Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
Royal Flush
By Pico Iyer
The Commoner
by John Burnham Schwartz
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 351 pp., $24.95
The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 120 pp., $15.00
Whenever a Japanese crown prince gets married, to this day, the new groom and bride have to crawl, on their knees, into a secret enclosure in the Imperial Palace to seek the approval of the prince's official ancestor, the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The Emperor and Empress are, by tradition, not allowed to watch the rites in person—they have to content themselves with following the action outside the shrine on TV. After the new bride bears children, she will not, if she is a commoner, be permitted to introduce them to their nonimperial grandparents. And when the prince accedes to the throne, he retreats to the same place to lie down for a night with his mythic forebear, in what sounds like a somewhat incestuous, as well as cross-species, alliance.
Review, 3752 words
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