Amy Stanley weaves a masterful narrative, from the prologue to the epilogue. Beautiful prose
like, "Eventually, the shapes of the characters would become as familiar as the mountains on the horizon."
This is a work of history that reads like a novel and is easily accessible for those who are not familiar with the inner workings of Edo period society in Japan.
The narrative lends
itself to explaining the particulars of the Edo period without getting too
bogged down in the technical aspects of society, culture, and daily life. Stanley's extensive historical research can
absolutely be seen in the descriptions of Buddhism, the intricacies of women's lives, and the
contemporary accounts of those who lived in the time period.
The first chapter
details the birth of Tsuneno, her family history, and provides comparisons
between her privileged life and the lives of others around the world. The reader meets her father, a True Pure Land
Buddhist who makes a very good living, but struggles with his identity and the
mark he intends to make on the world.
Others include Tsuneno's siblings
with comparisons between a boy's education in early modern Japan and a girl's
education in the same period.
The following
chapter tracks Tsuneno's story from her village in Echigo province to her
marriage and move to ōishida, and beyond.
Tsuneno's story is tempered through the lens of her siblings and their
transitions from childhood to adulthood.
Readers track her younger sister Kiyomi and the struggles she faced in
her early marriage and her brother Giyū's challenges in marriage. Stanley is careful to highlight the
individual struggles that men and women both faced at this time, though they
were different, each did share similarities.
Stanley's narrative
leads the reader through Tsuneno's life from marriage to divorce, feast to
famine, and rural to urban. She weaves a
complex and compelling tapestry depicting the struggle and strife of women with
a backdrop of the City of Edo. Tsuneno
may be the leading lady in this historical narrative, but Edo is a beautiful
supporting actor.
"Tsuneno's legacy was the great city of Edo: her ambition, her life's work. Her aspiration for a different kind of existence propelled her from home, and she might have said that the experience of Edo changed her. But she also shaped the city. Every well she waited at; every copper coin she spent."
This book is
accessible to readers from casual to academic and would be a useful tool in the
classroom. I would recommend it to
anyone who is interested in the subject matter.
Funded in part by a
grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, Stanley's research and
subsequent book effectively show the importance of not only grants supporting
the arts, but the importance of research in the early modern era.
This book releases
July 14th, 2020 from Scribner and is available for Pre-Order on Amazon and at
other fine book retailers!
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