Although located far from the populated centres of traditional Japan, the three Kumano shrines occupied a central position in the Japanese religious landscape. This book studies Kumano not only as a site of practice, but also as a place of the imagination and a topic of literary and artistic representation.
目次
Situating Kumano -- The place and path of Kumano pilgrimage -- Institutional and economic structures -- Picturing Kumano -- Structure and agenda -- Emplacements -- The land of origins -- Sites of asceticism -- Translocated genealogies -- Multiple paradises -- Esoteric cartographies -- Institutional portraits -- Mortuary practices -- Suicide and salvation -- Funereal pilgrimage -- Return passage -- Memorial rites -- The theater of state -- The political landscape -- Imperial progress and Institutional growth -- Religious politics and Buddhist Kingship paradises future and past -- A woman's place -- Gender and the ambiguities of enlightenment -- Female trouble -- Exclusion and transgression -- Buddhist matriarchies -- A second genesis -- A hell of one's own.
