Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan

This examination of death rituals in early Japan finds in the practice of double burial a key to understanding the Taika Era, or the Era of Great Change (645-710 C.H.). Drawing on narratives and poems from the earliest Japanese texts – the Kojiki, a mythology, the Nihonshoki, a historical chronicle, and the Man’ yoshu, an anthology of poetry – Ebersole argues that double burial was the center of a manipulation of myth and ritual for specific ideological and factional purposes.