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Reviewed by:
  • The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan
  • Hank Glassman
The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan. By Karen M. Gerhart. University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. 272 pages. Hardcover $39.00.

The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan, by Karen Gerhart, seeks to identify, describe, classify, and contextualize the many physical objects employed in Japanese funerary and memorial rituals. Gerhart's primary purpose in this ambitious and groundbreaking study is to bring to light the functions of these objects in the death rituals of early medieval Japan. The book is quite unlike any other, whether in English or in Japanese: as the author points out repeatedly, her task is a challenging one, since those who have previously written on this subject have been intimately familiar with the uses, both symbolic and practical, of funereal accoutrements and thus have not tended to offer detailed explanations of them. Recognizing this difficulty, Gerhart uses a variety of textual and visual sources to provide a rich account of this phenomenon, and she demonstrates a serious commitment to filling in the existing gaps. In the end, she is remarkably successful in showing the reader what a typical funeral of a high-ranking elite family member would have been like during the fourteenth or fifteenth century and the roles that various objects would have played in such a ceremony.

Even where the conclusions remain somewhat hypothetical, the journey is interesting at every turn. The book makes excellent use of the detailed and meticulous secondary studies produced over the last couple of decades by such historians as Itō Yuishin, Katsuda Itaru, and Ishii Susumu; these sources and others keep it solidly grounded. While Gerhart is an art historian, it is extremely clear that she is less interested in the plastic and formal qualities or aesthetic value of the objects she discusses than she is in their symbolic, ritual, and performative effects. She states explicitly, for example, that she has intentionally avoided the words "art" and "artwork" as misleading and insufficient to capture the contextual significance of the broad range of items she discusses in this study (p. 5). To refer to them as works of art would reduce them to mere ancillary decorative elements when in fact they are absolutely central. She states at the outset, "I argue that the ritual objects are not simply visual appendages to the ritual sequence but are part of the structure and performance" (p. 2). [End Page 400]

The book is divided into two parts, the first half being a series of case studies based on an investigation of written sources and the second half being an investigation of the role of funerary structures, paintings, sculptures, and specialized implements in Japanese Buddhist death ritual. The author seeks to draw insights from scholarship in ritual studies, material culture, and art history to offer us a sufficiently nuanced and complex understanding of her topic. The first two chapters, "Death in the Fourteenth Century" and "Funerals in the Fifteenth Century," lay the essential contextual groundwork for the analysis and interpretation of the investigations of the second half of the book. Gerhart draws information from a variety of sources such as Heian period ritual manuals, illustrated scrolls depicting the funerals and memorial services of eminent monks, and, most prominently, diaries of courtiers of the Muromachi period. Reviewing these materials, Gerhart suggests that the fourteenth century was a time of experimentation and transition in the history of Japanese funerals and that the fifteenth century saw increasing standardization and codification. Her case study approach allows her to offer the reader a fairly continuous narrative of death ritual as it developed over the course of more than a century, from 1345 to 1463. Building on this foundational knowledge, the second half analyzes and interprets the meaning of material objects in rituals of encoffining, interment, and mourning. Chapters 3 to 5 demonstrate the centrality of such items and make it clear that, far from being simple objects of decoration or veneration (or even symbols of something else), the cymbals, censers, banners, portraits, grave enclosures, and so on performed functions central to the efficacy of the ritual and thus, it was believed, to the salvation...

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