Do Not Look at Me

The descent is the best-known episode this tradition carries. Izanagi follows Izanami to Yomi, the land of the dead, and she tells him she has already eaten its food but will go and ask to be released — and asks him not to look at her while she does. He waits, breaks a tooth from his comb, lights it, and looks. What the account describes is a body already corrupting with thunder-deities in it. He runs; she sends hags, then the thunders, then her own pursuit; he throws down a comb and a headband that become bamboo shoots and grapes, and at the pass he closes the road with a boulder.