The Jeweled Spear Stirs the Ocean

Before there is land, there is only the brine.

The heavens have already separated from the earth — or rather, the light has already risen and the heavy has already sunk, the way oil separates from water given time. But the earth below is not yet earth. It is a film on the surface of an infinite ocean, floating like oil, adrift like foam, and nothing has been given a name or a fixed shape because there is no one yet to name or fix it.

The heavenly deities look down at this unfinished world and feel something that the Kojiki calls aware — a word the Japanese will spend a thousand years trying to define, which means roughly: the pathos of things, the sadness of the beautiful, the ache that comes from looking at something not yet itself. They summon two young deities — the last-born pair, the youngest of the generation, the one called he who invites and the one called she who invites.

They hand the pair a spear.

It is not an ordinary spear. It is made of heavenly jewels, and it is called Ame-no-Nuboko — the Jeweled Spear of Heaven — and it is long enough to reach from the Floating Bridge down into the formless brine below. The Bridge itself hangs between the high plain of heaven and the unfinished world, a bridge connecting what is finished to what has not yet begun.

Izanagi and Izanami stand on the Bridge together.

They lower the spear.

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What they do next is usually translated as stirring, but the Japanese word — kaki-maze — carries more physical force than stirring implies. They push the spear down into the ocean and they churn it. They rotate it through the formless brine with effort, with intention, with the full force of divine bodies working in tandem. The Kojiki describes the sound the ocean makes: koro koro. A rolling, turbulent sound. The sound of something being made.

When they lift the spear, brine drips from the tip.

The drops fall back into the ocean. But as they fall, they congeal. Each drop thickens as it descends, compresses, solidifies. By the time the drops touch the surface of the ocean they are no longer brine but something harder — salt crystals, or land, or something between the two. The drops pile on top of one another and build themselves into an island.

The island is called Onogoro — self-forming or self-curdling — because it made itself from the falling of divine drops. It is the first solid thing in the world. Izanagi and Izanami descend from the Bridge and set foot on Onogoro, and it holds them. They erect a pillar in its center, a Heavenly August Pillar, and they walk around it — he from the left, she from the right — and when they meet on the far side they speak.

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Their words when they meet are misremembered.

She speaks first. She says: What a fine young man. He says: What a fine young woman. But the heavenly deities, watching from above, send a message back: The woman should not have spoken first. So Izanagi and Izanami walk back around the pillar and begin again. This time he speaks first. What a fine young woman. She answers: What a fine young man. And this time the union is right.

What follows is the birth of the islands.

They make love on Onogoro, and from their union the islands of Japan are born one by one — Awaji first, then Iyo, then Oki, then Tsukushi, then Iki, then Tsushima, then Sado, then finally Yamato, the great central island, which will one day be the heart of an empire. The Kojiki lists the islands with the same care it gives to every act of divine creation: each has a name, each name has a meaning, each meaning is a praise.

The ocean is still there. It will always be there. But the land has been pulled out of it by the dripping of a spear, by the falling of brine that chose at the last moment to become something harder. Every grain of sand on every Japanese beach is a remnant of that churning. Every island in the archipelago is a thickened drop.

The spear hangs in a shrine at Awaji to this day, or its memory does — a long slender form in a building not always open, in a country that rebuilds its oldest things in order to keep them permanent.

The brine remembers being stirred.