Tokyo’s four-timesdivorced adventuress

These letters make life in 19th-century Japan seem like something out of EastEnders, finds Dominic Cavendish

ESTRANGER IN THE SHOGUN’S CITY by Amy Stanley 352pp, Chatto & Windus, £16.99, ebook £9.99

arthquakes are common in Japan. Toward the end of Stranger in the

Shogun’s City, which guides us through a woman’s life in the land of the rising sun in the first half of the 19th century, there is a large, monstrous one. In 1855, areas of Edo, the city that was later renamed Tokyo, were razed by a force attributed by folklore to a giant subterranean catfish.

Coming a year after the departure of Commodore Perry, who had used an industrial-age show of force – “gunboat diplomacy” – to prise the country out of its 200-year-long period of isolation (“sakoku”) and open it up to trade with the United

States, the catastrophe – which destroyed 15,000 buildings – felt like a physical expression of that epoch-shaking incursion. As Amy Stanley, an American historian of early modern and modern Japan, notes in her meticulous study, in one broadsheet, the catfish was depicted as a steamship, belching coins; in another it was engaged with Perry in a tug-of-war. The people “sensed that the ground they stood on was unstable”, she writes. Sure enough, the arrival of the Americans propelled a period of change which culminated in 1868 in the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the feudal system of government that had stabilised the country after a bloody civil war in the early 1600s.

All this is the stuff of staple accounts of Japan’s shift from a hermetic to a kinetic attitude to the outside world. What’s striking about Stanley’s history is her focus on how these upheavals beset the life of a woman – Tsuneno – who ventured to the city from the sticks with the same adventurousness, but none of the macho might, of Perry, who arrived soon after her death in May 1853.

Stanley was intrigued by a spike in epistolary exchanges in the archives preserved by generations of Tsuneno’s family, her father a Buddhist priest of the “True Pure Land” sect, and custodian of a temple – Rinsenji – some two weeks’ walk from Edo. Amid a heap of dull tax-bills, Tsuneno’s missives delineated a drama of relationship angst and domestic commotion: in dozens of letters, “she would complain, rejoice, despair, rage and apologise”. Stanley, transfixed by female words of defiance and mischief from a rigidly gendered era (“I went to Kanda Minagawacho in Edo – and I ended up in so much trouble!”), has left no snippet of information unconsidered as she tries to fill in the blanks, join the dots and give this rebel of her time, four times divorced, her due.

Married off at 12 to a priest in an inland river town – emerging from the ceremony with status-defining “blackened teeth” – the trajectory of our heroine’s life at first accorded with the age’s default setting of wifely compliance, as outlined in The Greater Learning for Women, a stifling primer which advised that “the only qualities that befit a woman… are gentle obedience, chastity, mercy and quietness”. But 16 years later, she returned home (for reasons unknown); ructions with husbands two and three occurred with increasing frequency; she refused further marriage offers and in 1839 made her escape, selling and pawning her possessions and heading to Edo with a junior priest who took advantage of her.

This is a portrait of a self-made lady. Initially so poor that she couldn’t afford to keep warm, begging for a heavy coat to be sent from home, and lugging futons and filling water-jugs to get by, Tsuneno lived on aspiration, marvelled at the city, and finally fell on her feet: husband number four wound up in the service of a city magistrate, bestowing security and social position.

Stanley endeavours – with a Hilary Mantel-esque attention to detail – to recreate the world through which Tsuneno moved. It’s impressive, but she ends up swamping the reader with data. While I enjoyed the descriptions of the “awkward, unfashionable and overwhelmed” – and largely ornamental – samurai who thronged the streets of Edo, there’s a lot where that came from. Like the minuscule tenement room where Tsuneno first set up camp (“enough space to set one tatami mat lengthwise”), the all-inclusive clutter of facts becomes claustrophobic.

It’s a relief when it goes a bit Albert Square. “She turned her back on her family and made us lose face in front of the whole world,” scolds her older brother Giyu. “I know I have a terrible temper but I’ve never even met anyone who is as bad tempered as

‘She turned her back on her family and made us lose face,’ scolds her brother

STARING AT GOD by Simon Heffer 928pp, Windmill, £12.99

The first serious and really wide-ranging history of the Home Front during the Great War for decades. Scholarly, objective and extremely well-written, it is filled with surprising revelations, and Heffer describes the effect of the war on the lives of ordinary Britons with empathy. A remarkable achievement.