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

I am, of course, a sucker for all things Japanese. Even so, Amy Stanley's Stranger in the Shogun's City, the biographical account of a thrice-divorced, provincial Japanese woman who leaves her snowbound village for the big city of Edo, is a particular treat. 

By all odds, Tsuneno should have remained unknown, her life and times, loves and losses relegated to the dustbin of history, the years only deepening her anonymity. She was born in 1801, the oldest daughter of a Buddhist priest in the small village of Ishigami, destined to live a life like that of all the women before her: sweeping floors, tending the brazier, comforting the parishioners of a small temple, and above all, raising a large and numerous family. This was the lot of women in Japan - and around the world, let's face it - in 1801 (and while we're facing the music, we need to acknowledge that in much of the world, it still is today). 

Tsuneno never could reconcile herself to such a life though, cycling through husbands the way other women of her era may have cycled through kimonos. Unlikely though her story is, it is surely not singular. Perhaps most unique is the level of literacy Tsuneno attained. As the daughter of a priest, and thus in preparation for being able to provide support and assistance to a future husband in the running of another temple, such literacy was deemed critical; the letters she would later exchange with her increasingly exasperated family are the fruit of that education.

Stanley is a professor of history; that she stumbled upon Tsuneno's story is a great good fortune. As she notes early, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the collection of correspondence assembled and maintained first by Tsuneno's father, Emon, and then her oldest brother, Giyu.The tax bills, the loan statements, the memoranda from samurai and planting records were no different than those of any other temple family. What set them apart were the letters. Letters to, from, and about Tsuneno. Ultimately, the entire archive, "rather than telling the orderly story of a family, would begin to tell a different story: hers." 

And what a story! Married off at 12 for the first time, by her mid-30s, Tsuneno had been married and divorced three times, all to men of her father's choosing. Desperate not to be married off yet again, she made a decision - the first independent and consequential decision of her life - to run off to Edo, even then one of the largest cities on earth. As Stanley writes, using Tsuneno's own penetrating, heartbreaking words, "When I wasn't brave, I got caught up in unpleasantness no matter what I did." (An echo from the past reminding all of us today of what happens when we aren't brave: reader, take note.) In Edo she marries again, her fourth husband, but the first of her choosing. Their life - her life - would not be easy, but for the first time, it would be her own.

Tsuneno is endearing; it is one of her letters (available online through the Niigata public archive) that first captured Stanley's imagination, and with which Stanley hooked me in her prologue: To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I'm writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-cho in Edo -- quite unexpectedly -- and I ended up in so much trouble! A confidential letter from daughter to mother detailing so much trouble? Indeed. It is Stanley, though, who brings Tsuneno - and Edo - alive.

Oh Edo! Stanley's descriptions of the Shogun's city with its bannermen and maidservants, the vendors and carpenters, Nihonbashi and Shinjuku and the kabuki theaters! The fire towers, the noodle stalls, the slap of sandals and the cicadas, the temples and their festivals and sea of umbrellas to fend off the summer rains. All of this jumps from the page; it is the Edo-Tokyo museum come to life, and if Stanley's descriptions don't make you want to march backwards in time and experience Edo for yourself, well you just never quite loved Tokyo as much as I did. 

And then Stanley does the most remarkable thing. This book, which I believed wholeheartedly to be a biography of one of the masses, and an ode to Edo before Perry's ships heralded irrevocable change, becomes instead a treatise on the role of women. In hindsight, Stanley has sprinkled the clues  throughout, as when she writes bluntly, "the only goal was to move toward a life that held some hope of change, where she wouldn't be buried alive under a dying old man, in a lonely little village." That sentence took my breath away. When I think of how suffocating life in 21st century America can sometimes be, well, I'll leave it at that.

So while she could have written an engaging biography of Tsuneno and a marvelous history of Edo, Stanley goes one step further. This book becomes a record of the contributions of the countless Tsunenos. This remarkable passage appears in the closing pages:

"...if women like her hadn't come in from the countryside, Edo wouldn't have grown. If they hadn't washed floors, sold charcoal, kept the books, done laundry, and served food, its economy could not have functioned. And if they hadn't bought theater tickets, hairpins, bolts of cloth, and bowls of noodles, the shogun's great city wouldn't have been a city at all. It would have been a dusty military outpost full of men, one of a thousand, not worth all the effort. Tsuneno's legacy was the great city of Edo: her ambition, her life's work...she might have said that the experience of Edo changed her. But she also shaped the city" (p. 236, 237).

That paragraph is a testament to work and lives of women on down through time, their contributions so seldom recorded in the way that the fates captured Tsuneno's. Stranger in the Shogun's City is a phenomenal work of Japanese history, but it is an equally important work on women's history.