Through Tsuneno, a woman with no remarkable talents or aspirations, Stanley conjures a teeming world ... Tsuneno’s restlessness and bad luck make her a rewarding subject ... Stanley’s primary materials are letters from Tsuneno and her relatives, which are delightfully frank ... The couple squabble, divorce, and remarry, and Tsuneno’s fortunes continue their erratic, fascinating fall and rise and fall ... a lost place appears to the reader as if alive and intact.
'Historians', wrote Simon Schama, 'are painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation,' but Amy Stanley succeeds as well as anyone could hope in her masterfully told and painstakingly researched evocation of an ordinary Japanese woman’s life in Edo on the eve of the opening of Japan ... This is very much the portrait of a woman. Stanley deals with the disappointments and tragedies of Tsuneno’s life with a delicate touch that channels the understanding of a daughter, a sister, a mother ... Having laid out the psychological and familial framework for her story, Stanley then weaves through the narrative threads from the rich trove of memoirs, annals and artefacts that the boisterous Edo period left behind. From this we hear the sounds of the samurai tramping through the city, smell the eels grilling in tiny food stands, see the colour of posters for Kabuki performances ... Stranger in the Shogun’s City is the most evocative book this review has read about Japan since The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris.
... absorbing ... a compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy ... Ms. Stanley draws a richly textured picture of Tsuneno’s world and is especially attuned to quotidian routines, particularly for women ... previously brief flashes of Tsuneno’s willful personality spark into a blaze.
... [an] enthralling portrait of an intrepid 19th-century Japanese woman and the city she loved. 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. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is as close to a novel as responsible history can be ... 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.
At the heart of Stanley’s book is the extraordinary and terrible story of Tsuneno, whose life went against the grain not only of what was expected of women in her day but also of what we assume life was like for women at that time ... This book is clearly intended to appeal not to specialists but to as wide a readership as possible ... detailed documentation ... 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 ... Tsuneno’s story takes us into virtually every corner of this remarkable society on the brink of change...plunges us alongside her right inside Japanese society, taking us into the very different worlds she brushed up against, making us smell the smells and experience the details.
... a 19th-century Japanese woman whose brief existence comes vividly to life amid cataclysmic global changes ... Carefully archived and catalogued along with the bulk of her family’s correspondence, Tsuneno’s letters, lists and expense diaries remain as small but important pieces of a mosaic that Stanley has elegantly and expertly reassembled into a life. In fact, the first thing one notices about Stranger in the Shotgun's City is that it often reads like a novel or biography, but every turn of phrase remains steadfastly true to historical fact. Nearly 90 pages of notes, bibliography and indexing attest to Stanley’s diligent and painstaking research ... measured and empathic prose.
The great achievement of this revelatory book is to demolish any assumption on the part of English language readers that pre-modern Japan was all blossom, tea ceremonies and mysterious half-smiles. Instead, by working through the rich archive of letters and diaries left by Tsuneno and her family, Stanley reveals a culture that is remarkably reminiscent of Victorian England, which is to say deeply expressive once you’ve cracked the codes ... Stanley works hard throughout this compelling book to make Tsuneno into a feminist heroine, a brilliant girl born ahead of her time who 'always claimed what was hers'. But on the evidence provided here, it really wasn’t like this. 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. It is her ordinariness, and her multiple failures at not getting what she wanted, that make her story so deeply absorbing.
... [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 ... Stanley successfully uses Tsuneno’s unusually eventful life as a window onto a joltingly unfamiliar view of the city ... Tsuneno’s personality shines through...with remarkably clarity ... The political urgency of #MeToo-era feminism thrums through the text like a theremin ... Similarly, her emphasis on the gendered economy of child-raising feels particularly necessary at this current moment ... even if the Edoite mentality may never be entirely knowable...[Stanley] get[s] us remarkably close.
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.
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.
Stranger in the Shogun's City, a story of Tsuneno, a woman who defied convention to forge her own path through life in nineteenth century Japan, is penned with the precision and dexterity of a Japanese calligrapher; the result is engaging, impactful and insightful ... The stage is set, with the background neatly laid out in a manner that remains consistent throughout the book: historical context is provided succinctly, each scene is illuminated adroitly, the language never superfluous ... Stanley steps back, allowing Tsuneno to take centre stage. However, in parts she acts as a narrator - there are gaps in the story that require informed supposition. But this is clear; we know when the plot diverts from its evidence-based trajectory. We have faith in the knowledge of the narrator – she, more than most, would know ... The book is classified as historical biography, but it does not read like a work of non-fiction. From the childhood home adjoining the temple in the remote provinces, to the dingy tenements of Edo where she later resides, we travel with Tsuneno, share her experiences; the sights, sounds and smells are all rendered familiar.
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 ... Vividly recounted in letters are her struggles to find her way and make peace with her family. While she was there, Edo was transformed from the glamorous metropolis the village girl had dreamed of to a city besieged by stringent moral reforms. Even as the reforms lifted, underlying issues remained, and a short time after Tsuneno’s death, her city fell to an uprising, to be reborn as Tokyo. This is an eye-opening account of an extraordinary ordinary life.
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 ... Stanley fills in the blanks of Tsuneno’s letters and diary entries with well-informed speculation about her daily life and atmospheric descriptions of corrupt and sophisticated Edo during the Tokugawa shogunate. Japanophiles and readers of women’s history will be entranced.
Historian Stanley brings a deep knowledge of Japanese culture to a vibrant portrait of the Asian nation centered on the struggles of one defiant woman ... Stanley creates a palpable sense of the Japanese capital: a teeming, highly stratified city where newcomers faced poverty and discrimination, migrants lived in hovels, and the only jobs available to Tsuneno—if she was lucky—were in service to a shogun or samurai. Despite hunger, cold, illness, and betrayal, she persisted, determined to achieve the independence she desperately desired ... An absorbing history of a vanished world.
