Izanami is a primordial creator goddess of Shinto who, together with her husband and brother Izanagi, brought the world into being at the dawn of things. Standing on the floating bridge of heaven, the pair stir the primeval brine with a jewelled spear, and from the drop that falls from its tip the first island forms; descending to it, they marry and give birth to the islands of Japan and to a great host of kami, the deities of the sea, the mountains, the rivers, the wind, the trees and the fields. Izanami is thus the mother of the land itself and of much of the natural world. But her creative labour brings her to her death: in giving birth to the kami of fire, Kagutsuchi, she is fatally burned, and she departs to Yomi, the shadowy land of the dead.
After Izanagi seals the passage to Yomi and their marriage ends, the Kojiki records a bitter final exchange between them: Izanami, transformed into the ruling goddess of the land of the dead, Yomotsu-Okami, vows that she will each day strangle a thousand people of the living world in retribution, to which Izanagi answers that he will then cause fifteen hundred to be born each day, an exchange ancient Japanese tradition reads as explaining the ordinary balance of death and birth in the human world ever after. This grim covenant between the divine couple, rather than any single act of creation, is the passage most often cited as the mythic origin of mortality itself within the Shinto tradition, fixing Izanami permanently as goddess and guardian of the dead in contrast to Izanagi's continued association with the living world and its purification.