Book reviews ,

摘要

Boret's book offers a clear and well-documented account of 'tree burial', defined as 'concealing a corpse inside a tree or beneath its roots' (p. 4), a practice which has emerged in Japan over the last sixteen years. The author's core argument is that, while there has been a decline in ancestor worship in Japan since the 1970s, new forms of burial and ancestor worship such as tree burial are not so much a rejection of Japanese ancestral rites and tradition as a symptom of the desire to liberalize and innovate what the author calls 'ways of death' in Japan today. In particular, tree burial provides the Japanese with an ecologically sustainable alternative to cremation and grave burial, as well as a way to avoid the exorbitant expenses associated with funeral practices in Japan today (e.g. the author quotes a figure of no less than ￡70,000 as the average price for a typical grave in Tokyo as of 2010).