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59
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Amy Stanley
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
July 14, 2020
A deeply researched work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edoâthe city that would become Tokyoâand a portrait of a great city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West.
What The Reviewers Say
Through Tsuneno, a woman with no remarkable talents or aspirations, Stanley conjures a teeming world.
'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.
... absorbing.
... [an] 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.
