Good, evil — the Bible taught “the West” to think in those terms. Non-Biblical cultures — Japan’s for instance — make other distinctions, or make this one differently. Children raised differently turn out different. We are all children of our earliest myths. The children of Adam and Eve need disciplined mental effort to understand the children of Izanagi and Izanami, and vice versa.

The Bible tells us that God created heaven and earth and everything in them. On the sixth and final day of creation he said, “Let us make man in our image,” to “have dominion” over “all the Earth.” The first couple’s disobedience earned them expulsion from paradise and their descendants the endless toil we know to this day. Theirs was the first evil. Implicit in it is the meaning of good: obedience to the one God, creator of all that is, omnipotent and all-knowing, whose word is law and whose law is good.

It is highly unlikely that any Japanese ever heard or imagined such a thing before the year 1549, when the first Christian missionaries arrived. Early Japanese civilization took a very different route to the future. There was no “one God”; there were myriad gods, so numerous indeed, and so morally ambiguous besides, that the eighth-century chronicle “Nihon Shoki” speaks of “kami that shone with the luster of fireflies, and evil kami that buzzed like flies.”