is set adrift in a reed boat, and a small foam island, neither of which is counted among their true children.

Consulting the heavenly deities, the couple learn the fault lay in Izanami speaking before Izanagi in the marriage ritual. Repeating the ceremony correctly around the pillar, with Izanagi speaking first, they conceive successfully, and from their union come the many islands that make up Japan, followed by a great host of deities governing the sea, rivers, mountains, wind, trees, and the other features and forces of the natural world.

Izanami dies giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi, her body fatally burned in the delivery, and passes into the underworld realm of Yomi. Overcome with grief and rage, Izanagi beheads the infant fire god with his sword, and from the blood scattered on the rocks and from Kagutsuchi's dismembered body a further series of deities come into being. Unable to accept his wife's death, Izanagi follows her down into Yomi to plead with her to return to the world of the living.

Izanami, speaking to him from within the darkened hall, warns him not to look at her, explaining she has already eaten the food of Yomi and can no longer easily leave, but agrees to try to persuade the gods of the underworld to release her if he waits outside without looking. Izanagi's patience fails, and lighting a broken tooth of his comb as a torch, he looks in and sees Izanami's body already decayed and crawling with the eight gods of thunder that had formed from her corpse's putrefaction. Horrified, he flees; Izanami, enraged, sends demons and finally comes herself in pursuit, and Izanagi escapes only by sealing the pass out of Yomi with a massive boulder. Purifying himself afterward by bathing in a river, the sun goddess Amaterasu, the moon god Tsukuyomi, and the storm god Susanoo are born from the washing of his left eye, right eye, and nose.