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Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
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About This Book
A work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo—the city that would become Tokyo—and a portrait of a great city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West.The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother's. But after three divorces, she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo. In the book we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry's fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno's life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture—and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions.
Reviews
"Stanley successfully uses Tsuneno's unusually eventful life as a window onto a joltingly unfamiliar view of the city ..."
"Essential for anyone interested in 19th-century Japanese history, and a great companion piece to Anna Sherman's The Bells of Old Tokyo, which compares modern day Tokyo with historic Edo."
"Tsuneno is interesting and admirable precisely because she was of her time and had to make the best of the hand she had been dealt."
"a compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy ..."
"Tsuneno's restlessness and bad luck make her a rewarding subject ..."
"Despite hunger, cold, illness, and betrayal, she persisted, determined to achieve the independence she desperately desired ..."
"This is an eye-opening account of an extraordinary ordinary life."
"Stanley, a professor of history at Northwestern University, renders the world of that rebellious woman, Tsuneno, so vividly that I had trouble pulling myself back into the present whenever I put the book down."
"Nearly 90 pages of notes, bibliography and indexing attest to Stanley's diligent and painstaking research ..."
"Northwestern University history professor Stanley debuts with an evocative and deeply researched portrait of 19th-century Japan through the events of one woman's life in the decades before Commodore Perry's 1853 arrival and the opening of the country to the West ..."
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