Kagutsuchi is the fire-deity, and he is the point at which the creation of Japan stops going well. Izanagi and Izanami have borne the islands and then a long series of gods without incident; Kagutsuchi is the last, and bearing him burns his mother so badly that she sickens and dies. Even her dying produces deities — from her vomit, her waste and her urine come gods of metal, clay and water, the last of which are the things one puts out a fire with.
Izanagi’s response is immediate and futile. He draws the sword and beheads his own newborn son.
於是伊耶那岐命，拔所御佩之十拳釼，斬其子迦具土神之頸
“drawing the ten-grasp sabre that was augustly girded on him, cut off the head of his child the Deity Shining-Elder” — Kojiki, Sect. VIII, tr. Basil Hall Chamberlain (1882)
The kanbun names him where Chamberlain does not: 迦具土神, Kagutsuchi, in the sentence itself. Chamberlain renders Japanese theonyms as English calques throughout, so the same god appears in his English as “the Deity Shining-Elder”; the Kojiki also calls him Hi-no-Kagutsuchi, the fire-shining one. The killing is as generative as the birth was: eight deities come from the blood on the sword and the rocks it spatters, and eight more from the pieces of the body, most of them gods of mountains and of the thunder that gathers over them. Fire, cut apart, becomes the landscape.
The rest follows from it. Izanagi goes down to Yomi to bring Izanami back, breaks the one condition she sets by striking a light to look at her, and flees what he sees; the divorce at the pass between the living and the dead is what fixes death in the world. Kagutsuchi himself, unusually for a god killed in infancy, keeps a substantial cult — he is enshrined at Atago and Akiba as the deity to petition against the fires that periodically took whole quarters of wooden cities, and the same power that killed Izanami is asked, at those shrines, to hold itself back.
