The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (Japan Library Classics) [Paperback]

Carmen Blacker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1999 | ISBN-10: 1873410859 | ISBN-13: 978-1873410851 | Edition: 3

This classic work describes shamanic figures surviving in Japan today, their initiatory dreams, ascetic practices, the supernatural beings with whom they communicate, and the geography of the other world in myth and legend.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'One of the absolute 'must read' books on Japanese religious practice. It is also essential reading for those interested in asceticism, shamanism and spirit possession in general.' - Ian Reader, Culture and Religion

'one suspects that the time may be not far off when it will come to be recognized as the best book on East Asian religion as a whole to emerge from Britain in the twentieth century.' - T. H. Barrett, Bulletin of SOAS

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 3 edition (September 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1873410859
• ISBN-13: 978-1873410851
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,071,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!", April 21, 2010

By 

Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (Paperback)

While it sounds like a dull thing to say, "The Catalpa Bow" really is a pivotal work in the study of Japanese religion. One of the few English-language titles to address the phenomenon of Japanese shamanism at all, it also played a vanguard role in questioning and transcending the sort of neat and tidy distinctions between "Buddhism" and "Shinto" that had rather handicapped prior scholarship on the subject--or at least unhelpfully distorted characterizations and treatments of the kind of lived religion Carmen Blacker is investigating. It is mainly for this that the book is often cited approvingly, but this stance is not so much a conclusion as a precondition opening up previously inaccessible dimensions of Japanese religiosity to our fascinated scrutiny.

As one might suspect, a strong anthropological impulse governs the general tenor of the study. Interviews with shamanistic practitioners along with first-hand (and second-hand) eyewitness accounts of rituals, ceremonies, and exorcisms are given center stage in a manner very refreshing to anyone kind of tired of academic titles that bend a poverty of content to analytical overkill. And yet the overflowing pandemonium of rich detail to be found herein is organized with a light but sure touch through an ongoing development of definitions and categories (more typical of a "history of religions" approach) so that the whole thing, rather than spinning out of control into a mélange of folkloristic footnotes, takes on comprehensible form that can actually be retained in one's memory afterwards without betraying the dispersion of geographic and historical specificity bridged thereby.

What one might not suspect is that there's a deeply elegiac undertone to this book as well. Many of these religious practices were in the process of dying out and vanishing or else ossifying into tourist spectacles even as Blacker was doing her fieldwork in the 1960's and early '70's, and, while this is one of the only books to touch upon the kind of religiosity I experienced in rural Japan in the 1990's at all, this sad and yet perhaps inevitable process has clearly continued unabated since then. Sometimes this leads the author to rely on literary works as additional evidence, which can be an iffy proposition in and of itself--and some of the passages where Blacker extrapolates what medieval Japanese shamans "must certainly" have been thinking and doing based on stray passages in Noh plays, fictional monogatari, and temple miracle tales are a bit weak as a result. On the other hand, the book would have felt incomplete if these potential sources had been passed over in silence. The same sort of goes for references to folklorists like Yanagita Kunio and Origuchi Shinobu; their contribution to theories of Japanese cultural essentialism should give one pause, but in tracking an elusive subject like Japanese shamanism can one afford to decline the data they bring to the table?

In any case, such considerations are trumped by Blacker's wonderfully narrated observations, which tilt the book towards being as much a priceless and possibly timeless classic as a pivotally significant study. The unusually extensive treatment of the Shugendo and Nichiren traditions found within these pages also render this book pretty unique in the field. And if you have a taste for the "wondrous strange" then you'll probably find the book every bit as interesting as I did.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even for the layman, a wonderful read., September 13, 2010

By 

Cardamon (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Catalpa Bow (Japan Library Classics) (Kindle Edition)

I bought this on a whim, with pretty much no pre-existing knowledge of Japanese religion except for general knowledge about Buddhism and the knowledge that Shintoism existed. Even with this background, I found this book to be fascinating and well-done. A tad hard at times, but still one of the more readable books with this amount of knowledge behind it I have ever read. It's a very, very good look at how religion and superstition actually existed in practice in pre-modern Japan. If that's the kind of thing you enjoy, you'll love it. If not, well, you won't.