The Kami by Jorge Luis Borges — Read

In a passage from Seneca, we read that Thales of Miletus taught that the earth floats in a surrounding sea, like a ship, and that these waters when tossed and driven by the tempests are the cause of earthquakes. Historians or mythologists of eighth-century Japan offer us a rather different seismological system. In the Sacred Scriptures it is written:

Now beneath the Fertile-Land-of-Reed-Plains lay a Kami in the form of a great cat-fish, and by its movement it caused the earth to quake, till the Great Deity of Deer Island thrust his sword deep into the earth and transfixed the Kami's head. So, now, when the evil Kami is violent, he puts forth his hand and lays it upon the sword till the Kami becomes quiet.