IF THE DEVIL resides in the details, then Sarah Thal's account of the historical evolution of a popular pilgrimage site on the northern coast of the Japanese island of Shikoku is to be applauded for telling us a great deal about Japan's early modern era, not just about how Buddhism and Shintō functioned on the island but about the interplay between political, economic, and religious forces across the nation. Most of the themes that she traces will be at least vaguely familiar to students of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, but the way in which she explains them is likely to give readers reason to rethink, or at least to reorganize, their interpretations of modern Japan's religious and political life.

At its most basic, Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods traces the vicissitudes of the religious institutions on Zōzu, a holy mountain near the Inland Sea occupied by a miracle-working god variously named Khumbīra, Konpira, and Kotohira. Drawing on a rich array of journals, donor lists, temple records, advertisements, and scholarly treatises, Thal shows the dramatic changes the mountain's key temple/shrine underwent in order to remain vital even when the nation's political and economic environment made survival difficult.

Although this study makes ample use of the theoretical language of contemporary scholarship, though it refers constantly to sites, landscapes, commodified culture, and combinatory institutions, it is at heart a fairly traditional piece of scholarship, which examines a single institution's history to illuminate the country as a whole. In the work's telling, temples and priests typically react to rulers and powerful businesses rather than the reverse. Elites appear in sharp focus or as individuals, while commoners show up as ill-defined groups. Thal imposes a precise chronology on the narrative, even when the material resists neat division. And the story she tells is almost exclusively of the male world, devoid either of women as actors (except in the brothels outside the holy precincts) or of comment on the absence of women in the temples or shrines.