Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism

(forthcoming with the University of Hawai'i Press, May 2026)

From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, Japanese aristocrats attributed their afflictions to vengeful spirits of the deceased. But in the late twelfth century, a new and anomalous ailment, caused not by spirits but the material dead, crept into their consciousness. “Corpse-vector disease,” as it was called, emerged as a new form of “postmortem contagion”—diseases tethered to death that reanimated in pathogenic forms such as ghosts, noxious qi, corpse-worms, and disease-causing demons. In response, Tendai Buddhist monks of the Jimon branch at Onjōji temple engaged creatively with esoteric rites, medical texts, and Daoist scriptures to craft a healing ritual for their patients. Cadaverous is the first book-length work to examine this ritual and its extant manuscripts. Bridging religious studies and medical history, it analyzes Buddhist ritual healing in Japan through the lens of “ritual immunity”—the complex, experimental processes through which monks identified disease agents, demarcated boundaries between self and pathogen, and designed therapeutic interventions.

By exploring the social, moral, material, and ritual dynamics that shaped new disease concepts, Cadaverous reveals how corpse-vector disease reflected growing anxieties surrounding death and pollution in a capital increasingly crowded with corpses. The book offers an unprecedented tour of the therapeutic and ritual culture of early medieval Japan, illuminating how that culture was haunted by darker preoccupations with disease, death, and defilement.

Bubbles in the Trichiliocosm: Aromatics and Buddhist Air Conditioning in Premodern Japan

My second project explores how Buddhists in premodern Japan used aromatics from distant regions throughout the world to reimagine the Japanese archipelago as a sacred land within Buddhist cosmology. In the wake of Bertold Laufer, Edward Schafer, and Yamada Kentarō, scholars have long seen aromatics primarily as valuable items of trade in the maritime and continental exchange routes that stretched throughout Eurasia. Much less has been said of their centrality in myth and ritual. In this project, I examine how Buddhists incorporated aromatics into their stories and ceremonies to show how these materials supported local religious efforts to put Japan on the Buddhist map. I argue that aromatics enabled Japanese Buddhists to take their senses — especially their noses, ideally purified through ritual repentance — as entry points for participating in a Buddhist world of local, global, and cosmic scales.

An early essay from this project was published as “Kōyaku no yoi—Heian kōki no bukkyō-kei honzōsho wo chūshin ni” 香薬の酔い─平安後期の仏教系本草書を中心に [The Intoxication of Aromatics—A Study of Late-Heian Buddhist Materia Medica]. In Itō Nobuhiro, ed. Yoi no bunkashi: girei kara yamai made 酔いの文化史─儀礼から病まで [A Cultural History of Intoxication: From Ritual to Illness]. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2020: 72–92. (In Japanese)