my books

My new book on Shinto, Shinto in Person: Tokyo, is now available for purchase on Amazon and Gumroad. There will be a print version available on Amazon very soon (possibly by the time you read this), but the approval process for hardcopy takes a bit longer than that for Kindle books. As the blurb says, the book is for someone who wants to visit jinja in Tokyo and learn about Shinto as they go. It does talk about the individual jinja, but it is more about broader Shinto culture, and… Read More »New Book: Shinto in Person: Tokyo

Shinto Portrayals in Manga is the latest book in the Mimusubi Essays on Shinto series. The two essays it collects were written about five years apart, and reading them over I can tell. The problem with these essays is that there are a lot of manga series written about Shinto, often with more than a dozen volumes, and every author takes a different approach. I have tried to cover a significant number of manga, and different genres of manga, but even so I am not sure just how general these… Read More »New Book: Shinto Portrayals in Manga

I have just put my latest collection of two past Patreon essays up for sale on Amazon: Myths from the Bungo & Hizen Fudoki. These two Fudoki do survive as independent works, rather than as quotations in other texts, but they look as though they have been severely edited. The remaining parts of the Bungo-no-Kuni Fudoki are remarkable for how little they say explicitly about jinja or kami, which means that there is substantially more material from the Hizen-no-Kuni Fudoki in this collection. Both of these regions are in Kyushu,… Read More »New Book: Bungo and Hizen Fudoki

Shinto Practice for Non-Japanese is now available in paperback from Amazon. There isn’t really much else to say about the book. It is still a practical introduction to practising Shinto if you are not Japanese or not in Japan, or most likely neither, and the content is the same as the electronic version, apart from some editing changes to reflect the change in medium. If you would prefer to have a physical version that you can hold in your hands, that is now a possibility. I hope that some people… Read More »Shinto Practice in Print

I have just made Myths from the Harima Fudoki available on Amazon. This is another compilation of my Patreon essays, but because there are a lot of interesting myths in this Fudoki, it is a compilation of three essays, rather than the normal two. Here is the blurb: The Harima-no-Kuni Fudoki is a gazetteer of the province of Harima, part of modern Hyōgo Prefecture, in the early eighth century. It contains a lot of myths about the kami of that region, and these myths include both kami who do appear in the… Read More »New Book: Myths from the Harima Fudoki

I have released a new book on Amazon collecting two of my Patreon essays: Shinto on Ethics and Death. These essays have been available separately on Gumroad for some time (Ethics and Death), and will remain available there. These essays cover topics that are often considered to be central to “religion”, but which are not at all central to Shinto. Indeed, for much of its history Shinto avoided having anything to do with death, and it has never been entirely clear on what, if anything, it thinks happens to you… Read More »New Book: Shinto on Ethics and Death