Deity · Japanese · c. 100 BCE
Izanami
Also called Izanami-no-Mikoto
The Japanese goddess who makes the islands with her husband, dies giving birth to fire, and becomes the ruler of Yomi — where she promises to kill a thousand people a day for the insult of being seen.
Narrow source base
The quarrel at the entrance to Yomi is one of the sharpest scenes in any mythology this corpus holds. She has eaten the food of the dead and cannot simply leave; she asks him to wait and not to look; he lights a comb and looks, and runs. Her reply to being pursued and shut in is a rate: a thousand deaths a day, answered by his fifteen hundred births. Death is not evil here and she is not a demon — it is the settlement of a marital dispute, expressed as demography, and it is the reason the world has both.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Izumo, and the pass of Yomi that the Kojiki places at its border
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) · 712 CE
- Named there as
- Izanami no Mikoto
- Rank
- She Who Invites
- Pantheon
- Japanese
- Order
- Japanese pantheon
- Base of operations
- Izumo, and the pass of Yomi that the Kojiki places at its border
- Era
- c. 100 BCE
- Traditions
- Shinto & Japanese
Traits
- Domain
- Creation, birth, death, the land of Yomi
- Traditional form
- In Yomi, a body already changed by decay
Stats
Known connections
Opposed by
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
Possibly the oldest shrine in Japan, in the province Susanoo is banished to and then rules.
Izumo is where the Kojiki places the pass between the living country and Yomi, which she rules after the separation.
35.402, 132.685 · Wikidata Q696362
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Izanami, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- transformation2
- malefic1
- material1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Izanami, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as She who invites; Female deity of the pair
Bears the islands and the gods with Izanagi, dies of the birth of the fire god, and rules in Yomi; sets the number of deaths per day after being seen.
The chronicle gives several variant accounts of the separation side by side, differing in who says what at the pass and agreeing on the outcome.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Izanami?
What rank is Izanami?
How else is Izanami spelled?
What is Izanami said to do?
How old is Izanami?
Nearest in the corpus
If Izanami is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Amaterasu
Sun Goddess · Japanese
Sun goddess who hides in a cave and must be lured out — and from whom the Japanese imperial house claimed descent until 1946.
Izanagi
He Who Invites · Japanese
The Japanese god who stirs the sea into land with a spear, goes into Yomi after his wife and looks at her against her word, and washes afterwards — producing Amaterasu and Susanoo from the washing.
Susanoo
Storm Kami · Japanese
Expelled from heaven for wrecking his sister's rice fields, and then immediately kills the eight-headed serpent and becomes a hero.
Tsukuyomi
The Moon Reckoner · Japanese
The Japanese moon god, born from Izanagi's washing beside Amaterasu — and the reason the sun and moon are never in the sky together, having killed the food goddess at dinner and been refused his sister's company ever since.
Yamata-no-Orochi
Eight-Forked Serpent · Japanese
The eight-headed serpent given a daughter to eat each year, until Susanoo made it drunk and cut it apart. Japan's branch of the serpent-slaying pattern.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
The books behind Izanami
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters)
Ō no Yasumaro · 712 CE · Old Japanese
Read Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Wikimedia file page
Nihongi (Nihon Shoki)
Prince Toneri and others; tr. W. G. Aston · 720 CE · Classical Japanese
Read Nihongi (Nihon Shoki) in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Unknown author · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.