The entry in the Nihon shoki covering the reign of Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–86) begins—after reciting the emperor's names, and somewhat predictably reporting that he was of majestic appearance at birth and grew into a virile and martial adult—with the surprising opening statement that he “was skilled in astronomy and the art of invisibility.” Tenmu's exceptional importance to early Japanese history is signaled by his receiving more extensive coverage in the Nihon shoki than any of the other thirty-nine monarchs chronicled in that seminal text. Tenmu may have actually been the first Japanese ruler to wield the august imperial title tennō (pp. 46, 49), and it was also roughly around his time that a loosely united Yamato kingdom was finally transformed into a more centralized country that, for the first time, began to call itself Nihon (Japan). Yet, as Herman Ooms observes in this fine new book, Tenmu is “portrayed in the historical record as a Daoist transcendental” (p. xvii).

Ooms redirects the conventional narrative focus of early Japanese history onto Emperor Tenmu and away from, for example, the legendary Taika coup of 645, which receives relatively scant mention here. Ooms also emphasizes imperial legitimatization through imported continental Daoism rather more than is commonly portrayed. In the process, Ooms does not so much explode received mythology as respectfully move past it to engage the most sophisticated recent scholarship. “Shintō,” as Ooms points out, did not really begin to be generically used as a label for supposedly “native” Japanese religion until the fourteenth century, and the two-character written word can be traced to Chinese Daoist origins (pp. 165–68). Chinese “Daoism” itself is also somewhat problematic, however, as Ooms sometimes seems to backhandedly acknowledge by favoring the vaguer label “Daoisant” instead. Tenmu's special skill, translated loosely as “the art of invisibility” (Japanese, tonkō; Chinese, dunjia), for example, is listed in the preface to the biographies of fangshi (“Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians,” as in the title of Kenneth J. DeWoskin's Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies of Fang-shih [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983]) in the Dynastic History of the Later Han simply as an “esoteric art” (fang shu).

Whether such Chinese techniques as yin-yang studies or divination should properly be described as “Daoist” or not is incidental, though. As Ooms correctly indicates, continental models did offer an array of technologies and symbols that could be tapped in a deliberate effort to enhance the Japanese imperial aura. Tenmu is associated with more supernatural symbols in the Nihon shoki than any other ruler, and both the Nihon shoki and the Kojiki depict Tenmu and his successor Jitō as making “an encyclopedic use of politically motivated Daoist, Buddhist, and kami worship symbols to reformat their personae as rulers of a new regimen” (pp. 59, 178). The ideology of a new empire was being quite consciously fabricated in these years. All available tools were seemingly drawn on. The Kojiki, for example (which was completed in 712, but began with an initiative from Tenmu in 681 to prepare a record that would serve as “a foundation for imperial rule”) invokes the expression “[All] under Heaven” ninety times without ever mentioning China—the original source of the concept (pp. 6–7, 36).

If this era was a critical period in the formation of “Japan,” Ooms reminds us that it was also a time of instability and change, marked by numerous plots, rebellions, and suspected conspiracies. The “Tenmu dynasty” of the book's title, for example, came to an end in 770 when the throne passed to a descendant of Tenmu's brother rather than of Tenmu. The “Kojiki's life span as an effective political document in ancient Japan was limited to a half century,” as its ideology of imperial legitimacy rooted in descent from kami, which had to be shared with other noble families also claiming kami descent, was displaced after 745 by a Buddhist vision that was simultaneously more universal and more exclusively monarchical (p. 85). Changes, furthermore, never stopped: between about 1200 and 1840, no Japanese ruler seems to have actually held the title tennō (pp. xvi, 269).

Minor criticisms of this book might include repeated references to the Three Kingdoms Chinese Wei dynasty as “Southern Wei,” in spite of the fact that it was geographically located in the north, and is not usually so designated. Less trivially, the details of this study seldom seem to resolve themselves into many grand conclusions. But Ooms expertly blends recent archeological discoveries with Japanese, classical Chinese, English, and other European-language scholarship into an immensely fascinating interpretation. The book is a must-read for anyone who is seriously interested in the earliest Japanese history.