When historian of early modern Japan Dr. Amy Stanley came upon a letter written by a woman named Tsuneno while she was prepping a class lesson in primary sources, she knew she had found a great story. The challenge was how to tell it, even through gaps in the archive—not to mention the challenges of writing while raising two small boys The result, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, is an extraordinary biography that went on to win multiple national awards and demonstrate that compelling trade history can be about something other than war or famous white men. Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University, joins Kate Carpenter to talk about her research and writing process and give some practical advice for revision, bringing lost places to life, and more.

To stay updated on new episodes and more from Drafting the Past (including reviews, craft essays, and author Q & As, sign up for the newsletter at draftingthepast.com).

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
• Amy Stanley, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan
• Niigata Prefectural Archive
• Amy Stanley, “Revisiting the ‘Comfort Girls’ of Report 49,” American Historical Review 130, no. 4 (December 2025), 1459-1483

Hey there! This is the Drafting the Past

podcast. I'm your host Kate Carpenter, and in each episode,

I interview a historian about how they research and write

history. Today's guest has been requested by several listeners,

but I'm embarrassed to admit that I only recently read her

work on early modern Japanese history. When I did, though, I

was blown away, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Amy Stanley

to talk about how she writes history.

I'm so happy to be here.

Amy is a professor of history at

Northwestern University and the author of two books. The first

was *Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the

Household in Early Modern Japan.* Her second book, which

came out in 2020, was *Stranger in the Shogun City: A Japanese

Woman and Her World.* It's a remarkable book that follows the

story of one unconventional woman in 1800s Japan, bringing

to life the rural villages and the vibrant urban center of Edo

where she lived in the process. The storytelling is captivating,

the writing gorgeous. The book went on to earn many

well-deserved honors, including the National Book Critics Circle

Award in Biography and the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for

Biography. And it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in

Biography. It will not surprise anyone who has read her work to

learn that Amy loves and thinks deeply about the writing process

and constructing a rich narrative from sometimes

difficult sources. We talked about how she did it, even while

deep in the trenches of raising two small children. Here's my

conversation with Dr. Amy Stanley.

I've probably always wanted to be a writer,

even more than I wanted to be a historian, and I think that

history and Japanese history-that's the genre that I

work in. But I really think of myself as a writer first, and

having this academic job and teaching students, which is

wonderful, is also kind of an excuse to do what I would prefer

to do, which is write all the time, and I think that my

interest in writing-I mean, I think like a lot of people

started when I was a kid and I was a huge reader, and I

particularly liked historical fiction. So any kind of

historical fiction where there was a little girl in the past

who was trying to figure out her life was my favorite thing to

read, and I remember, you know, one of the books I read over and

over again was *The Witch of Blackbird Pond* but also

anything like *The Little House on the Prairie* series, or

things that at the time weren't even historical fiction, like

*The Anne of Green Gables* series, or particularly my

favorite was *Emily of New Moon.* I love that book. I still

reread it all the time. Those were kind of my introduction to

the idea of being a writer, and because some of the protagonists

in those books are writers themselves or emerging writers,

I think that's where I got the idea that that was something

that I wanted to do. So I always kept a journal. I was always

really excited to do writing assignments in elementary school

or in high school, and I think you know as I developed as an

academic and you know got my PhD in East Asian languages and

civilizations, the writing kind of took a backseat to the

research and all the language acquisition. But it was really

my first love.

Well, let's start with just kind of the

details of your work. So, when and where do you like to do

writing?

I think for a lot of my writing, particularly of

the book that we're talking about, *Stranger in the Shogun

City,* it wasn't a case of where I liked to do my writing. It was

a case of where I could do my writing. So, I had two little

kids at the time. So I think I signed the contract for that

book when my kids were something like five and two. And so I

wrote wherever I could. And some of that book was actually

composed on my phone while I was rocking my kids to sleep, or at

birthday parties when I'd find a quiet corner, or I remember a

particular indoor play space where I used to take my kids in

the winter, and I wouldn't say those were my preferred places

to do my writing, but that's where the writing could happen,

and so that's where it happened. Now that my kids are older and I

have more time and I have more space, I do a lot of writing in

coffee shops. I do some in my office. I do some on my front

porch, but I will really write wherever I feel like writing and

whenever I have the opportunity.

Do you try to write every day, or do you go

sort of through periods where you write more and less?

You know, I think I don't have a particular

discipline where I try to write every day because when I am into

a piece of writing, I want to be working on it all the time, and

I would rather be writing than you know planning for class or

making dinner or any of the other things that generally have

to happen in everyday life. So I tend to write at odd times, and

in times when I probably shouldn't be writing, so I don't

have a particular idea of okay, I'm going to write from this

time to this time. That being said, there are obviously times

when you know I'm I'm really into you know have to be grading

or you know I'm I'm traveling or something else is happening and

I'm not writing. But my basic baseline is: if I'm not writing

something, then I'm generally not happy. So I write pretty

much all the time.

How do you like to organize your sources and

your writing?

