Okuninushi

According to the Japanese Izumo Cycle, the hero Okuninushi had 80 brothers who were jealous of his marriage to the princess Ya-gami-himi, and so, plotted to kill him.

After telling Okuninushi to help them hunt a huge boar, they heated a large rock and pushed it down a mountainside to wards their brother below. Thinking that is was the boar, Okuninushi attempted to catch it and was burnt to death. his mother, filled with grief, appealed to the gods and he was restored to life again.

The Eighty brothers made a second attempt to take Okuninushi’s life, by crushing him in the fork of a tree. Again his mother appealed to the Kami, and Okuninushi was brought back to life.

She then set Okuninushi to Yomi, the Japanese realm of the dead, to seek the counsel of Susa-no-o who now dwelt in the underworld, after his exile from heaven. In Yomi, Okuninushi fell in love with Suseri-hime the daughter of Susa-no-o, and so they married.

Susa-no-o was angered by their union and, like the eighty brothers before him, attempted to kill Okuninushi. Susa-no-o made Okuninushi sleep in a room full of venomous snakes, but he was protected by a magical scarf Suseri-hime had provided for him. Again, Susa-no-o put Okuninushi in another room, this time full of bees and centipedes, but as before, the scarf protected him from harm.

Then Susa-no-o fired and arrow into the middle of a vast field and told Okuninushi to retrieve it. While Okuninushi searched for the arrow, Susa-no-o set the field alight. Surrounded by a wall of fire Okuninushi was trapped and could find no way to escape. It was then that a mouse told Okuninushi to stamp a hole into the hollow ground. He did so, and hid beneath the ground as the fire swept overhead. the mouse recovered the arrow and gave it to Okuninushi, which the hero then returned to Susa-no-o.

After these events, Susa-no-o’s hostility to wards his son-in-law began to decline, and one day he asked Okuninushi to clean his hair, which was terribly infested with centipedes. While Okuninushi cleaned Susa-no-o’s hair, the god fell asleep, and the hero saw his chance to escape death’s realm, along with his beautiful bride. He tied Susa-no-o’s hair to the rafters of his palace, and taking Susa-no-o’s powerful bow, sword, and enchanted Koto, he set off with Suseri-hime upon his back. By the time Susa-no-o had managed to untangle his hair from the rafters and reach the border of Yomi, the couple were already in the land of the living. Susa-no-o shouted to Okuninushi that if he was ever to defeat his eighty brothers he must use the weapons he had taken. and that was what Okuninushi eventually did.