STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN’S CITY: FROM THE ARCHIVE TO THE PAGE

Описание: November 2025 General Meeting
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Amy Stanley - Orrington Lunt Professor of History, Director of Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University

"Stranger in the Shogun’s City: From the Archive to the Page"

In the early nineteenth century, an irrepressible woman named Tsuneno ran away from her home in the Japanese snow country. After three marriages and three divorces, she was determined to find a new life in the great city of Edo (now Tokyo), even if it meant pawning her clothes and working as a servant. When I encountered fragments of Tsuneno's life in the archive, I realized that her story had enormous potential to show us many facets of women's lives in early modern Japan, but it was also a struggle to form her scattered record into a narrative.

This talk draws from my experience wrestling with Tsuneno’s archive to consider problems of narration, methodology, and silence: Where do you turn when you don't know exactly what happened? How do you write a compelling narrative when you're faced with frustrating gaps? What can you draw from your own experience of the world, and where should you leave room for difference? And worst of all, how do you know what your sources aren't telling you, and make peace with what you don't know?