is a divination ritual in Japan. The Early Middle Japanese form was ukefi, which is pronounced ukei in modern Japanese.
Generally, it was a form of cleromancy that involved asking a question of the kami and arriving at an answer through some form of sortition. The belief was that the kami would influence the outcome of the sortition in order to communicate their will.
Hayashi à Âen, a nineteenth-century practitioner of ukehi, identified six functions of the rite. He claimed it could be used to:
The dictates of ukei can come as a dream, but more commonly the petitioner would use the ritual to ask a question of the kami and then await an omen of some sort to confirm their response. If nothing happened, it was assumed that the kami did not favour the proposed course of action. The questioning of the kami took the form of an oath or vow. Sometimes the ritual involved inscribing the choices available on bamboo slips, which were then shaken in a container; whichever slip fell out dictated the appropriate course of action.
In the novel Runaway Horses, Yukio Mishima described the procedure of ukei as "contain[ing] an element of danger not unlike a footing that could give way at any moment".