The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki attach a second, harsher episode to Konohanasakuya-hime's marriage, one that explains why the imperial line, and human beings generally, do not live forever. Before Ninigi chose her, her father Oyamatsumi offered him both of his daughters together: Konohanasakuya-hime, the blossom princess, and her elder sister Iwanaga-hime, the rock princess, whose name means long-enduring as stone. Ninigi, taken with the younger sister's beauty and repelled by the elder's plain appearance, sent Iwanaga-hime back to her father and kept only the blossom princess for his wife.
Oyamatsumi's response, in the telling preserved in the Nihon Shoki, was grief rather than anger at the insult: he explained that he had sent the two sisters together for a reason, so that Ninigi's descendants would have lived as long and unchanging as rock through Iwanaga-hime, while flourishing and prospering like the blossoming trees through Konohanasakuya-hime; by rejecting the rock sister, Ninigi had condemned his own line, and by extension humankind, to lives that bloom brilliantly and fall quickly, like the cherry blossom, rather than enduring like stone. The myth gives Konohanasakuya-hime's association with beautiful transience a second, more consequential meaning: her chosen beauty is also the origin, in this telling, of human mortality itself.