Kagu-tsuchi did not know. He sucked his thumb like a match-head.
Midzu-ha-no-me did not know. She sucked her thumb like a faucet.
Hani-yama-hime did not know. She sucked her thumb like a stalk of grass.
With the shadow of the bridge thin and receding on the shoals, Izanagi lashed together the trunks of eight young trees, and taking a lock of his son’s hair to light his way, tucked the three bright-eyed children of Izanami’s flesh away in the charred shell of the house with the last of the jellyfish to give them suck. On his raft of trees, the first widower of all things bereft set out across the churning sea, across the foam and the tipped waves, across the violet water and the black.
When he ran aground on Honshu, his beard was tangled and clotted with salt. He marveled at how Honshu-his-child had grown, how the acacia had brambled, how the mountains had grown braids and top-knots of snow. How the stones had rolled up from the barrels of earth. And he wandered.
“Izanami!” he called to the bloody-flowered acacia.
“Izanami!” he called to the top-knots of snow.
“Izanami!” he called to the stones from the barrels of earth.
And it was the stones that answered.
“Here,” they murmured in their grinding, “here.”
Izanagi pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.
“Here,” they sighed, and moved from their loam, “here.”
Behind a certain stone, there was a hole, tangled with roots and sifting soil, tangled with the dead-skin bells of mushroom and the sinuous movements of centipedes retreating from the light.
“Come in,” sighed the centipedes as their ruby tails vanished, “this is Ne no Kuni, the Root-Country. She is here, she is here.”
It was small, only wide enough for his shoulders, for his own hips, and it was open and dark as a mouth.
“Izanami?” he whispered.
No answer came, and thus, second of all things that go under the earth, Izanagi wriggled through the scrim of mud into Ne no Kuni.
In the Root-Country, there is no light. Even before there was land, there was light, and Izanagi crawled through the sludge trying to taste the dark, to breathe it, to understand how so complete and utter a thing could have come to be without his knowledge. The darkness grew around him until he no longer felt the wet earth stroking his limbs, but was simply over-hung with it, like curtains and veils, and he could see nothing, first of all blinded things. His feet squelched in a kind of softness underfoot; his hands groped in a mist like breath. There was no sound but himself and the darkness, which seemed to draw into itself and out again.
He pulled a comb from his hair, fashioned in the days before Kagu-tsuchi from pieces of the tortoise-floor, days Izanagi recalled as happy, when Izanami was quiet and fat with islands. He fumbled in the black with the curl of his son’s hair, and lit the edge of the green comb. Fire flared out of the prongs, white and gold as a blanched sun, and the tile-teeth burned slowly down.
In the sudden glare, he lifted one foot and then the other out of the yielding ground; in the sudden glare there was no ground but flesh; in the sudden glare there was no air but the thick fumes of decay spiraling yellow and gray; in the sudden glare there was no Ne no Kuni, there was only Izanami, spread out over the gloam like a shroud, her body become the Root-Country. He was deep in her, in the pooled, moon-shot morass of her stomach, stretched now into a vast and planted field, wavering with untold grasses, with straggling trees clutching at her navel like dead hands. Her breasts rose up stiff and capped with black ice—clouds and cracks clustered at their peaks. Her arms lay out straight as highways, pocked with moldering wells and sinks where her blood had become brackish rivers moving sluggish and sere through the hollows of her elbows. Her knees had split open, and the flora of the dead already bloomed there, asphodel and d
ragonfruit and oranges like leering faces. Her thighs and calves spread off behind him; he could not see their end. She was gargantuan, the landscape itself, and her skin was broken so often, still streaked with scorch-streaks, that the red curve of her liver rivaled her femur for color-ghast, and her broken ribs rose up in jagged, thin-tipped stalactites. Her heart did not beat, but sat huge in the center of the world like an anchor dropped into an unguessable sea, cut by wiry meridians, its ventricles swollen and spider-blown, congealed and flayed and burning still.
Izanagi’s lips curled back in disgust, and he vomited onto the navel of his wife—but the sight of his trickling sour seeping into her flesh caused his dry throat to retch again, and again, pushing against itself and finding nothing more to give to the country of Izanami.
Somewhere behind the ice-caps of her teeth, a cry began. It hurtled up from the depths of the rocks of her bones, it shook the hand-roots of the trees worming at her sternum. The roof of the Izanami-world shook, and strands of her hair, which he could see now had made up the great darkness stretching over him and over her. Great, ropy shafts of it tumbled down, crashing onto the wet-flesh earth, sending up sprays of stilled, clotted blood. The cry grew until he knew it for the voice of Izanami, and amid the spray of long braids slashing through liquefying vertebrae, Izanagi, first of all things that feared, ran from the bellow of his wife towards the tunnel which had emptied him into her.
“OUT! OUT!” it snarled, and shards of cartilage shot through with starlight and mosses cut through his back like shrapnel. He scrambled up through the mud and the skein of roots, through the centipedes laughing “Here, here!” and the stones gurgling dryly around him like swallowing throats.
“OUT! OUT!” the cry shook the dirt from the tunnel, and it sifted onto the face of Izanagi, it drifted into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, until he could not breathe, nor see. He choked, first of all things in the world to suffocate, and he was filled up with her, her voice stopping his ears like wax, flakes of her skin closing up every open part of him.
The stones moved aside like water and with a cloud of sweat and dust Izanagi was thrown onto the long grass still clutching his burning comb—though it scalded him, he held it before him as though it were his only dear thing. There was a sudden detonation of light, and he sprawled, prostrate as a penitent, on the green earth, beaten down by the sky and covered in the detritus of the Root-Country-which-is-Izanami, soaked in her dead-sour ablutions, clammy and shuddering.
Yet still, the cry barreled up from the weed-massed crevice, and he covered his hands with his face as it serrated the air:
“OUTOUTOUT! OUT OF MY GRAVE, OUT OF MY FLESH, YOU HAVE NO PLACE IN ME! EATER OF CHILDREN, EATER OF DEATH, GLUTTON, GLUTTON, GLUTTON! GO WITH THE CHILDREN WHO ARE TOO BIG FOR YOU TO EAT, GO WITH HONSHU, GO WITH KYUSHU, GO WITH KAGU-TSUCHI. COME NEVER HERE AGAIN, I WILL LET NO ONE PASS. I WILL DEVOUR EVERYTHING YOU MAKE, I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU SIRE WITH THAT SICK, MEWLING BODY. IN THE MOMENT THEY DRAW BREATH, I WILL BE THERE TO SNATCH IT BACK. THIS IS MY WORLD, NOW, IN THE DEEPS AND THE DARK. KEEP TO YOUR HALF, SPOILED BY LIGHT. GO, GET OUT, GOBBLE UP THE WHOLE WORLD IF YOU CAN, BUT COME NEAR MY COUNTRY AGAIN AND I WILL BURN YOU, BELLY-OUT, AS YOU BURNED ME.”
Izanagi scrambled back from the gales of the voice, which stank of putrefaction: mushrooms and oversweet fruit, spoilt fat and dried blood.
“I would not come into your disgusting country again for any price,” he sputtered, trying to scoop the offal from his eyes, scrape it from his tongue, “and I can sire worlds faster than you can lay them waste! You will see how many sons, how many islands, how many blazing boys will come tumbling out of me! You can’t take them all, and for every thousand you claw to pieces I will bring fifteen hundred out of the ground. You should not have been made, there is no need for you—you are a leech-child like that monstrosity you spawned, and you have as little strength, as little beauty. You cannot banish me from the dark—I banish you from the light, and no one will care that you are gone, when the world is as full of my children as the beaches of Onogoro with jellyfish!”