SOURCE: Fessler, Susanna. “The Nature of the Kami: Ueda Akinari and Tandai Shoshin Roku.” Monumenta Nipponica 51, no. 1 (spring 1996): 1-15.

In the following excerpt, Fessler explains Akinari's philosophy on the nature of deities.

Ueda Akinari, renowned for his fiction writing, was also a serious scholar of kokugaku, or National Learning. Of particular concern for him was the nature of the kami—their ethics (if any) and how those ethics reflected the cognitive nature of the beings themselves. In an age when the nature of the kami was being discussed by a number of kokugaku scholars, including the great Motoori Norinaga, 1730-1801, Akinari was but one voice in a crowd, yet his ideas on this issue differ distinctly from those of his peers. He agreed with them that Confucian and Buddhist scholars were wrong to impose their philosophical ethical framework upon the realm of the kami, for, he declared, the...