This is a unique look into Edo Japan that captivates the reader from beginning to end. It’s a shame it’s often mislabeled as fiction because it doesn’t duly credit the author with her tireless research.

I was really pleasantly surprised by just how much I loved this. I knew I would be interested but I ended up absolutely loving it. As someone who works with personal archives, I loved seeing the fruits of this remarkable family collection in action. The level of detail in the writing is astounding and I really felt like I was right there with Tsuneno. Highly recommend to anyone even remotely interested in Japanese history and culture and/or the lives of women in the 19th century.

There often aren't non-fiction books about the average person, and this is one of those. Tsuneno is average, just from a family that wrote each other a lot of letters. Living in the last decades of Japan under the shogunate, it was still a fairly traditional life she lived especially as a woman. Born to a family of priests, she also was fairly well off for a villager but didn't accomplish anything amazing. I would have liked to see more of her words included, instead there were some conjectures and historical framing (like that divorce was completely normal in society at the time). The beginning was a bit hard to get used to, its a bit of an unusual writing style but once you got used to that was pretty interesting to read. It would have been more interesting to get her perspective on Commodore Perry's arrival, but she died just before that. Are there really not that amount of letters about any other particular person? I did learn a lot though and am glad to have read it.

The life of Tsuneno, the daughter of a Buddhist priest, has been recorded in temple records via letters, documents, and notations. After three divorces, Tsuneno runs away to Edo, where she is forced to live in abject poverty. Determined to make her own way, she finds menial work, and marries on her own.

This book was written in a more scholarly fashion, with the author speculating on Tsuneno's life based on primary sources and the history of Edo. At times the book was dry and tedious, however, the personality of Tsuneno shined through. Overall, 4 out of 5 stars.

My knowledge of Asian history is not strong, and I only have the most basic understanding of Edo and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. This was a fascinating and approachable read, exploring the final decades of that distinctive period in Japanese history through the varied experiences of one woman as documented in her family's archives. Highly recommended.

Based on a few letters as primary sources, Tsuneno, a very unremarkable woman, makes her way to Edo( now Tokyo) during the end of the shogun’s rule in the mid 1800’s. She may have left little of herself for history to discover, but the historian Amy Stanley, creates a fully dimensional woman who had been married and divorced three times by the time she was 35. Unwilling to settle for another arranged marriage she leaves the rural area. Her life in Edo still meant she needed to get married. Single life would give her no security. Tsunero could have been one of those women, who deserve the words “You Go, Girl.”

Interesting woman's perspective of 19th-century Japanese history. Tsuneno was sent off to be married (for the first time) at the young age of 12. And while her first marriage lasted for more than 10 years, her husband did eventually end up divorcing her (either due to her infertility or uncooperative behavior-- documentation was unclear). Her family continued to find two more "suitable" husbands for her but these marriages also did not prosper. Finally, Tsuneno decided to find a future for herself; her journey was unprecedented and courageous, especially for the time period and culture.

Really enjoyed this history book.Based on the journals of a Japanese Woman in the 1800s.we are drawn into her world her life and she was a fascinating woman fascinating time to follow.Well written highly recommend. .#netgalley#scribnerbooks

I'm a huge history lovers and couldn't wait to read this and wasn't disappointed. Well written and researched I recommend for all history lovers.

I loved this. Stretching from 1804 to 1853, it's the true (and imagined in part) story of Tsuneno, a Japanese woman who lived a bigger life than one could possibly imagine. Stanley pulled together letters from Tsuneno to her family over the years- mostly, to be honest, asking for money. She married three times, unsuccessfully, and never really seemed to learn from her mistakes. She was childless and doesn't seem to yearn for children. It's once she moves to Edo that the book begins to shine, giving the reader a sense of what Tokyo was like before Admiral Perry arrived. There are all sorts of interesting details. Know that there are footnotes, which in Kindle become endnotes- I'd suggest hard copy, if possible, to enhance the reading experience because I think valuable info is otherwise lost. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

“To be a woman is to grow up and leave for another household.” So begins “The Great Learning for Women,” an 18th-century Japanese primer attributed to the neo-Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekken. As generation after generation of girls sat down to study, learning the texts and skills that would prepare them for adulthood, this was among the first and most fundamental precepts: They would grow older and, in time, depart their family home to marry into another. Biology and society admitted no alternate possibility.

Full review published at the Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2020

The book started so good, and then, somewhere in the middle I lost touch with it. It's a story of Tsuneno, her journey and adventures. I liked the first half better because of the plot. The second part dragged a little, but overall the book deserves solid 4 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for allowing me to read and provide and honest review for Stranger in the Shogun's City.

