Three books to read before Hong Kong’s literary festival kicks off
Amy Stanley, Sophy Roberts and Marie Lu will be appearing online at this year’s event, but there is still time to become acquainted with their works
Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley, Simon & Schuster
Just as works about nothing are really about everything, so this is a book in which the life of a nobody reveals much about society. The time is the early 19th century; the location Japan’s “snow country”; the protagonist one of eight children of a Buddhist priest. Unlike her brothers, who studied feudal administration, the girl, Tsuneno, was taught to sew and, at 12, thrust into marriage.
Her destiny, as historian Amy Stanley notes, was always to “grow up and leave for another household”, such was the lot of women in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868). But because affairs did not proceed “smoothly” she found herself in and out of three marriages, by which time she was in her mid-30s and questioning what life had to offer. Edo (now Tokyo) was a beacon.
Stanley chanced on Tsuneno’s letters to family members, who disowned her after she married for a fifth time (twice to the same man). Obsessively, the author started translating the correspondence, reinforcing it with research producing sharp, albeit sepia, images of an isolationist land whose history was on the cusp of change.
At 49, while Tsuneno was dying, American Commodore Matthew Perry was sailing towards Japan to open the country to the West. Stanley has sewn biography to history, in the process producing valuable feminist scholarship that stitches “extra” to ordinary.
Amy Stanley and Mike Chinoy’s “Exploring History Through Biography”, with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, takes place on November 14 at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.
