Susanoo, the storm god, is given rule of the sea by his father Izanagi but instead weeps and rages that he wishes to join his dead mother Izanami in the underworld, and before leaving heaven to face judgment for his conduct, he goes to take leave of his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu. Suspicious of his intentions, Amaterasu meets him armed, and the two undertake a contest of creation, each producing deities from objects belonging to the other, a contest Susanoo claims to have won, and whose result emboldens him to a spree of destructive behavior in heaven that follows.
He breaks down the ridges between Amaterasu's rice paddies, fills her irrigation channels, and, most seriously, flays a piebald colt and hurls its body through the roof of the hall where Amaterasu's weaving maidens are at work, killing one of them in the shock. Grieved, frightened, and finally outraged past endurance, Amaterasu withdraws into the heavenly rock cave, Ama-no-Iwato, and seals its entrance with a great boulder. With the sun goddess hidden, the world and the high plain of heaven alike are plunged into permanent night, and disorder spreads among the gods, described in the texts as a chaos of countless malevolent spirits swarming like summer flies.