[Jujutsu Kaisen & Japanese Mythology]: Where Do "Curses" Come From? The Moment a God Fell into a Special Grade Cursed Spirit in the Kojiki's Underworld

A World Where Negative Emotions Take Shape

The anime Jujutsu Kaisen depicts a world where human negative emotions become Cursed Energy, giving rise to grotesque monsters.

The appearance of these Cursed Spirits — born from human stagnation such as fear, regret, and jealousy — has left a massive impact on audiences worldwide.

But in Japan, this concept of a curse is by no means fiction invented from scratch by modern creators.

How was Japan's oldest, original curse born?

Its origin is recorded in visceral and grotesque detail within a myth compiled over 1,300 years ago.

And it begins not with a monster. It begins with a goddess.

Section 1: Kegare — The Concept That Jujutsu Kaisen Was Built On

In the anime, curses manifest in places where people gather or where energy stagnates. Dark corners of schools. Abandoned buildings. Anywhere that human fear and regret have accumulated without release.

This operates on the exact same system as the concept of Kegare in Japanese Shintoism.

Kegare is not simply "dirt" or "filth" in the physical sense. It is the spiritual state that results from the extreme depletion of life force — the condition of absolute stagnation, of energy that has stopped moving and begun to rot.

Ancient Japanese people understood Kegare as the source of all calamity. Not evil as a moral category, but stagnation as a natural force — as dangerous and as inevitable as decay itself.

The most powerful representation of Kegare in Japanese mythology is not a demon or a monster summoned from darkness. It is a goddess. Specifically, it is what happened to Izanami — the mother goddess who created the islands of Japan — after she died.

What Jujutsu Kaisen does not show you:

The concept of Kegare did not emerge from abstract philosophy. It emerged from a specific mythological event — one of the most disturbing scenes in the entire Kojiki. A husband who descended into the underworld to find his dead wife. And what he found when he broke the one rule she had given him.

→ Read the full story of Japan's creation and the birth of Kegare — KAMIYO Origins

Section 2: The Moment a God Transforms into a Monster

To find his deceased wife, Izanagi stepped into Yomi-no-Kuni — the pitch-black underworld, the realm of the dead.

He called out to her in the darkness.

Izanami answered. She told him she had already eaten the food of the underworld and could not return immediately. She would consult with the gods of Yomi. She made one request:

"Do not look at me. Whatever you hear, whatever you feel in this darkness — do not bring your light into this place."

Izanagi waited. He waited in complete darkness, in complete silence.

And then he could not bear it any longer.

He broke off the end-tooth of his comb and lit it as a torch.

What he saw was not the goddess he had crossed the boundary of death to find.

Her entire body was writhing with maggots. Her flesh was rotting and melting away. And from her body — from her head, her chest, her stomach, her genitals, her left hand, her right hand, her left foot, her right foot — eight grotesque beings had been born. The Yakusa-no-Ikazuchi. The Eight Thunder Gods.

This was not a monster from outside. This was Izanami herself. The goddess who had shaped the islands of Japan with her hands. The being who had stood beside Izanagi on the floating bridge of heaven and stirred the primordial ocean.

She had become the most powerful manifestation of Kegare that Japan's mythology would ever record.

In the language of Jujutsu Kaisen: a Special Grade Cursed Spirit. Born not from human negative emotion, but from something older and more absolute — the transformation of the sacred itself, when abandoned and left to stagnate in the dark.

The layer Jujutsu Kaisen left unexplored:

The Eight Thunder Gods that emerged from Izanami's body are not simply monsters. Each one corresponds to a specific location on her body, and each carries a specific form of destructive energy. The Kojiki records them with precise, unsettling detail — a taxonomy of what happens when divine energy stagnates and turns.

This is the original mythology of cursed energy. Not imagined. Recorded.

→ Read KAMIYO Episode 35 — Izanami's Corruption and the Birth of the Yakusa-no-Ikazuchi

Section 3: Gods and Curses Share the Same Root

Izanagi ran.

Driven by terror, he fled from the underworld — from his wife, from the Eight Thunder Gods, from everything he had seen in the torchlight.

Izanami, enraged that her decayed form had been witnessed, unleashed the Shikome — the hideous women of Yomi — to hunt him. Then the Eight Thunder Gods themselves. Then an army of 1,500 warriors from the underworld.

Izanagi threw down his headdress and it became grapes. He threw down his comb and it became bamboo shoots. He threw peaches at his pursuers and drove them back.

Finally, he reached Yomotsu Hirasaka — the slope at the boundary between the living and the dead — and heaved a massive boulder across the entrance, sealing the two worlds forever.

From one side of the boulder, Izanami screamed that she would kill one thousand people each day.

From the other side, Izanagi replied that he would bring one thousand five hundred lives into the world.

This exchange — this declaration of the cycle of life and death — was not made by philosophers or priests. It was made by a husband and wife, separated by a boulder, at the end of a marriage that had crossed the boundary of death and could not survive what it found there.

What this means for Jujutsu Kaisen's entire premise:

The instinctive terror that audiences feel watching Cursed Spirits in Jujutsu Kaisen is not a modern reaction to a modern invention. It is the exact same fear that ancient Japanese people encoded into the Kojiki when they described Izanami's transformation — the fear that the sacred can stagnate, the pure can rot, and the beloved can become something that pursues you in the dark.

In Japanese mythology, there is no absolute good or evil. Even gods, if they stagnate, rot, and cling to attachments, will fall and become terrifying curses. Jujutsu Kaisen did not create this idea. It inherited it.

The curses in the anime are not metaphors for human negativity. They are the direct descendants of Kegare — a concept that was already ancient when the Kojiki was written, and that still lives inside every person who watches Jujutsu Kaisen and feels something they cannot fully explain.

The Mythology That Jujutsu Kaisen Was Drawing From

A goddess who created a nation, abandoned in the darkness, transformed into something her husband could not look at.

Eight Thunder Gods born from the sites of her decay.

A boulder placed at the boundary of the living and the dead, and two voices making promises from opposite sides.

This is where curses come from. Not from the imagination of a manga artist. From the oldest written record of Japan's understanding of what happens when life force stagnates and divine energy has nowhere left to go.

Jujutsu Kaisen gave you the surface of this world — the monsters, the battles, the cursed techniques. But the original source is stranger, more human, and more disturbing than any adaptation can fully contain.

Izanami did not choose to become what Izanagi saw in the torchlight. She was abandoned. She was left in the dark. And what accumulated in that darkness became the origin of every curse that Japan's mythology would ever record.

→ Read the complete myth — KAMIYO Origins: Where Japan's oldest curses were born

Wear the Gods Who Existed Before the Curses

Izanami's transformation into Kegare did not happen in isolation. It happened because of who she was before — the goddess who stood beside Izanagi and brought the islands of Japan into existence.

From the grief and aftermath of her loss, from Izanagi's purification ritual in the river after he fled the underworld, three gods were born.

Amaterasu. Tsukuyomi. Susanoo.

The Sun Goddess. The Moon God. The Storm God.

These are the gods who existed on the other side of the darkness — born not despite the tragedy of Izanami's corruption, but because of it. They are what life creates when it insists on continuing after loss.

KAMIYO carries these gods as art. The mythology that gave Jujutsu Kaisen its deepest spiritual architecture, made wearable.

If the soul of what you read here resonates with something in you — this is where it lives.

→ KAMIYO Collection — Wear the myth

The myth is still alive. It has been waiting 1,300 years to be known.