Amaterasu and the cave

Susanoo, storm and sea, is given the ocean and objects. He weeps until his beard reaches his chest, ruins his father’s patience, and before departing goes up to heaven to take leave of his sister Amaterasu, the sun. She meets him armed, which is the correct instinct.

He behaves badly. He breaks the ridges of her rice fields, fills in the ditches, and finally flays a piebald colt backwards and throws it through the roof of the hall where she and her women are weaving. One of them is killed.

The dark

Amaterasu goes into a cave and pulls a stone across the entrance, and the world loses the sun. The Kojiki is brief about the consequence and precise about its scale: the plain of high heaven is dark, the central land of reed plains is dark, and in the endless night every kind of calamity arises.

Eight hundred myriads of gods assemble in a dry riverbed to work out what to do. They try roosters first — birds of the long-crying night, to make the dawn happen by announcing it. It does not work.

The trick

So they build the apparatus instead. They dig up a sakaki tree and hang a mirror on it, and jewels, and cloth. They gather cockerels. And Ame-no-Uzume turns a tub over, climbs on it, and dances — stamping until it booms, working herself into a state, pulling her clothing down until she is exposed.

Eight hundred myriads of gods laugh at once, and the noise is enormous.

Inside the cave, Amaterasu cannot understand it. The world is dark; what is there to laugh at? She moves the stone a little and asks. Uzume tells her: we are rejoicing, because there is a god here greater than you.

While she is taking that in, they hold up the mirror. She leans out towards the shining thing, not recognising it, and a god waiting beside the entrance takes her hand and pulls, and another stretches a rope across the mouth of the cave behind her, and tells her she may not go back in.

What the story is doing

Two things at once, and they are hard to separate.

It is an eclipse or a winter, told as a family quarrel — the sun withdrawn and returned, with a ritual that works. The objects are not incidental: the mirror, the jewel and the sword that Susanoo later gives up are the three imperial regalia, and the Kojiki was compiled at court to establish that the emperor descends from Amaterasu. This is a story about where the throne comes from.

It is also, and unusually, a myth in which the crisis is solved by comedy. Not by a hero, not by a sacrifice, not by a bargain with death. The sun comes back because somebody made everyone laugh, and the sun could not stand not knowing what the joke was.