The Kojiki returns again and again to acts of separation. Husband and wife. Sister and brother. The visible and the invisible. The largest of these — the one that comes earliest in the text and underwrites every smaller separation after it — is the separation of the living from the dead.
That separation happens here.
The return from Yomi
Izanami dies in childbirth — the god of fire burns her from the inside out as he is born — and descends to Yomi-no-Kuni, the land of the dead. Izanagi, unable to accept this, follows her. He finds her in the darkness of Yomi. He sees her — and she has already begun to rot. Maggots cover her body. Eight thunder gods writhe in her flesh.
Izanagi runs. Izanami, enraged at having been seen this way, sends the army of Yomi after him. He flees through the underworld with the dead pursuing. He throws his hair-comb behind him; it sprouts as bamboo, slowing the pursuit. He throws peaches, the food of the dead, at his pursuers; they fall away.
At last he reaches the boundary — the slope between Yomi and the world above. He climbs. He arrives at the surface. He turns. And then, with all his strength, he pushes a great boulder — the Chibiki-no-Iwa, the Thousand-Pulling Rock — into the mouth of the underworld and seals it.
Izanami, on the other side, declares: “I will kill a thousand of your people every day.” Izanagi replies: “Then I will cause fifteen hundred to be born.” The separation is fixed. Death is real. Life continues.
The actual slope
The traditional identification of this slope is Ifuya-zaka, a quiet, narrow stretch of road in the Higashi-Izumo district of Matsue. The site is unsignposted from the highway. You park on a gravel pull-off. You walk fifty metres up a slight rise. And you arrive at three large boulders set in a row, half-overgrown, marked only by a wooden plaque.
These are said to be the Chibiki-no-Iwa — or the place where it stood. The scale is not what you expect. The boulders are large but not monumental. The site does not announce itself. It is, in a way, the most undramatic mythologically charged place in the whole Kojiki Trail.
The strangeness of standing here
What is unusual about Yomotsu Hirasaka is not the visible site. It is the claim of the visible site. This is, by tradition, the literal boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. The Kojiki does not place this boundary in a metaphor or in a distant region. It places it on a slope in Izumo, with a few rocks, that you can walk to in your normal shoes.
Stand there for a minute. The road is quiet. The trees overhead are not unusual. The rocks are rocks. And yet, by the text of the country’s oldest book, the dead are on the other side.
Editor’s note
This is the strangest stop on the Izumo trail, and arguably the one most worth taking time at. There is no shrine to photograph, no shimenawa to admire, no famous tree. There are three rocks and an old story. Bring patience. The site rewards the visitor who is willing to spend ten quiet minutes doing nothing in particular.