This compelling book follows Tsuneno, a young girl from the Japanese countryside, as she progresses through her life. Tsuneno makes unconventional choices and asserts herself in ways that are often contradictory to the wishes of her family and challenges the norms and expectations of women of her day. Not only do we witness Tsuneno's evolution, but Japan's as well, as it reacts to the impacts of global trade and changing attitudes towards the Samurai ruling class.

Author Amy Stanley brings history to life by expertly weaving Tsuneno's correspondence and family archives with her own extensive research and translation to give the text depth and context, resulting in a story that is quite remarkable for a woman of that day, but simultaneously feels very modern and contemporary. Stanley includes fascinating historical details about the development of Edo, country life, Samurai ruling structure and the culture of the day that will appeal to anyone with interest in Japanese history.

This book is an interesting take on viewing a historical period: through the eyes (or in this case, letters) of a person who lived at that period in that city. In this case, the book focuses on Tsuneno, a woman from the Japanese countryside who moves to Edo in the early 1800s. We learn about her through letters she wrote to her family and vice versa and the struggles she endures as she tries to make a life for herself in the metropolis that is Tokugawa shogunate-era Edo.

Stanley truly cares about her subject - both Tsuneno and Edo - and it's clear from her writing and research. She portrays Tsuneno as stubborn yet determined, even when she's wearing her last robe and scraping together coins for a meal. We also meet Tsuneno's family, through whom we get an alternate view of Tsuneno. Her story is ultimately a sad and frustrating one, especially reading this as a 21st century woman.

Parts of the book were dry and a little boring to get through, and I wish we knew more about Tsuneno and her life, but Stanley only has a scant few letters with which to reincarnate her and the world she lived in. Overall, Stanley does a beautiful job - I really enjoyed reading about fashion and the theater scene, and I liked how the book closes just after Admiral Perry reaches Japan: it's the end of not only Tsuneno but the world she knew...and many of us can only imagine.

This book was one of those that I changed my opinion of more than once as I was reading it. At first, I was really enjoying it, getting excited for the main character Tsuneno to head to Edo and start our adventure.

Then the story just got tedious. I found myself saying to myself “ok, I get it, she’s hard to get along with, can we please move this story along already!” Also, I think the fact that I was reading a digital copy that was only tracking my % complete was throwing me off, because it was calculating the footnotes (which also weren’t notated in the main text, which I didn’t realize until I had finished. I wish I had known so I could have referenced some), and the author’s notes at the end of the book, so while my kindle was saying I was at 72% or something, I was actually done. Knowing that at 66% would have given me a different perspective as I thought I was getting bogged down in repetitiveness.

But finally, I ended up enjoying it more for the the setting Tsuneno was in rather than Tsuneno’s story itself. Having lived in Japan for ten years and studying at University there, I am a student of the language and history and culture. This time period, the time right before Perry's arrival and the waning days of the Tokugawa Shogunate are not a time I’m very familiar with, so I began to focus on Edo as the main character and Tsuneno as a supporting actress. While it is absolutely fascinating to me that the personal letters of the daughter of a village priest who by all accounts lived and died in abject poverty in Edo still survive to this day is amazing. That she was literate, and spent money for paper, ink, and postage to write home, and that these letters were filed away rather than thrown out or burned, and survived for over 200 years and a war is amazing. To put into perspective what was going on in other parts of the world, this was pre-Civil War America-gold had yet to be discovered in California. The author does talk about the Opium Wars happening in China and the Western world forcing its way into Asia, but in Europe and America, Tsuneno’s peers were doing the same thing. Young men and women leaving the countryside and villages for a new life in the big cities-London, NY, Paris, Boston where they could get rich, yet they also faced similar conditions. Tenements, despicable lending and rental practices that kept them in debt, Croocked cops and gangs.

So I guess I would warn you, I found this to be more an academic look at Edo. It’s a beautiful look at what is today Tokyo, when she was much younger, and much wilder. Read the author’s notes at the end-always read epilogues, prologues, and notes. They tell you what the author’s thoughts are with their work.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for an ARC.

In this non-fiction work, author Stanley chronicles the life of a Japanese woman in the 1800s based on the woman's voluminous correspondence with her family members. But the book focuses on standard descriptions of places and events, and there's actually very little material that quotes these letters directly. The result is a book that drags and is full of historical material that I could read in any book about Japan during this time. The author missed a big opportunity in not letting her subject's own voice lead the narrative.

