The pair stand on the floating bridge of heaven and stir the brine with a jewelled spear; the drop that falls from its tip becomes the first island. They descend, circle the pillar, and their first attempt at a marriage rite goes wrong because Izanami speaks first, producing a deformed child they set adrift — the text is explicit that the failure was the woman speaking before the man, and the passage has been argued about by feminist scholars and by shrine priests alike. She dies bearing the fire kami, and Izanagi's pursuit of her into Yomi is the tradition's foundational account of death: he lights a comb tooth, sees maggots, and flees. At the pass between the worlds they exchange the words that separate them, she vowing to strangle a thousand people a day, he vowing that fifteen hundred will be born. It is a statement about population rather than about salvation, and it is characteristically unsentimental.