The first example, the story of Izanami and Izanagi, is set in the distant epoch that the Kojiki and the Nihongi call the Age of Gods. But the second example that I will cite, superficially very different, is set in the Age of the Earthly Sovereigns. Here we read of a fisherman later revered as a deity named Urashima:

He was hadsome of feature... He went out alone in a boat to fish with hook and line. During three days and nights he caught nothing, but at length he caught a turtle of five colours. Wondering, he put it in the boat... While he slept the turtle suddenly became transformed into a woman, in form beautiful beyond description...

He said to her, 'This place is far from the homes of people, of whom there are few on the sea. How did you so suddenly come here?'

Smiling she replied, 'I deemed you a man of parts alone on the sea, lacking anyone with whom to converse, so I came here by wind and cloud.'

She is, of course, a Kami, as he quickly understands, from a magical land that 'lasts as long as sky and earth and ends with sun and moon'. And she tempts him:

'You can come to that region by a turn of your oar. Obey me and shut your eyes.'

So presently they came to a broad island in the wide sea, which was covered with jewels. (On it was a great mansion.) Its high gate and towers shone with a brilliance which his eyes had never beheld and his ears had never heard tell.

They enter the mansion and are received and greeted in a loving fashion by her parents: 'Seated they conversed of the difference between mankind and the Land-of-Spirits, and the joy of man and Kami meeting.

Eventually the fisherman Urashima and the beautiful sea Kami are married. Thereafter: 'For three years, far from his aged parents, he lived his life in the Spirit capital, when he began to yearn for his home and for them.' Observing the change in him, his wife asks: 'Do you desire to return home?'

He replies: 'To come to this far Spirit Land, I parted from my near and kin. My yearning I cannot help... I wish to return to my native place to see my parents for a while'. Then we read:

Hand in hand they walked conversing... till they came to where their ways diverged and where her parents and relatives, sorrowing to part with him, made their farewells.

The princess informed him that she was indeed the turtle which he had taken in his boat, and she took a jewel-casket and gave it to him saying: 'If you do not forget me and desire to seek me, keep this casket carefully, but do not open it.'

Thus he parted from her and entered his boat, shutting his eyes as she bade him.

In a trice Urashima finds himself back in his home village again but a terrible surprise awaits him. During the three years that he has spent enchanted on the Spirit island 300 mortal years have passed and everything has changed beyond recognition.

Stumbling around dazed and disconsolate, discovering from a passer-by that his own disappearance three centuries previously is itself now the subject of a village legend, he forgets the warning about the jewel box and opens it to remind himself of his Kami wife: 'But before he could look into it, something in the form of a blue-orchid soared up to the blue sky with the wind and clouds. Then he knew that, having broken his oath, he could not go back and see her again."

(Hancock 2)