Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World

"You have that just right: Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan ’s transformation is taking root. Tsuneno attends school, learns to sew and dreams of the big city. At age 12, she is married off and dispatched to an even more remote province. Three failed marriages later, she literally walks for weeks on a horrific journey to reach Edo where, impoverished and degraded, she proves to be a skilful survivor, finding a form of independence to which she clings, even after she marries a louche of a samurai . She dies in 1853, just before Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan. She was remarkably resilient and tenacious, but Tsuneno was also rebellious, troublesome and not entirely likeable. And her death brought me to tears. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant. Tsuneno emerges as a sort of everywoman who transcends time and is more than a vessel to represent Edo’s transformation into Tokyo and Japan’s path to power. “It’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city” Stanley, an historian of early and modern Japan, happened to find a letter from Tsuneno hidden in an archive online which led her to Japan and the discovery of a rich archive of letters written by Tsuneno which had been saved by her family, along with a trove of documents. Stanley is quite understated about this dedication and accomplishment. As she explains in the book, she reads and speaks Japanese, but the brushstrokes of 200 years ago posed quite a challenge. Stanley photographed everything from the archive, and painstakingly translated it all to create a narrative of Tsuneno’s life through her very detailed and personal letters. Stanley has recovered a lost world. Drawing on her knowledge of the history, Stanley contextualizes the letters, which enhances their power. So, it’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city and its evolving culture. This biography is such a sharp reminder of the importance of archives. I fear that we will soon face a future in which we will have to rely on redacted government documents. The victors will dominate the narrative, and the stories of the powerless will vanish unless we work to preserve them. With email replacing letters and so much news disappearing online, we need a coordinated effort to create new archives, especially for those who may not have reached a moment of fame, or infamy. I try not to look at the publishing history of books as they come up for awards and, instead, focus on the book itself. So I don’t know the particulars here, but kudos to Scribner on this one. My sense, though, is that there’s increasing enthusiasm to recover forgotten, overlooked figures and histories and that Stanley’s book could find a wide audience. While we—the NBCC—consider Stranger in the Shogun’s City a biography, if I were pitching this book I could see it as work of history or narrative nonfiction , a book to assign in East Asian history classes, or those involving gender and women. From the publishing perspective, there have been bestselling novels like Shogun by James Clavell and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden that were made into films. And, of course, I would like that the universal quality in Stranger in the Shogun’s City would have publishers clamoring."