Let us be upfront about two things about this book: first, its a fine piece of work, and second, it might look like a tome but its not - nearly half the book is notes, bibliography, references and the index!
Amy Stanley's "Stranger in the Shogun's City" is a labour of love spanning nearly two decades. It is the real life story of an ordinary girl named Tsuneno, daughter of a temple priest, who gets married at 12, lives through four divorces and many journeys through Japan before landing up as an impoverished migrant worker in the capital city of Edo, now Tokyo.
The book reconstructs her life from a vast collection of letters that Tsuneno sent to her brothers back home. Letters that were preserved at Risenji, a temple in Ishigami village for nearly 200 years before finding its way to the archives section of a library in Niigata Prefecture.
Tsuneno's lifetime (1801-1853) covers one of the biggest inflection points in East Asian history - the colonial powers, the Dutch, England, France, and Americans are carving out their colonies in Asia, and the Japanese Shogunate is waking from its slumber to see the aftermath of gunboat 'diplomacy', the Opium Wars and the humiliation heaped on China. It is also a time of terrible deprivations - especially the Tempo Famine (1833-37), a period when -
"...it was hard to say how many died of hunger and how many died of epidemic diseases - typhus and dysentery - the ravaged the weakened population...in the northeast, half the peasants in one domain had died of some of the survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Even reliable accounts described people reduced to eating grass and straw sandals, roadways strewn with emaciated corpses, and gravediggers too weak an exhausted to continue their work".
The book brings to life many familiar places in Tokyo - Chiyoda, Kanda, Tsukiji, Ginza - areas that are now teeming with skyscrapers, clean roads and manicured gardens. It is good to be reminded of the millions of hapless migrants like Tsuneno who did their bit to raise a grand city from dirt and squalor.
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REFERENCES & LINKS
* Stanley, Amy (2020): STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN'S CITY - A Japanese Woman and Her World, Scribner 2020
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