Yakusa no Ikazuchi- Japanese GroupCollective"Thunder Kami of the Corpse"

Birth from Izanami's Body

Izanagi broke his wife's one prohibition. She had told him not to look at her. He snapped a tooth from his comb, lit it as a torch, and held it up in the halls of Yomi.

Izanami's body was swarming. The Kojiki names eight thunder kami nesting in her corpse: Ōikazuchi, Great Thunder, in her head, and Honoikazuchi, Fire Thunder, in her breast, and so on through her belly, her hands, her feet. Maggots boiled over her flesh. What had been the goddess who shaped the islands of Japan was now host to lightning and rot.

Izanagi ran.

The Pursuit

Izanami sent the eight thunder kami and the Yomotsu-shikome, the hags of Yomi, after him. Izanagi fled through the passage between the dead and the living, hurling things behind him as he went. He tore the vine from his hair and flung it to the ground; it sprouted grapes, and his pursuers stopped to eat. He snapped teeth from his comb and threw them; bamboo shoots burst from the earth, and the hags crouched to devour those too.

The thunder kami were not so easily distracted. They pressed on. At the slope of Yomi, Izanagi found three peaches growing at the boundary. He hurled them at the thunder gods, and they fell back. Peaches, from that day, held the power to repel the dead.

Izanagi dragged the Chibiki-no-Iwa, a boulder so vast it would take a thousand men to move, across the mouth of the passage and sealed Yomi shut. From the other side, Izanami swore she would kill a thousand of his people every day. He answered: then fifteen hundred will be born.