Stranger in the Shogun's City by Amy Stanley (Scribner)

“I wanted to go to Edo, but you wouldn’t let me go.” These words echo from the early 1800s, written by a woman who became the scandal of her rural, religious family. 

Tsuneno was born in snow country, where ten-foot measuring poles were buried by blizzards, temperatures remained at freezing “from equinox to equinox,” and gigantic icicles grew inside people’s homes.  The daughter of a village priest, she was taught to read and write, with the understanding that she would become a wife who could write letters, read poetry, and keep household accounts. The interminable winters sent her to read manuals of good conduct for women but what Tsuneno gleaned from them was the knowledge of another life in the metropolis of Edo, a two-week journey from her home.

Married when she was twelve, Tsuneno was divorced by the time she was twenty-eight. Her family rushed her into another marriage which lasted only four years. A third marriage was over in three months, due to “her selfish behavior,” her older brother wrote. Tsuneno was now a thirty-eight-year-old triple-divorcee, and although divorce carried no stigma in 19th-century Japan, she was apparently barren and definitely shopworn. Her prospects were dismal and she made up her mind. She would break tradition by running  off to Edo and making a life for herself far from home.

A neighbor promised to guide her over the mountains to her destination and to finance her journey, Tsuneno sold clothes from her many trousseaus and pawned more utilitarian garments. These were garments that she had made herself, carefully, from fabric that only the more fortunate were able to procure. Good clothing was a mark of social status and she was selling hers. She would be haunted by that decision for much of her life.

Tsuneno was forced into a pragmatic liaison with her guide, a man with relatives in Edo who would give them a place to live and help them find their footing in the capital. This lasted about as long as the money she had brought with her and soon Tsuneno was on her own, with only the clothes she had worn during her escape. But she was a survivor, with little regard for social class. Taking a job as a maid in a samurai’s household, she began the life she’d always wanted in a city filled with vitality and culture. 

She arrived during a time of turbulence and hunger. Edo was flooded with refugees from the countryside, fleeing starvation, looking for work. That Tsuneno survived on her own is an amazing feat, one that she chronicled in letters to her family, long streams of letters to people who had all but disowned her.

Family records in Japan at that time were preserved for future generations. Tsuneno’s father had over a hundred years worth of paper, documents that detailed every minute transaction of his ancestors, every letter that had ever been sent. His son carried on this tradition, keeping even the letters of the sister who had brought shame to her family. She wrote to him up until the year of her death at the age of forty-nine, the year that Commodore Perry arrived in Edo and the city became Tokyo.

Historian Nancy Stanley was online reading the public archives from a city near the place where Tsuneno’s family had lived for centuries. One of the archivists had discovered the letters of a woman who had written an epistolary history of herself and the city she had made her own and Stanley was hooked as she read Tsuneno’s words to her mother. “I went to...Edo--quite unexpectedly--and I ended up in so much trouble!” But even while enduring this “trouble,” Tsuneno left a legacy, a picture of Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Perry changed it forever. 

If there’s one cavil to be had with Stranger in the Shogun’s City, it’s the regret that Tsuneno’s own words don’t tell her story. Even so, her vibrant, adventurous spirit pervades this history, while Stanley gives a detailed, lively view both of Tsuneno’s unchronicled early life and of the city this headstrong woman loved.~Janet Brown