When death falls apart: Making and unmaking the necromaterial traditions of contemporary Japan By HannahGould, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2023. 168 pp.

Japan is widely recognized as a secular society where, for most people, questions of religious affiliation or faith are insignificant to daily living.Yet ghosts of the historical past and "hungry ghosts" who have not received care from descendants linger on the fringe of awareness, ideas brought to consciousness at the serious illness or death of a family member.In the recent past, most Japanese responded to the death of a family member through Buddhist services and through ongoing home rites offering flowers, rice, water, or favorite foods and drinks to the departed, supporting them on their path to becoming buddhas.Visits with the dead at a home alter (butsudan) included reciting Buddhist sutras, reports of family or neighborhood news, and personal prayers, providing spiritual care for the deceased.In exchange, the ancestral spirits, thus sustained were expected to bring good fortune to the family, looking out for their descendants from their otherworldly existence.This relationship carried across generations but with increasing depersonalization of the deceased through the years.Living humans do not want the spirits of the dead ignored, becoming troublesome or malevolent "hungry ghosts," but neither do they want them too close for too long.This system was household-based, and care for the ancestors of the household ideally continued through the generations, even when most people claimed no religious faith and were not convinced that their actions had any efficacy in a spirit world they did doubted exists.Hannah Gould asks us to consider what happens when this system "falls apart," when a way of dealing with death dies.Many scholars of Japanese society and religion observe a stark decline in lay Buddhist observances in Japan in abandoned family graves and a weakening market for butsudan home altars, many scholars of Japan observe a stark decline in lay Buddhist observance in Japan, and assume that people no longer care about family and reject the burden of sustaining the deceased.This change is traced to changing demographics (longer lives, fewer children), increased urbanization (small apartment living), geographic mobility (living far from ancestral graves), and a widening socioeconomic gap between those with resources to purchase extravagant necrogoods and those who cannot afford the increasingly high prices of graves and butsudan.But Gould suggests that such analyses, while not incorrect, are too facile.She brings material culture studies of the lifecourse of things and ethnographic methodology to bear in a reconsideration of whether the things connected to death die when no longer utilized, or merely fall apart, continuing an existence, much as the dead are never totally gone.Necromaterials are not disposed of with the household trash even if they have been ritually de-sanctified.