Yomi

Summary

Yomi is the land of the dead in Japanese myth. The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki write it with the Chinese graphs 黄泉, "Yellow Springs", a Chinese name for the world under the earth, which Japanese read yomi or yomo. It is entered by a slope called Yomotsu-hirasaka, the Slope of Yomi, which the Kojiki says was called in its own day the Ifuya slope in Izumo. It has a hall with a door, a hearth on which its food is cooked, kami who rule it, the hags of Yomi, eight thunders, and an army of fifteen hundred warriors.

Its great story is Izanagi's. His wife Izanami died giving birth to fire, and Izanagi followed her to Yomi. She came out to him from the door of the hall, and he said: the land we made is not finished; come back. She said: if only you had come sooner; I have eaten from the hearth of Yomi; but I want to return, so I will speak with the kami of Yomi; do not look at me. She went in, and the wait grew long. He broke off an end tooth of his comb, lit it and went in, and saw maggots swarming in her body, a thunder in her head, a thunder in her breast, thunders in her belly, her private parts, her hands and her feet, eight thunders in all. He fled in terror, and she said: you have shamed me, and sent the hags of Yomi after him. He threw down his head-dress, which became grapes, and they stopped to eat them; then he broke his comb, which became bamboo shoots, and they stopped to pull them up. She sent the eight thunders with fifteen hundred warriors; he fled brandishing his sword behind him until he reached the foot of the slope, took three peaches from a tree there and threw them, and the pursuers turned back. He said to the peaches: as you have helped me, help the living people when they fall into trouble. Then she came herself, and he blocked the slope with a rock it would take a thousand men to drag, and they stood on either side of it and parted. She said: if you do this, I will strangle a thousand of the people of your land each day; he said: if you do this, I will set up fifteen hundred birthing huts each day. So each day a thousand die and fifteen hundred are born. Izanami was called the Great Kami of Yomi, and the rock the Kami Who Turns Back the Road and the Kami Who Blocks the Door of Yomi.

When he came out he said: I have come to a hideous and polluted land; let me purify myself, and he went down into the river and washed, and from his washing came Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi and Susanoo. The slope appears a second time in the story of Ōkuninushi: fleeing Susanoo's deep land with Susanoo's daughter and sword, he was chased by Susanoo to the Slope of Yomi, where Susanoo looked at him from afar and shouted to him to become lord of the land.

The idea the story turns on is that the land of the dead is bounded by food, by looking and by the rock. Whoever eats from its hearth belongs to it; whoever looks at what is inside it loses the one he came for; whoever comes out of it comes out polluted and needs water. It is a land reached on foot down a slope, not under the sea or above the sky, and so it can be shut with a rock. At the rock death and birth became a daily count: a thousand taken, fifteen hundred born.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the Semitic essay mentions Yomi without reading its name. The Kojiki writes it with the phonetic signs 予母, yomo, in the name of the hags of Yomi, followed by tsu, the genitive particle, in Yomotsu. What remains is y-m with its vowels. We read it from Arabic y-h-m: y is y, m is m, and the h drops between the vowels, as it dropped in Japanese itself when the old spelling ohokuninushi became the modern ōkuninushi. Lisān al-ʿArab gives "al-yahmāʾ: a desert with no water in it, where no sound is heard", "the land with no trace in it, no road and no landmark, where no way is found", "laylun ayham: a night without stars", and "al-yahmāʾ: the blind one, so called for the blindness of whoever travels it". On this reading Yomi is the yahmāʾ: the dark land where nothing is seen and no road is known, which is what the story makes it: Izanagi could not see his wife until he lit the tooth of his comb, and he came out only in flight. The common Japanese explanation, which derives the name from yoru, night, meets this reading.

Linguistic Root

Forms and spellings

The graphs 黄泉 are Chinese, with the Japanese name read beneath them. Chamberlain says the orthodox Japanese explanation derives yomi from yoru, night, making it the land of gloom, and that Arai Hakuseki suggested it might be a pronunciation of Yama, the Indian king of the dead. The Kokugakuin database records a third view: that the old form yomo alternates its vowels with yama, mountain, since in early Japan the dead were buried in the mountains, citing poems of the Man'yōshū. It adds that the text does not say plainly that Yomi is underground, and that the Chinese graphs moved its picture beneath the earth.

