i.
Three chapters
Volume 1
i.
The Tawara
In preparationii.
The Stars
In the talisman books of late Meiji and early Taishō Japan, the night sky was a working reference. Its stars had names, offices, and days of the calendar on which they came down to inspect the living — and each could be addressed with a talisman.
iii.
The Cosmos
The 1910 compendium that supplies our Dipper stars makes a larger claim at the head of one of its chapters: that every calendar people use to tell time — the sun and moon, the five planets, the twenty-eight lodges, the ten stems and twelve branches, the sixty-year cycle — derives from a single source, the pole star, differentiating itself into sixty-four "transformation stars." This chapter follows that claim through five systems, each of which counts the sky in a different number.