R. Keller Kimbrough

Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative by Alison McQueen Tokita (review)

more time to evaluating—and perhaps even quoting—primary sources and less space to quoting learned authorities. More bothersome is Stockdale’s tendency to relegate useful information to his notes. Unfortunately, they are not footnotes but rather endnotes, and so I found myself constantly fl ipping back and forth between the text and the notes. Readers of the book should be warned that, in addition to learning about Heian Japan, they will learn who wrote what about the subject, but they will miss important details if they fail to look at the notes. That said, anyone with a serious interest in the period would be well advised to read this book.

Preaching from Pictures

David Plath’s Preaching from Pictures is an exploration of the colorful and frightening world of the 17th-century Kumano kanjin jikkai mandara (Kumano Mind Contemplation Ten Worlds Mandala), a vast, vivid, and often ghastly painted representation of the 10 worlds of enlightened and unenlightened existence, including the six karmic realms of heaven, humans, ashura (a world of never-ending battle), animals, hungry ghosts, and hell. The paintings were mass-produced in the 17th and 18th centuries for use in Buddhist preaching by itinerant, fund-raising ‘‘Kumano nuns,’’ who would unfurl them at bridges, festivals, temples, and shrines and use them as a basis to preach. Plath’s DVD comprises two central parts: a 37-minute documentary exposition of the Ten Worlds Mandala, focusing on the artwork’s specific contents and its historical, cultural, and religious contexts; and approximately 80 minutes of ‘‘interviews’’—staged conversations between specialists in the fields of Japanese history and religion, on a variety of topics relevant to the Ten Worlds Mandala, as well as a reading by Kazuko Goodman of a fictional Kumano nun’s picturebased sermon from a 17th-century puppet play. Additional features of the DVD include a glossary of terms, an image gallery conveniently hyperlinked to particular sections of the interviews, and a bibliography of related websites and secondary textual sources, both in English and in Japanese. The DVD is a wonderful addition to the existing body of pedagogical resources on premodern Japanese art, history, and religion, and is highly suited for use in the undergraduate and secondary-school classroom. According to a blurb on the back of the DVD case, ‘‘Preaching from Pictures is based on a film created by the National Museum of Japanese History,’’ a video program by the name of Jikkai Mandala, according to the concluding credits of the DVD. In creating the 37-minute documentary, Plath appears to have excerpted scenes of the Ten Worlds Mandala from the museum video, added an English voice-over, and interspersed them with images of a 17th-century screen painting of Edo street scenes (the six-panel Edozu by obu) in the collection of the National Museum of Japanese History in Chiba Prefecture. The historian Ronald Toby frequently narrates in front of the Edo screen painting, as a means of providing historical background. Unfortunately, the adaptation of the Japanese video to the English-language documentary resulted in a number of infelicities, the most obvious of which is the occasionally low resolution of Visual Anthropology, 21: 276–277, 2008 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460801986335