I found the characters next to impossible to connect with and the narrative dry and boring. It sounded like a great premise but just fell flat for me.

I was really intrigued to start reading this book. The premise was so promising. Learning about a lady in Japan and her life experiences.
I greedily read the first 20% of the book. LOVED the letters and details of her home life, her marriages, the divorces, the scandal of her brother raping another brothers wife.
Then she left her small city and traveled to Edo.
THERE is when the book just fell flat.
Too much description of places and things that MIGHT have happened...not actual facts.
I stayed with it for another 10% of the book and just gave up when the descriptions were more WHAT might have occurred vs actually occurred.
Positive...learning about marriage and divorce.
Negatives....lots of assumptions and maybes, not enough details about her actual life.

I went back 4 times to try to keep reading and it was dull and boring.
I will NOT leave a review on Goodreads since I did not finish this book.

Let it be said up front, I really enjoyed this read. It wasn’t exactly what I envisioned but no matter. The notion of a nonfiction written with such delicacy and character development, is a lovely one, Telling the story of a woman’s life in Japan just ripe for Western take over was genius especially because of the status of women in that society, as in most societies of the day. Tsuneno lived as an obedient daughter, sister and wife, until she didn’t and forged her way to a semblance of freedom through her own choices in a time and place where choices weren’t given to women, I felt like I really got to know her and the Japan, and her ardent desire for a life in a city, Edo, a metropolis like many all over the world, with this desire so universal to many,

First posted on Goodreads 28 March 2020

Read a 2018 essay by the author here.:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/historians-sexual-assault-research-metoo.html

The topic: what she learned about the history of sexual assault while writing this book.

This is my first post-COVID-19 review, meaning, the situation is still spinning out of control as I write this. I am putting this fact out there, up front. Even in the best of times, I am not generally known as a little ray of sunshine and … these are not the best of times. The most charitable adjective for my present mood is “cranky”.

I hope the talented and educated writer of this book, and all those dedicated souls at the publisher who not only helped it see the light of day but also generously gave me a free review copy, will excuse me when I say that, even though his book is worthy and edifying, I did not enjoy it in the way that I wished to. In these times, I really need a history that grabs me by the throat and says “Look at this! This is fascinating! This is dramatic! Go ahead and lose yourself in this previously-unknown-to-you past time and place, which is at the same time wildly different from your present life but also strangely familiar!”

This book did not do that for me.

Maybe I'm asking too much. But damn that's what I need right now.

Perhaps my problem is that, when I read descriptions of books on Netgalley, instead of seeing the books that is, I see the book that I want it to be. In this case, I understood (correctly, I think) that the author had, improbably, learned (on the Internet) about the existence of a bunch of letters from a Japanese woman, written to her family perhaps starting 1830 or so and continuing right up to the moment that Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” Japan. The woman had run away from her stifling rural existence in rural northwest Japan to try her luck as an independent person in the capital Edo (present-day Tokyo).

I had hoped that maybe this woman, Tsuneno, would be an observer of everyday life in a land now distant and different from our own. Tsuneno would be, I had hoped, a newly-discovered Samuel Pepys for her age and her place, which in some ways seems to resemble the London of Pepys' time. I knew that Tsuneno was not a highly-placed civil servant and social climber like Pepys, but I thought there would be a load of interesting detail about how average people worked, what they thought, what they said about the things going on about them.

There isn't so much of that. As far as I could tell, a lot of the letters from Tsuneno to her family were requests for aid or actions, e.g., get some items she had pawned back from the pawnbrokers. I was actually a little disappointed that I didn't get to hear her voice directly more often. Maybe there's a good reason that I didn't – the time, culture, and language are in many ways so removed from our own that much of the writing, presented without interpretation, might be incomprehensible. I'm just not sure.

The author fills in a lot of interesting detail herself. For example, I enjoyed learning how Edo samurai got paid (Kindle location 1731), and the network of middlemen (basically, rice re-sellers) that local cultural peculiarities generated.

Nor is it the author's fault that Tsuneno died seemingly a few short weeks before Perry's first visit. It would have been fascinating to know, direct from the writings of an average person, how the visit was seen by the average resident of Edo. What rumors circulated? Were foreigners considered terrifying? grotesque? ridiculous? Did anyone dare hope that the arrival of foreigners would actually be good for Edo and Japan?

I apologize again that I can't be more positive about this book. As everybody involved with it is surely aware, it is just emerging at a terrifically difficult and stressful time – I guess it's just not the easy read that I need while self-isolating.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the free advance egalley copy of this book.