Three Deities Born Alone and Hidden

The Kojiki's very first sentence names the deities that were born when heaven and earth began, in the Plain of High Heaven, before any of the pairs of gods that later chapters describe as creating the visible world. Three deities appear in this opening line, given in Basil Hall Chamberlain's translation as the Deity Master of the August Centre of Heaven, the High August Producing Wondrous Deity, and the Divine Producing Wondrous Deity, English compounds built from Chamberlain's decision to translate the divine names' meanings rather than transliterate the Japanese sounds. The passage states one further fact about all three and stops there. Each of them was born alone, without a partner, and each hid its person immediately after being born. No further story follows about any of the three within the surviving text, no genealogy, no act, no shrine tradition tied to them individually. That silence is not an omission the text apologizes for; it is presented as the whole of what can be said, three deities who exist at the very beginning of the cosmos and then withdraw from the narrative that their own appearance opens. Being born alone, with no counterpart of the opposite kind to pair with, sets these three apart structurally from the many later deities the Kojiki introduces in male and female pairs who then generate further deities together, marking the opening trio as belonging to a different order of existence from almost everything that follows them.