Japan Review 27 (2014) 27 (2014) 259 is book is the first academic monograph on sacred space in the capital city of Tokyo, based on the author’s on-the-ground observations in the neighbourhoods of Yamanote and Asakusa. Steven Heine, a well established researcher in the field of Japanese religions, has devoted most of his long scholarly career to Zen Buddhism. Here, however, he turns his attention to sacred space in the Japanese capital postulating an “objective and neutral yet subjectively engaged standpoint,” free of the shortcomings of previous approaches to religion like exceptionalism, cultural relativism, postmodernism and the “discourses of lost Japan” (pp. 24–27). By bringing attention to urban sacred space clusters, Heine’s case study of Tokyo aligns with a recent trend in sacred space analysis that tackles urban sacred space and ritual in context, focusing on networks of religious sites and the community’s engagement with them, like Kawano Satsuki’s monograph on Kamakura (2005) or Elisabetta Porcu’s study of Kyoto (2012). Heine’s main contribution is the reassessment of some of the so-called “contradictions” or “conundrums” of contemporary Japanese religiosity. He questions the use of quantitative data on which these are often based, and instead proposes a more nuanced approach based on on-the-ground observation and qualitative analysis at both a macro and micro level. The first part of the book tackles the secular-sacred polarity. Chapter 1 offers a cross- cultural comparative perspective, comparing Tokyo to U.S. cities, while Chapter 2 justifies the choice of Tokyo by stressing that it is the epitome of the pervasiveness of sacred space religious practice in modern secularized life, its shrines and temples being integrated in people’s ordinary life and interconnected as clusters. In the second part of the book, Heine discusses Japanese religiosity’s “structure” and “motivation,” to prove that “there are more important elements for understanding religious structure than focusing on division (or union) of Buddhism and Shinto and for understanding motivation than emphasizing the role of pragmatism in a world of vanishing tradition” (p. 23). The author dedicates a chapter to each of these two aspects of Japanese religiosity for the sake of analysis, although he insists that they are connected, affirming that “in Japan, a seamless web of interactions encompasses the practicality and impracticality of the continuum of living and dying” (p. 178). Chapter 3 stresses the important role of “living Inari”—which Heine identifies here as just one of many popular deities chosen here to represent “folk religion”—as the underlying Sacred High City, Sacred Low City: A Tale of Religious Sites in Two Tokyo Neighbourhoods Steven Heine Oxford University Press, 2011 220 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-538620-2 (hardcover); 978-0-19-986144-6 (paperback) BOOK REVIEW