Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society . By Sharon Kinsella. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. $39.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

temple, temple halls rented out to gamblers, monks found by the dozens in brothels (p. 73), and prostitutes plying their trade within the temple precincts. On twenty official occasions the Yoshiwara professionals "conducted their business in rent-houses in the Sensoji precincts and districts," a situation, however, that "was not uncommon . . . at any time during the late Tokugawa period" (p. 138). Nevertheless, Hur claims to show "that understanding the SensSji culture of prayer and play debunks the myth of 'degenerate Buddhism'" (p. 29). This understanding comes down to declaring that the Sensoji cultural formula was simultaneously unusual and uniquely late Tokugawa, and typical of Japan. Thus Hur waffles between historicist explanations and essentialist declamations. This "union" was "a natural, perhaps even an inevitable one" (p. 28), which explains that "the inherent fabric of Japanese religious culture resisted the forcible separation" of the "combination" which "throughout Japanese religious history . . . was never perceived to be self-contradictory," but also that it was "a natural development within late Tokugawa urban Buddhism" while being nothing less than a "fundamental structure of Japanese Buddhist culture" (pp. 76, 77). The closest Hur comes, however, to "naturalizing" the Sensoji phenomenon is when he discusses (in the "Social Geography" section of chapter 2) the liminal character of the area where it was located as a composite of eschatology and paradise (my metaphors). Close by were the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, the Ek5-in (the destined temple for 100,000 victims of the 1657 Meireki fire and criminals executed on the Kotsukappara grounds next door), and Edo's kabuki theaters. Hur might have added to these sites the Jokan-ji, funeral temple for 25,000 Yoshiwara prostitutes (average age: twenty-two) and Danzaemon's eta compound. Many also came to die in the streets around Sensoji itself to be close to its famous Asakusa Kannon, even though the temple itself was not in the funeral business. A map of this liminal corner of Edo might have best convinced the reader that indeed Asakusa was a very "natural" or obvious place in Edo for something like Sensoji culture to grow. The ambivalent historical explanation of this study cries out for clarification by a full comparison with other phases of Buddhist institutional history (Japanese or not), with the culture of pilgrim sites (from European medieval history, perhaps), and in general for an open engagement with theories of play (beyond the few casual references to them). As a social and economic study of the Sensoji cultural enterprise, however, this study constitutes a very rich supplement to Nishiyama Matsunosuke's Edo Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997).