Stranger in the Shogun's City by Amy Stanley review – a woman's life in 19th-century Japan
Enjoying a garden in Omia, Japan, c1877.
Enjoying a garden in Omia, Japan, c1877. Photograph: Felice Beato/Royal Photographic Society/SSPL/Getty Images
Forget the tea ceremonies and geishas. This is a vivid examination of the life of an ordinary if much-married woman
Kathryn Hughes
Sat 15 Aug 2020 16.30 AEST
114
In 1839 a priest’s daughter called Tsuneno ran away from her village in Echigo, otherwise known as the Snow Country of north-central Japan. Her destination was Edo, the shogun’s city, which she had longed to see from the moment she first heard of its existence. The journey took two weeks and involved a treacherous mountain trek, but to Tsuneno it was worth it. Her village home was not only on ice from equinox to equinox, but its customs and expectations seemed frozen too. The shogunate, an ancient feudal system of governance, might be on its last legs but Edo still meant warmth and sizzle and the kind of social melt that allowed for fresh starts.
Tsuneno, though, was no one’s idea of a lovely young heroine, nor did she, as you might expect from the slackly orientalist cover design and title of Amy Stanley’s book, end up as a tip-top geisha with a sideline in erotic yet subversively feminist poetry. She was, in fact, a much-married middle-aged woman with such a bad temper that, on the occasion of her fourth marriage, her eldest brother Giyu felt obliged to warn the groom: “As you probably know, she’s a very selfish person, so please return her to us if things don’t go well.”
The great achievement of this revelatory book is to demolish any assumption on the part of English language readers that pre-modern Japan was all blossom, tea ceremonies and mysterious half-smiles. Instead, by working through the rich archive of letters and diaries left by Tsuneno and her family, Stanley reveals a culture that is remarkably reminiscent of Victorian England, which is to say deeply expressive once you’ve cracked the codes.
We can hardly blame Tsuneno for wanting to bolt. At the age of 12 her parents had married her off for the first time to a priest in another province. Fifteen years and no children later, he filed for divorce. A year on, the family came up with another husband, and this time the arrangement limped on for four years. A third marriage endured only “four blurry, claustrophobic months”. On the surface nothing terrible had happened – since Tsuneno was a woman from a respectable family (think vicar’s daughter) no one would dare to beat or starve her. But when you hear how her newly married younger sister was threatened with being put in a cage and displayed to strangers on account of her quick temper then you sense the pervasive threat to spirited women. Now, coming up to 40 and with no children to tie her down, Tsuneno decided on one last lunge at a life less ordinary.
A Japanese traditional female entertainer, or geisha, from Shimbashi area performs during a run-through before their actual show of “Azumaodori” at Shimbashi Enbujo Theater Wednesday, May 22, 2019, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Photograph: Eugene Hoshiko/AP
It would be pleasing to report that she found her bliss in Edo. But as a migrant she was far more vulnerable than if she had stayed put: the nice-seeming man from her village who was chaperoning her over the mountains raped her the moment they left their home turf. Naturally, he wanted to marry her too. On arrival in the city there wasn’t much work. Tsuneno wasn’t young or sunny enough to be a geisha and was reduced instead to becoming a domestic servant, picking up after nine women before going home at night to her squalid tenement. She spent nearly a year shivering in one unlined kimono because her brother, now head monk at the home temple, refused to send the clothes that she had asked for.
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And then, when she finally got to choose a husband for herself, it didn’t work out any better than before. Izawa Hirosuke may have been a samurai, albeit a low-ranker, but he turned out to be as bad as all those officers on half pay in Victorian novels who hang around spa towns looking for a lady to leech off. “If I’d known even the slightest bit about his character,” wrote Tsuneno in one of her inimitable letters home, “I would never have married him.” But she did, twice, which says as much about her as it does about him.
Stanley works hard throughout this compelling book to make Tsuneno into a feminist heroine, a brilliant girl born ahead of her time who “always claimed what was hers”. But on the evidence provided here, it really wasn’t like this. Tsuneno is interesting and admirable precisely because she was of her time and had to make the best of the hand she had been dealt. It is her ordinariness, and her multiple failures at not getting what she wanted, that make her story so deeply absorbing.
Stranger in the Shogun’s City is published by Vintage (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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