Volume 43, Number 10 · June 6, 1996
Japan: In the Spirit World
By Ian Buruma
The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths
by Ian Littlewood
Secker & Warburg, 238 pp., £9.99
A Zen Romance: One Woman's Adventures in a Monastery
by Deborah Boliver Boehm
Kodansha, 258 pp., $25.00
A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine
by John K. Nelson
University of Washington Press, 286 pp., $17.50 (paper)
'Zen Buddhism,' declared Time magazine in 1958, 'is growing more chic by the minute.' This was then, of course: the era of Kerouac, Snyder, Watts, and the Dharma Bums. These days most people go to Japan for other reasons: money, fashion, architecture, sex. I'm not sure when the promise of spiritual enlightenment first attracted foreigners to Japan. Long before the Beats in any case. Lafcadio Hearn visited a Buddhist temple in Yokohama in 1890. It was his first day in Japan, and he started off on the wrong foot. He mistook a bowl of water, offered for his refreshment by a hospitable priest, for a begging bowl, and dropped a few coins in it—one of many cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Review, 4655 words
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