Izanami.

Izanami (伊邪那美, Izanami) begins as a creator-kami paired with Izanagi at the start of the world, but her form becomes inseparable from transformation. In the early creation scenes she belongs to the ordered symmetry of the divine pair, circling the heavenly pillar, bearing islands, and bringing forth the deities of the land. After the birth of Kagutsuchi, however, her visual register changes entirely, because the tradition remembers her through the unseen body of the dead and the hidden authority of Yomi.

That shift is central to her identity. Izanami is not merely a mother-goddess displaced by later myths. She is the figure through whom the creation cycle turns into a death cycle. The same deity who helps bring the world into being becomes the power who cannot return from the underworld, and that duality gives her a gravity unlike almost any other figure in the opening myths.

Izanami's most important interactions are with Izanagi, the children she bears, and the dead realm that claims her. With Izanagi she performs the corrected marriage rite and begets the islands and many deities. With Kagutsuchi's birth the creative sequence becomes fatal, and her death breaks the original harmony of the pair. When Izanagi comes to Yomi to recover her, the encounter is governed by taboo, delay, and shame rather than reunion.

Her final interaction with Izanagi at Yomotsu Hirasaka gives the myth one of its harshest explanations of human life. Separated by the boulder at the slope of Yomi, she vows to kill a thousand people each day, and Izanagi answers that fifteen hundred will be born. The exchange makes her not simply a victim of death but one of its ruling voices, a divine force in the continual arithmetic of mortality.