Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan (review)

In this first comprehensive English-language monograph on premodern Japan's Kumano cult, Max Moerman aptly situates Kumano as a topos of death and paradise—a major religious landscape layered with a rich range of meanings and interpretations crisscrossing different religious ideas and practices. Moerman thoroughly depicts "both the real and the ideal, the historical and the ideological" (p. 3) dimensions of the Kumano cult by zooming in and out of the Nachi sankei mandara (Nachi pilgrimage mandala). This sixteenth-century painting of the Kumano religious landscape serves "as a useful point of entry and frame of orientation" (p. 25) and offers "a symbolic means of negotiating both the locative specificity of the Kumano cult and the thick associative context that connects it to a larger cultural and religious landscape" (p. 36). This strategy works well and provides the au-thor with a vehicle that enables him to focus his investigation.

To begin, Moerman addresses "the social construction of a religious landscape and the range of its interpretations" (p. 5). He does this by tracing "the appearance of Kumano in the literary and visual record, both imperial and Buddhist, to reveal the layers of cultural inscription that composed the site" (p. 37) and, in particular, by exploring "the texts and images that contributed to, and constituted, the levels of meaning that premodern pilgrims found at Kumano" (p. 42). This task of contextualizing the identities of Kumano in a history that had been subjected to constant accommodation, mutation, and translocation is complex, but Moerman clearly shows that Kumano's multiple genealogies eventually converged in the soteriology of life and death.

Moerman examines a ritual suicide, the Fudaraku tokai, that captivated followers of the Kumano cult and "through which Kumano's landscape was transformed from one of death to one of rebirth" (p. 38). The Fudaraku tokai left an indelible mark on the "dual ritualization of death and enlightenment" (p. 38) in the practices of Kumano's pilgrims. Several of Moerman's examples of Fudaraku tokai at Kumano help us to understand the religious matrix of this form of ritual suicide. Although "evidence of Fudaraku tokai is found in a wide range of historical sources, such as chronicles, diaries, prose narratives, and letters, in addition to paintings" (p. 94), its known instances are strikingly few and sporadic—only 24 between the ninth and eighteenth centuries (ten of which occurred in the sixteenth century!).

As a tale from the Uji shu¯i monogatari illustrates (p. 117), and as Moerman stresses, the dramatic self-immolation of Fudaraku tokai was heavily exploited, whether as a subject of e-toki performances, as a means of sharing the merit accrued by ritual suicide, or as a reference to pre-emptive memorial services. This is interesting, even though Moerman neither fully elaborates the historical process through which the Fudaraku tokai was molded into a tool of religious enterprise nor provides specific examples of how the Kumano pilgrimage (whose popularity owed much to this ritual suicide) was prescribed for "worldly advancement, health, and longevity" (p. 138).

We are then shown how, in the twelfth century, retired emperors and their consorts eagerly and repeatedly engaged in Kumano pilgrimages. It seems to have been a fashionable frenzy of the time—a frenzy ushered in by Goshirakawa and carried on by those retired sovereigns who followed him. What is puzzling is that, in spite of "the sheer excess, the overproduction, the relentlessness" (p. 148) of such pilgrimages, they suddenly ceased at the end of the Insei period in the late twelfth century. In answering the question, "How are we to understand these frequent pilgrimages to Kumano by retired emperors at the beginning of Japan's medieval age?" (p. 148), Moerman looks at the "competition for power in the late Heian period, [which was] characterized by literary, artistic, and religious, as well as explicitly political contestation" (p. 157).

Moerman's findings suggest that repeated...