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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
"a compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy ..."
"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."
"But on the evidence provided here, it really wasn't like this."
"Stanley brings all this vividly to life—clothing, laundry, the pecking order, right down to salaries and prices and precisely what people of different incomes could and couldn't afford ..."
"a 19th-century Japanese woman whose brief existence comes vividly to life amid cataclysmic global changes ..."
"Tsuneno belongs to a vanished world, but historian Stanley brings both her and the Japanese city of Edo back to life in this breathtaking work ..."
"Amy Stanley's book — a stunning work of academic persistence, reconstruction and luck — weaves the hard-won details of Tsuneno's life into the final years of the Edo period, brilliantly highlighting the clues that both Japan, and the city that would become Tokyo, were on the brink of change ..."
"[The book does] a fine job of introducing this wealth of historical material to the general reader...orientating even the first-time traveler to one of the great cities of the early modern world ..."
"The couple squabble, divorce, and remarry, and Tsuneno's fortunes continue their erratic, fascinating fall and rise and fall ..."
"what makes the book so captivating are not merely Tsuneno's stubborn attempts at self-determination, but also Stanley's enviable ability to make us feel as if we lived in 19th-century Edo with her."
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