Oh My Kami! Tsukuyomi

Tsukuyomi is the Japanese moon god. While Amaterasu, the sun goddess, was born from Izanagi’s left eye as he purified himself after leaving Yomi, Tsukuyomi was born from his right eye.

This was a fairly difficult image to create in that there are precious few myths involving Tsukuyomi. From what I can tell, he’s only even mentioned twice in the mythologies, the first story being his birth, and the second one being when he killed Ukemochi (I wrote about that at the end of Inari’s entry); Amaterasu was invited to a feast by the god of food, Ukemochi. She was busy, and so she sent her brother in her place. However, when Tsukuyomi saw the disgusting way in which the food was prepared — Ukemochi made the food by turning to the ocean and spitting out a fish, then facing the forest and spewing game out of her anus, and finally turning to a rice paddy and coughing up a bowl of rice — he got angry and killed the goddess.

Amaterasu was so upset with Tsukuyomi for killing Ukemochi that she refused to ever look at him again, and moved to another part of the sky. That is why we have day and night.

ツクヨミ

Tsukuyomi

Oh, and I added a Google Friend Connect module to my site (it’s on the sidebar, underneath the tags and categories) so if you’re using Google Reader or Blogger or anything like that, you can easily subscribe to my site if you’d like.

This print is available on my Etsy store. If you’re interested in buying the original, please email me. Thanks for reading!

2 thoughts on “Oh My Kami! Tsukuyomi

  1. Pingback: A-Yokai-A-Day: Katsura-otoko | MatthewMeyer.net

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