Yahmāʾ and ayham

Lisān al-ʿArab, under y-h-m, has "al-yahmāʾ: a desert with no water in it, where no sound is heard", "laylun ayham: a night without stars", "al-yahmāʾ: the blind one, so called for the blindness of whoever travels it", and "the land with no trace, no road and no landmark". Earlier lexicons record the plea for refuge from "the two ayhams", said to be fire and drowning, or the torrent and the raging stallion. The sound match runs like this: y is y, m is m, and h drops between two vowels, for which Japanese has a witness of its own in the historical spelling oho, which became ō. The a of ayham and yahmāʾ faces the o of yomo, and this is the weakest step of the reading, supported only by the Japanese view that yomo and yama are forms of one word.

Al-yamm as a second reading

If Arai Hakuseki's suggestion is followed, the name comes from that of Yama, whom this encyclopedia reads as al-yamm, and Arabic y-m is the sea. Lisān al-ʿArab has "al-yamm: the sea whose bottom and shores are not reached" and "yumma al-rajul, he is maymūm: when he is thrown into the sea, or drowned in it". This reading meets the Chinese graphs 黄泉, Yellow Springs, the water beneath the earth. But the Kojiki's Yomi is a land reached on foot down a slope, with no water in its story, so yahmāʾ stays first.

Tsukuyomi's name is read on its page as "he watered the day", its yomi from yawm, day. It is written with other graphs, 読 and 夜見, and Chamberlain notes that "Moon-Hades" would be possible if yomi were taken as one word, but prefers "moonlit night".

Key Mythic Narratives

In the Nihon shoki

The Nihon shoki tells of Yomi in more than one "writing". In one, Izanagi makes water against a large tree, the water becomes a great river at which the hags of Yomi halt, and then he blocks the slope, says "come no further" and throws down his staff, which becomes a kami. In a second he goes to "the temporary burial-place", where she comes out to meet him as she was in life and then vanishes; he lights a light and sees her swollen and festering, and drives off the thunders with the fruit of a peach tree growing by the road. In a third he says to her: our relationship is severed; I will not be beaten by a relation, and spits. Some say that the Slope of Yomi is no particular place, but the moment when breath fails at death. Aston notes that Yomi is no doubt connected with yo or yoru, night, and that scholars have noticed the resemblance of its name to that of Yama, the Indian god of the dead, and of the story of Yama and his sister Yami to that of Izanagi and Izanami.

What scholars say about Yomi

The Kokugakuin database gathers three views of where the picture of Yomi comes from. The first takes it from the tombs with a side passage of stone that spread in the fifth and sixth centuries, entered by a door and used for offering food to the dead. The second takes it from mogari, the temporary lying-in of the dead before burial, when the family still hoped for a return. The third places it in the mountains where the dead were buried. It notes that the Kojiki says Izanami "withdrew", not that she died, and that by the seventh century, when the two books were written, tombs had become places to lay bodies rather than to feed the dead, so that Yomi became in both books a land of pollution to be fled.

Symbolic Reading

The Semitic essay in this project places Yomi in a table comparing Izanagi and Izanami with Adam and Eve: Izanagi went down to Yomi to rescue his wife, looked at her and lost her as Orpheus lost his, and the essay says that in both stories death entered the world through the error of the first couple. In the Kojiki death enters before the look, when Izanami gives birth to fire, and is fixed when she eats from the hearth of Yomi; what the look does is cut off the way back and turn death into a daily count. The Japanese rereading essay reads Izanami's death by fire as the volcano that comes out of the land and burns it, so that on this reading Yomi is where the burned land went.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Hymn to Demeter Hades gives Persephone a pomegranate seed before sending her back to her mother, and her mother tells her: if you have eaten, you will go back to him for a third of the year. Izanami tells her husband: I have eaten from the hearth of Yomi. In both stories the food of the land of the dead binds whoever eats it to that land; they part in that Persephone returns to the upper world every year, and Izanami does not.

In the Akkadian poem Ishtar stands at the gate of "the land of no return" and tells the gatekeeper: open, or I will raise the dead to eat the living, until the dead outnumber the living. Izanami stands at the rock and says: I will kill a thousand of the people of your land each day. In both a threat is made from the edge of the land of the dead that the dead will overcome the living; in Japan the threat is answered with a larger number of births. Yomi also resembles the hall of Hel in the North, and Yama, who went ahead of humans to death and became its king. All of these belong to the descent to the underworld. Akkadian Descent of Ishtar, lines 1–125.