What People Are Saying about Stranger in the Shogun’s City
“Stanley conjures a teeming world . . . A magic trick . . . where a lost place appears to the reader as alive and intact.”
— Harper’s
Tsuneno’s rebellious trajectory, preserved in her family’s archive, was unusual, yet even her most commonplace steps are absorbing.”
“Tsuneno’s life was not heroic—but Amy Stanley’s patient reconstruction of it is”
“Amy Stanley’s book — a stunning work of academic persistence, reconstruction and luck — weaves the hard-won details of Tsuneno’s life into the final years of the Edo period, brilliantly highlighting the clues that both Japan, and the city that would become Tokyo, were on the brink of change.
“ . . . absorbing ... a compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy ... Ms. Stanley draws a richly textured picture of Tsuneno’s world and is especially attuned to quotidian routines, particularly for women ... previously brief flashes of Tsuneno’s willful personality spark into a blaze.”
“An absorbing history of a vanished world”
“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.”
“There is a fine line between admiration and envy. I was reminded of that while reading Amy Stanley’s enthralling portrait of an intrepid 19th-century Japanese woman and the city she loved. Stanley, a professor of history at Northwestern University, renders the world of that rebellious woman, Tsuneno, so vividly that I had trouble pulling myself back into the present whenever I put the book down. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is as close to a novel as responsible history can be.”
“. . . a touching and accessible story about leaving the provinces for the thrilling loneliness of the big city, about making mistakes and making the same mistakes again, about divorce, poverty and underachievement, all of it set against the background of epochal historical change.”
“'Historians', wrote Simon Schama, 'are painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation,' but Amy Stanley succeeds as well as anyone could hope in her masterfully told and painstakingly researched evocation of an ordinary Japanese woman’s life in Edo on the eve of the opening of Japan.”