Tsukuyomi is the Shinto moon god, born, in the Kojiki account, from the right eye of the creator Izanagi as the god purified himself, at the same moment that his radiant sister Amaterasu, the sun, was born from the left eye and their turbulent brother Susanoo from the nose. Sent up into the heavens to join Amaterasu and to rule the night beside her rule of the day, Tsukuyomi is at first her companion in the sky. Yet, unusually for so significant a figure, he has almost no mythology of his own, and the single story told of him serves mainly to explain why the sun and moon are no longer seen together. In that story, Amaterasu sends Tsukuyomi down as her representative to the food goddess Ukemochi, who prepares a feast by drawing food from her own body, from her mouth, the sea and the land.
Tsukuyomi, disgusted at being offered food produced in this way and taking it as a defilement, kills the food goddess. When he returns and reports what he has done, Amaterasu is filled with anger at so terrible an act and declares that she will never again look upon him face to face, and so, the myth explains, the sun and the moon dwell apart, the one ruling the day and the other the night, forever separated and never seen together in the sky. (A closely related version of the food-goddess killing is told of Susanoo instead, one of several places where the early chronicles preserve variant traditions.) Tsukuyomi is thus the divine embodiment of the moon and of the night, remembered above all for the estrangement that set the two great lights of heaven forever on their separate courses.