Book Club: Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley
NOMA’s book club meets monthly to discuss fiction and non-fiction books related to art in the museum’s collection and exhibitions.
This month’s book club selection is Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley, a vivid, deeply researched work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo–the city that would become Tokyo–and a portrait of a great city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West.
About NOMA’s Book Club
NOMA’s book club is an informal group open to anyone on a month-to-month basis. You do not have to attend every meeting or read every book to participate. In addition to monthly book discussions, the book club meets periodically for curatorial programs related to the book selections.
Books are selected in advance and planned according to the museum’s exhibition schedule. Participants are expected to procure their own copy of the titles. Selections are also available at the NOMA Museum Shop, where museum members receive a 10% discount.
Meetings are held in person or via Zoom. All meetings begin at 12 pm. For more information or questions, please email programs@noma.org.
About the Book
Stranger in the Shogun’s City
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography – Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award – Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for 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.
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother’s. But after three divorces–and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval–she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak.
With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture–and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions.
Immersive and fascinating, Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a revelatory work of history, layered with rich detail and delivered with beautiful prose, about the life of a woman, a city, and a culture.
-description from Scribner Book Company
About the Author
Skye Jackson is an award-winning writer and editor from New Orleans, LA, whose poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, Green Mountains Review, and was hand selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award. She currently teaches at Xavier University.