Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography
Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a history of a city: Tokyo (which was then called Edo) in the first half of the nineteenth century. It’s also the story of a rebellious, discontented woman who sacrificed everything to be there. The book follows her from her childhood in Japan’s snow country, through three catastrophic marriages and a devastating famine, to her escape to the shogun’s capital. It’s about how a woman used the city to recreate herself — as a maidservant, a tenement-dweller, a samurai’s wife — and how she, and others like her, built the global megalopolis we know today.
Advance Praise for Stranger in the Shogun’s City
“An absorbing history of a vanished world”
— Kirkus
“Amy Stanley’s breathtaking recreation of the world of Tsuneno—a forgotten but far-from-ordinary woman in early 19th-century Japan—is as entrancing as it is evocative, a model of the historian’s craft. This is a magical book.”
— Stephen R. Platt, author of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom
“. . . a gorgeous tapestry of early 19th-century Edo. When a meticulous historian is also a gifted storyteller, time travel becomes possible.”
— Janice Nimura, author of Daughters of the Samurai
“A carefully researched, elegantly crafted, boldly imaginative work of historical recreation.”
— Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink