She shits the Gods of Clay and pisses those of Gushing-Waters. Then Izanami is burnt as she gave birth to the Fire God, Kagutsuchi, but she keeping on creating. He’s set adrift to starve and drown, the rules are learned, and there are lots of births: the various islands that become Japan and kami of elements and places. The result is the birth of a “limp and squashy” Leech-child. When the kami act on the passed motion, Izanami breaks the rules she wasn’t aware of by being the first to flatter the other. Some version of archaized speech is used for all the voices in the novel: the narrator’s, her quotation, her quotation of someone’s quoting, as here. What say you? Now there is a proposition. In this way I should like us to give birth to the land. ‘“Let me put my place of excess into your place of emptiness, and thereby fill it. Once they notice their bodies differ, Izanaki has an idea. This couple is human in other ways, for the two seemed to be doomed from the start and are violent, weak-kneed, and vindictive. ![]() It can be comforting to the humans who care about these stories that their gods are subject to the sorts of disasters, or even just mistakes, that human life is full of. Izanaki (spelled elsewhere as Izanagi) and Izanami have their particular characteristics and history, while sharing with deities in other traditions an apprenticeship that requires a starting over. The legend is about Shinto’s kami (gods or forces of nature) responsible for creating the land and its creatures and phenomena. While her retelling can at times squeak by as a contemporary idiom, what is memorable about the novel is how little it illuminates its original and how little the legend enriches the new work, which is often dead and more often flat. Its website says that each of its writers has “retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way.” Natsuo Kirino, author of the latest volume in the series, has been certified fine by the awarding bodies of international prizes for crime fiction, she is alive now, and retells part of the Shinto creation myth. ![]() Canongate U.S., 320 pages, $24.Ĭanongate Books, publisher of The Goddess Chronicle, began its Myth Series-“A bold re-telling of legendary tales by the world’s finest contemporary writers”-in 1999. The myth might have been, but wasn’t, mined for tales of compassion, or inevitability of sorrow, or the psychology of misogyny or of revenge, or the strictures of fate. There is a paucity of richness in The Goddess Chronicle.
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