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

by Amy Stanley

🏆 Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best biography

✩ Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by historian Amy Stanley opens at the turn of the 19th century, and tries to bring to life the world of a woman called Tsuneno, the daughter of a Buddhist priest who ends up working in Edo (modern Tokyo) and marrying a Samurai (unhappily). The writing is beautiful and evocative and it is rather wonderful to have early modern Japan recreated by a historian using novelistic techniques.

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“Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan’s transformation is taking root. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant.” Read more...

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