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.

At the heart of Stanley’s book is the extraordinary and terrible story of Tsuneno, whose life went against the grain not only of what was expected of women in her day but also of what we assume life was like for women at that time.

... a 19th-century Japanese woman whose brief existence comes vividly to life amid cataclysmic global changes.

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.

... [The book does] a fine job of introducing this wealth of historical material to the general reader...orientating even the first-time traveler to one of the great cities of the early modern world.

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.

Essential for anyone interested in 19th-century Japanese history, and a great companion piece to Anna Sherman’s The Bells of Old Tokyo, which compares modern day Tokyo with historic Edo..

Stranger in the Shogun's City, a story of Tsuneno, a woman who defied convention to forge her own path through life in nineteenth century Japan, is penned with the precision and dexterity of a Japanese calligrapher; the result is engaging, impactful and insightful.

Tsuneno belongs to a vanished world, but historian Stanley brings both her and the Japanese city of Edo back to life in this breathtaking work.

Northwestern University history professor Stanley debuts with an evocative and deeply researched portrait of 19th-century Japan through the events of one woman’s life in the decades before Commodore Perry’s 1853 arrival and the opening of the country to the West.

Historian Stanley brings a deep knowledge of Japanese culture to a vibrant portrait of the Asian nation centered on the struggles of one defiant woman.