RaveThe Financial Times (UK)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 ... Stanley has constructed the biography of a rebellious woman whose life feels entwined with gathering forces of change in the era ... Where there are gaps, Stanley has supplemented the narrative with rigorous research and expert supposition. There is repeated reference to what individuals \'might\' have observed, yet there is never a sense that these hypotheticals are a stretch ... Few western writers have managed to capture the DNA strands from this fabulously colourful moment of Tokyo’s past and weave them so adroitly into narrative.