Ah, this is a really big problem because I am

not by nature a super organized person, and for me, all of the

stuff about organization, like putting your stuff into a

citation manager, or figuring out which word processor to use,

or figuring out like what to do about tagging your photos from

the archive, is always to me time that I could better be

spent writing because that's what I'd rather be doing. So

that results in a like a kind of disorganization in general, but

luckily I did know that when I wrote this book, Stranger in the

Shogun City, about Japan, that eventually it would be

translated into Japanese, and I would need to have my sources

very organized so that the translators could go back to

them. But I have a very primitive system, which is

basically that I have a big folder that's entitled the

Nanzenji monjo, which is the archival collection I used, and

it's organized by year. And there's a folder for the year,

and then there are all the letters that I used or all the

documents that I used in that folder, and then my notes are

basically just Word documents, and they're entitled "Notes from

So and So." They're all dumped into a big folder, "Notes for

the Book." And sometimes they're organized by chapter, and

sometimes they're not, and sometimes I just need to keyword

search them to find them in my Dropbox. So, I mean, I am not a

paragon of research organization, but luckily I can

find what I need basically 100% of the time.

That's what matters.

Yes, that really truly does matter because in the

translation project for this book, which was recently

translated, as I said, back into Japanese, I was constantly

getting queries from the translator like, "Can you find

this document? Can you find this document? And thank goodness I

could find all of them. And then I think, okay, going forward, I

should be even more organized and even more aware of where

everything is. But of course, it never works that way because you

know, you write for this many years and you're kind of set in

your ways, and you can't do things a different way.

Absolutely. Where in the research process do

you like to start writing?

I like to be writing all the time. I love

research in primary sources mostly. I like, I love to read

primary sources. Reading around in secondary sources is not

always my favorite thing, but I can make myself do the reading

in secondary sources if I have an idea or a question or a

writing project that I'm already working on, and that means that

for me, writing and research basically happen at the same

time. I have to find something first, so usually it's an

archival discovery that will get me going. But what will make me

excited is the process of writing. So it becomes, I mean,

I don't know. Like everyone, I write many, many, many drafts,

but I always start writing before I'm quote unquote ready

to start writing. And the writing is actually what

motivates the research, and not the other way around.

Interesting. How do you approach revision?

Oh, I approach revision like it is a

compulsion. It's a compulsive activity. So basically, you

know, like everyone, I will sit down and, you know, write. I

won't won't even say that I start by writing a terrible

first draft. I will start by writing something, and then that

will motivate me to do more of the research that I need to kind

of piece together in order to make a robust version of that

thing that's not even a draft. After that, there will be some

point where I will be very excited and I will write a very

very messy and terrible first draft. And then there's the

worst part of the writing process because you, I always

feel like when I've written down that first draft, yay, I've done

it! I have something on the page. It's awesome. And then

there comes the part where you reread that first draft, and

it's terrible. And you think, oh no, what am I going to do? I

thought this was good, and it's actually terrible. And then you

have to do that first revision, which to me is always the

hardest part, and then I do maybe a first revision, a second

revision, maybe get up to the fifth revision. I'm like, okay,

this is very polished. It's very nice now. I can send it out to

people, and then of course the minute I press send, I think, oh

no, it's actually terrible, and at that point, I take the whole

thing usually and put it in a document that, for superstitious

reasons, I will call always sandbox because it can't be it

can't be formal, it can't be the quote unquote real version. It

has to be something that I'm pretending is just a random

experiment. And at that point, even though it's already out at

some reader and I am feeling humiliated about this fact that

I sent it out, and it's terrible. I will start

reorganizing all the different parts, and then that sandbox

will become the real document, and then it will go through

about 20 more revisions before it's an actual real draft. But I

cannot streamline the process, and it's the exact same kind of

conjunction of chaotic things every single time I try to do it

I love that so much. Have you found that your

approach to writing has changed over the course of your career?

Probably not. Actually, I think it's always

been more or less the same, and particularly that same feeling

of the minute I send something out because I think it's

polished is the minute when I decide no, actually, the full

thing has to be changed, and so I think what I've become a

little bit more strategic about is who I send it to first, so

that you know when you're a graduate student, for example,

like the first person you send things to is often your advisor,

and that really is the person you do not want to see the

version that you've just decided is absolutely terrible. So I

think what has changed about my process is I now have a very

kind of specific order of readers in mind, and I know you

know how they go, so that it's only after I've done the sent

out a polished first draft that I decided was terrible, put it

in the sandbox and rearranged it and revised it 10 times, that it

goes to somebody who is only, I only feel comfortable sending

them an actually good version.

So that's really interesting to me because your

your first book was kind of a more traditional academic

monograph, and your second book, of course, Stranger in the

Shogun City, is an incredible narrative history, a trade book.

Were there things you had to learn or unlearn? How did you

shift from one mode to another?

