Amaterasu in the Cave: The World Goes Dark

The trouble begins with her brother.

Susanoo — the storm god, impetuous and violent — has been weeping so loudly that the mountains shake and the rivers run backwards. He mourns for his dead mother and refuses to be comforted. Amaterasu, the sun goddess, looks down from heaven and sees his approach with alarm. She arms herself, braces for battle. Susanoo protests that his intentions are peaceful — he only wanted to say goodbye before leaving for the underworld — but his behavior as he settles in for a visit is destructive: he fills her sacred rice paddies, breaks down the walls, defiles her weaving hall.

Amaterasu has had enough. She retreats into the Rock-Cave of Heaven and seals the door.

The world goes dark. Not metaphorically dark — dark in every sense. All manner of calamities arose. Evil spirits multiplied. Nothing grew. The gods gathered in the dry bed of the Tranquil River of Heaven and debated what to do.

Their solution is one of the strangest and most delightful rescue operations in world mythology. They do not pray. They do not beg. They do not threaten. They throw a party. The eight million gods hang sacred jewels in the trees, place a mirror before the cave entrance, and then the goddess Ame-no-Uzume — the Dread Female of Heaven — does something so outrageous that all eight million gods burst into helpless laughter.

She dances on an overturned bucket. She falls into a divine frenzy. The text is coy about the specifics but implies she exposes herself. The laughter is enormous.

Amaterasu, sealed in her cave in the dark, hears this. She is baffled. She opens the door just a crack to look — why are they laughing in the darkness? — and the god waiting beside the mirror holds it up. She sees her own face, blazing with light, and is startled enough to hesitate. In that moment another god seizes her hand and pulls her fully out. The world is bright again.

There is a quality of wit in this story that feels entirely at home in Shinto — a tradition less interested in transcending the world than in recognizing the divine within it. The problem was solved not by power but by joy. The sun returned not because she was overpowered or persuaded but because she was curious about what she was missing. What coaxes the divine back into the world is laughter and wildness and presence, not supplication.

Susanoo, for his part, is expelled from heaven and sent to earth — where, in the next part of the Kojiki, he slays an eight-headed dragon and becomes a different kind of hero entirely.