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A collection of travel sketches and essays portraying Japan's sacred sites, rituals, artistic crafts, seasonal landscapes, and domestic customs. The author moves among Buddhist and Shinto shrines, mausoleums, and village altars, describing temple architecture, ceremonies, and the atmosphere of pilgrimage; travels around a famous volcanic peak and coastal bays; and observes crafts such as cloisonné and flower arranging. Interwoven are portraits of festivals, theatrical performance, and private moments that reveal popular beliefs, everyday piety, and aesthetic sensibilities, with lyrical scene-setting and reflective passages about continuity, impermanence, and the visual arts.
“Shakspeare would have us know that there is no devotion to truth, to justice, to charity, more intense and real than that of the man who is faithful to them out of the sheer spirit of loyalty, unstimulated and unsupported by any faith which can be called theological.”
Dowden, “Shakspeare, his Mind and Art.”