Old-World Japan: Legends of the Land of the Gods

Long before modern Japan rose from its post-war ashes, there existed a world where gods walked the earth and the islands themselves were born from divine love. This collection gathers the primordial myths of Shinto tradition, starting with Izanagi and Izanami, the divine couple whose sacred dance conjured the Japanese archipelago from the primordial chaos. Here you'll encounter the fiery catastrophe of Izanami's death and the terrible vengeance that follows, the luminous goddess Amaterasu who hides herself away in a cave, and the countless kami who dwell in waterfalls, mountains, and the hearts of ancient forests. Rinder, writing in 1895, understood that these are not mere children's tales but the very foundation stones of a civilization. His prose retains the strange beauty and moral gravity of stories told around fires long before writing existed. For anyone seeking the mythic roots of Japanese culture, or simply hungry for narratives that operate on a different logic than Western fairy tales, these legends offer something increasingly rare: the chance to encounter the numinous.