Stranger in the Shogun’s City
One of the major challenges historians face when writing about the lives of non-elite women of the past is the absence of sources. Sources written by men that describe their lives are rare. Those written by the women themselves are rarer yet.
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by historian Amy Stanley, demonstrates how rich history can be when such sources are available.
The project began when Stanley became fascinated with a family archive that included dozens of letters written in early nineteenth century Japan.by a rebellious woman named Tsuneno and the letters (and legal documents) created by her family in response. Together, these letters created a rare picture of the life an unconventional, non-elite woman, written in her own words.
Born in 1804 in a rural village, Tsuneno was the daughter of a Buddhist priest. She tried to settle into the traditional (and relatively privileged) life that her family expected of her, but it didn’t take. After three divorces and faced with another arranged marriage, she ran away to Edo (now Tokyo), then one of the largest cities of the world. Her life in Edo was always hard and often scandalous by the standards of her family and society. She made horrible decisions. She moved from tenement to tenement, took menial jobs that didn’t pay enough to support her, and married, divorced, and re-married a violent man from her home region. Her life can be summed up in a single line from one of her letters: “I ended up in so much trouble.”
Stanley places Tsuneno firmly in her historical context, creating a multi-layered picture of life in Japan in the decades before it was forcibly “opened” to the West by Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a vivid and often lyrical portrait not only of Tsuneno, but of Edo, the city she loved.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Gone Fishing
I’m up to my knees in the rushing waters of history right now. Once I climb out, dry off, and have a reviving shot of whiskey or three, I’ll be back in here in the Margins with new stories. I promise.
Leave the light on for me.
Fighting Words
(This cover is much more impressive in real life.)
Books about foreign correspondents in the first half of the twentieth century are popular at the moment, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.* I am happily reading them as part of my deep background reading for the current book. (It’s nice to have a reason to choose one book from the ever-growing to-be-read stacks over another.)
In Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars, historian Nancy Cott follows the career of four American journalists—John Gunther, Rayna Raphaelson, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson—who built careers for themselves as foreign correspondents in the years between the two world wars. Cott looks at her journalists as part of the stream of young Americans who poured to Europe after World War I, with little knowledge of its politics, or even its languages. In the process, she gives us a larger, richer vision of the “Lost Generation”.
Her journalists—like all the Lost Generation expats—spent time in Paris, but they were more itinerant than the writers we generally associate with that label. They traveled through China and Russia as well as more accessible European capitals, and were driven in part by the desire to understand the cultures in which they found themselves. They wanted to help their readers back home understand those cultures as well.
They may have started as innocents abroad, but they didn’t stay innocent. In their writing they moved beyond reporting the news to struggling with the big issues of the day. By the early 1930s, Gunther, Sheean, and Thompson were actively engaged in warning Americans about the dangers of fascism, in Europe and at home.**
Fighting Words is a bigger book than the story of four fascinating figures and the way their lives intertwined. It is at heart the story of the birth of modern journalism.
Good stuff.
*So far, as best I can tell, no one is writing about my own foreign correspondent. Also a good thing.
**One of these things is not like the others. Raphaelson died in Moscow in 1927. Her relationship to the others is important but her story doesn’t carry the same weight in the book.