Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan by Heather Blair (review)

Heather Blair’s Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan excavates the physical and affective spaces of Kinpusen on the Kii peninsula to tell the story from its rise as one of the most important elite pilgrimage destinations of the tenth century to its subordination into a branch temple and eventual fall from courtly prominence over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Blair eloquently demonstrates that memory marks the environment just as fundamentally as architectural structures do. Her methodology, which brings forth the imagined landscape of the mountain while also paying careful attention to its geographical importance, can be described as ambulatory: the histories and stories of Kinpusen lead her not only through the archives but also across the very terrain of the mountain, producing what she calls “bodily, affective memory in me” (p. xi). In turn, she takes the reader for an armchair journey of sorts into the texts and back out to the landscape itself, bringing the mountain to us in all its real and imagined space.

Real and Imagined offers an erudite contribution to the growing interest in religious studies scholarship on mountain pilgrimage as well as the religious habits of the laity. The book concentrates in particular on three elite laymen—Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), Fujiwara no Moromichi (1062–1099), and Retired Emperor Shirakawa (1053–1129)—and their placemaking efforts on Kinpusen. By uncovering their innovative practices and signature moves, Blair demonstrates that the participation of the laity was more than mere adherence to precedent, although it was also certainly that. Each of the chosen figures corresponds to a specific phase in the broader history of pilgrimage and politics, and by following their engagement with Kinpusen, Blair constructs a macrovision of the greater political and cultural shifts in Heian Japan. Indeed, one of the main contributions of the book is its ability to tell a tale larger than the mountain itself: the narrative of the rise and decline in elite pilgrimage to Kinpusen simultaneously mirrors wider political ruptures resulting from the move from the ritsuryō system (centralized bureaucracy ruled by statutory codes) through the royal court state controlled by regents into the insei period of rule by retired emperors. Blair develops this account almost exclusively using Heian-period texts. She pays attention to not only the continuities but also the historical disruptions and upheavals and their ramifications as reflected in these sources, conjuring a nuanced picture of pilgrimage that tells us about the variegated lives of the mountain.

Another strength of the book is its theoretical framework. While the discussion flows chronologically, charting pilgrimage trends in the context of wider sociopolitical developments, it also employs the theoretical device of the real and imagined space in order to draw out the co-constitutive relationship between pilgrims’ interaction with the real or tangible Kinpusen and their own (as well as others’) imaginings of the mountain.

Part 1 consists of three chapters that explore what Blair calls the “affective landscape,” or an “imagined dimension of spatiality . . . capable of evoking, overlaying, and even occluding the physical terrain” (p. 19). Chapter 1 challenges the idea that a place is single and unchanging. By analyzing a variety of sources such as poetry, stories, votive texts, annals, and law codes, Blair renders a picture of the ideological Kinpusen during the Heian period as a space that exceeded its physicality to become a political, ritual, and salvific icon to generations of the powerful Fujiwara. Lay pilgrimage developed during the tenth century, and even from this early point, Kinpusen was cast as a remote and numinous space. Origin stories that claimed Kinpusen had flown from China enhanced this otherworldly quality, and Heian-period texts described it as a godly abode with the ability to confer continued political power to its patrons and even the possibility of enlightenment to those who walked its paths. Blair shows that at the heart of pilgrimage was a desire to...