It is significant that in a country where nature has long been transfused with the numinous, that Japan's most iconic image is neither a building nor a monument, but a mountain — Fuji-san.
The physicality of the peak is undeniable, but the true monumentality of Fuji lies in its symbolism. What the mountain stands for, as the author explains in this erudite but eminently readable book, is nothing less than the nation itself.
My first encounter with Fuji was in one of its countless representational forms in the precincts of a small shrine in the Tokyo district of Negishi, where ropes surrounded a mound of rocks covered in moss and lichen. Built of lava carried from the mother mountain, miniature Fuji replicas, known as fujizuka, were common in Edo, standing in as substitutes for people who, through infirmity or lack of funds, could not make the pilgrimage to the real mountain.