The Mother’s Land and Other Essays

Where do gods come from, and what happens when a soul loses its body? Orikuchi Shinobu follows these questions through imagined countries beyond the sea, resurrection legends, mountain villages, and the ritual origins of flags. His searching arguments move between close textual reading and the remembered practices of ordinary communities.

These six complete works, first published between 1909 and 1929, include two studies of Oguri and Terute, an account of visiting mountain gods, and an essay tracing offering bundles into military banners. A compact research outline preserves the author’s questions and branching connections rather than turning them into a finished argument. A lively early review of Breaking the Seal provides a different view of performance, attentive to actors’ gestures, dialect, and timing.

A poet and scholar of folklore, Orikuchi proposes bold connections between language, belief, and narrative. This new English translation preserves his conjectures and uncertainties, the original sections, poetic lines, subtitles, and diagrams. Notes explain names, ritual terms, historical attitudes, and damaged readings in the supplied Japanese text. AI-assisted translation.