Alternate Currents: Reiki's Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific

By Mikao Usui

The first genuinely academic history of Reiki, and the book that resets the field. Stein follows the practice from obscure Japanese therapy to global phenomenon through Hawayo Takata, the Japanese American woman who carried it across the Pacific, working from archives and oral histories rather than lineage folklore. Essential if you want to know what can actually be evidenced about Usui and what cannot.