Thumbs up for Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley. History.
Thumbs (a little hesitantly) up for The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village by Shen Fuyu. History.
I read these two books simultaneously and comparison is inevitable, so I will review them together. Stranger is a history of mid-19th century Edo through the life of one woman, the headstrong priest’s daughter Tsuneno, who was not historically important in any way except that she wrote a lot of letters which survived. And The Artisans is an early-to-mid-20th century history of the author’s own home town, a rural Chinese village, via the intertwining life stories of a dozen locals. When it comes to actual reading pleasure, I enjoyed Stranger much more, because it was written in English with a level of elegance that the translated text of The Artisans simply couldn’t achieve. Stranger also – probably because it was written for an audience who could be expected to have no context – painted a far more vivid picture of what life was like in its time and place.
On the other hand, The Artisans offhandedly mentions specific events in modern Chinese history with the assumption that I’ll know the greater context off the top of my head, which is not the case. I was reading a history book in order to learn more about the era, right? But it stuck very firmly to social history via villager’s interpersonal squabbles, and although those was colorful enough to be fun reading, I’m not sure what my takeaway was. Whereas with Stranger, I now have a reasonably clear Edo in my head. It should be said, both books were inevitably rather sad, since they are about people who struggled a lot and then died, because history, you know? In summary: The Artisans wasn’t a bad read, but I’m not sure who the audience is. I’d recommend Stranger to any fan of Japanese social history or women’s history who wants a quick, engrossing read.
Or maybe it was years later, when all her conventional plans for her life had collapsed, when she was staring down a future that suddenly seemed unbearable, that the idea took shape in her mind. Whatever the reason, at some point Tsuneno came to understand the problem that would define the rest of her life, and to perceive it as something that had been true for a long time. It was one of the first things she ever wrote in a letter, something she had already told her family many times before she finally put it in writing: “I wanted to go to Edo, but you wouldn’t let me go.”
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