The Tale of Tsukuyomi and Uke Mochi
At a Glance
- Central figures: Tsukuyomi, the god of the moon, and Uke Mochi, the goddess of food; Amaterasu, the sun goddess, is the third figure whose response drives the story’s final consequence.
- Setting: The heavens and the earthly realm where Uke Mochi resides; from Shinto tradition, rooted in the mythology of the creator pair Izanagi and Izanami and their children.
- The turn: Tsukuyomi kills Uke Mochi after she produces a feast by spitting food from her mouth and body - an act he finds impure and an offense to the sanctity of the divine gathering.
- The outcome: Amaterasu, horrified by the killing, severs all ties with Tsukuyomi; from that moment the sun and moon are never in the sky at the same time, and day and night become permanently separate.
- The legacy: From Uke Mochi’s body grow cows, horses, millet, silkworms, rice, wheat, and soybeans - the foundational crops and livestock that would sustain both gods and mortals.
Tsukuyomi was born from the washing of Izanagi’s right eye, at the moment the creator god purified himself after walking out of the underworld. In that same ritual, Amaterasu came from the left eye and Susanoo from the nose. Three children from one ablution - the sun, the moon, the storm. For a time, the moon god and the sun goddess dwelt together in the heavens, governing the hours between them, and the sky held no quarrel.
Then Amaterasu sent Tsukuyomi to earth with a message of goodwill for Uke Mochi.
The Feast Uke Mochi Prepared
Uke Mochi received the moon god with every sign of honor. She had a power no other deity possessed: food came from her body. To feed her divine guest, she turned toward the ocean and drew fish from her mouth. She turned toward the mountains and breathed out game. She faced the flooded paddies and produced rice. Each gesture a demonstration of her nature - she did not gather or cultivate, she gave from herself.
The table was full. The feast was ready. She had made it as an offering.
Tsukuyomi’s Sword
Tsukuyomi looked at what she had done and felt revulsion.
The food had come from her mouth, her nose, the substance of her body. To him it was contaminated before it reached the table - an obscenity dressed as hospitality, a violation of everything a sacred meal should be. He did not ask for an explanation. He did not speak. He drew his sword and killed her.
The food lay scattered. The goddess lay on the ground. Tsukuyomi returned to the heavens.
Amaterasu Turns Away
He told Amaterasu what had happened. She listened to the whole account - the feast, the disgust, the sword - and her face closed.
She called Tsukuyomi an evil god. She said she did not wish to look at him. From that day forward she would not share the sky with her brother, and she has not. He rises when she descends; she climbs when he is gone. The rift between them is the space between day and night, and it has not narrowed since.
The other gods watched the sun refuse the moon and said nothing that could mend it.
What Grew from Uke Mochi
But the story did not end with death.
From Uke Mochi’s fallen body, the world received what her killing had seemed to destroy. Cows and horses grew from her head. Millet sprouted from her forehead. From her eyebrows came silkworms, thread already coiling. Her eyes gave rice - the crop that would anchor Japanese agriculture for thousands of years. From her stomach came wheat and soybeans, two more staples that would sustain generation after generation.
She had spent her whole existence producing food. Death did not change that. The body that Tsukuyomi had judged impure became the source of the food that the living world would depend on. Every rice field planted in the paddies of Yamato, every silkworm unspooled for cloth - these were Uke Mochi, still.
The Moon’s Permanent Solitude
Tsukuyomi governs the night alone now. Among the three children of Izanagi, he is the one who recedes. Amaterasu commands the living world and is worshipped at Ise, the greatest shrine in the Shinto tradition. Susanoo, despite his rages, earned his place in the stories that followed. Tsukuyomi appears here and in one or two other fragments and then the chronicles fall quiet around him.
Whether his reading of the feast was right or wrong, the chronicles do not say. Uke Mochi’s method was unusual by any standard - food from the body, produced on demand, for a god she had never met. Whether that was sacred abundance or impurity is a question the texts leave open. Tsukuyomi acted on certainty and received isolation in return. The sword was drawn in a moment. The sky has been divided ever since.
The moon rises each night over the paddies where rice grows, over the mulberry trees where silkworms feed, over the fields of millet and wheat and soybean that spread across the land Uke Mochi’s body seeded. What Tsukuyomi destroyed, Uke Mochi replaced. The light he casts falls on everything she left behind.