I think that's something that people often ask

and answer in a different way than I do because a lot of

people say, "Well, I had to like unlearn academic writing in

order to relearn how to explain myself in a kind of more popular

mode." I feel like there definitely is a difference

between academic writing and the kind of writing that I did in

Stranger in the Shogun City. But I wouldn't say that one comes

more naturally to me than the other. And because I've written

in journals basically all my life, I think that the voice

that I used in my own private writing was pretty close to the

narrative voice that I used in Stranger in the Shogun City, and

I didn't have an experience where I had written a kind of

academic version that I then needed to go back and rewrite in

a different way, even though I actually published an academic

version in the American Historical Review before I wrote

the book, but even that article in the AHR, which is also about

Tsuneno and her life and kind of analyzes her experiences in a

different way, it uses more specialized academic

terminology. But I think the basic principles of how a

sentence should be, how a paragraph should go, or you

know, what you do in a conclusion are pretty much the

same. And I've always felt in my entire academic career, you

know, whether it's academic writing or other forms of

writing, if I get kind of two thirds of the way through a

draft, and I can't see the conclusion, if the concluding

paragraph doesn't kind of come to me, then I'm doing something

wrong. So I always feel like that concluding paragraph is the

most important part of writing anything. And if you don't see

it, then there's something wrong with what you've done before.

Do you then go back before you get to the

concluding paragraph, or how do you get to the point that you

have one?

Yes, because if I write like two thirds of the way

through and I'm still thinking I don't see the conclusion, then I

know that I am not writing towards something, and it's kind

of like, you know, the the basic level of this is in

undergraduate writing when you assign your your undergraduates

an essay and then you know they they'll give you their kind of,

you know, topic paragraph thesis paragraph and then they'll give

you all the examples and they'll give you the conclusion. One of

the things I always tell them is if you can rearrange your body

paragraphs in a different order, then you do not have an

argument. You just have a proposition and a series of

examples, and you need to kind of tie the argument all the way

through. And at the point where you can't put those paragraphs

in a different order is when you know that you will have momentum

toward a conclusion. And I think momentum toward a conclusion is

really important, and so if you don't have it, you need to go

back and rethink about how your structure is working and how

your argument is working.

Amazing, that's really great advice. Okay, so

and I know you've talked and written about this elsewhere,

but for listeners who don't know, I'm wondering if you can

tell us how you found the story that became Stranger in the

Shogun City, and especially, you know, I feel like micro

histories are not always obvious as books, you know, that it it

takes sort of seeing the potential in a story. So, when

did you know that this was a book?

So, in in some sense, I always knew that it was

a book, but in another sense, I didn't know that I could

actually pull it off. So the story of it is a little

complicated because it actually, the idea for this book or my

encounter with the series of documents that became this book

came out of teaching. I'd been assigned to teach the survey

class on early modern Japan, which is like my bread and

butter course, and I wanted to give the students primary

sources to read, the kinds of things that you would find in a

village archive, early modern Japan. Many people don't know

this, but it's probably the best documented early modern society

on the face of the earth. I mean, there are documents

everywhere, and they are in private collections and in

public collections, they're sitting around in people's

attics. I mean, there are just documents all over the place.

Very, very literate society, so a lot was preserved. But I

didn't feel like there was enough at the time in

translation to assign to my students, so they would get a

sense of like the breadth of things that were available. So I

very ambitiously thought, okay, well I can translate some of

these things myself, and then give them to my students. And I

had this whole exercise where I printed out, I translated and

printed out a lot of documents that were the kinds of things

that you would find in a village archive, put them all in random

order in archival boxes, and had my students do an exercise where

they created a finding aid as if they were archivists, like

receiving all this material, and then used the archive to write

their papers. So it was a very kind of analog activity, and it

was the best I could do for students who didn't have any

exposure to Japan or Japanese to mimic this idea of going into

the archive and finding documents without having any

context at all and having to kind of organize them and figure

out what they were about. So I was looking for things to put

into this archive, and I went to the homepage of the prefectural

archive of Niigata Prefecture. A Japanese prefecture is like an

American state. Niigata is on the Japan Sea coast. Many people

know the city of Niigata, but it's also a prefecture. I'd done

some work there for my first book, so I knew that it was a

well-organized archive, and I thought, okay, maybe there would

be something here. And it turned out, really luckily for me, that

as part of their public mission, they had created what they

called an internet document reading course, in which they

introduced kind of interesting documents that they had in the

archive, and then transcribed them, which is very important

because even modern Japanese people can't read the

paleography from earlier eras. So you'll often find, you know,

people have these things in their house that maybe their

ancestors have collected, and they can't read them themselves.

And so they'll come to the archive with these documents and

say, "Please help me read." So part of the public service that

a Japanese archive provides is teaching people how to read

older Japanese sources, manuscripts that are

handwritten. So in service of this, they had this internet

document reading course where they'd give examples of

documents from the archive, then they'd have transcriptions, and

then they'd have explanations. So some of these things are like

you know a document that a traveler might carry on the road

as a travel pass, or something like a village headman is

petitioning to buy some people from his village who have gone

to other villages into service back, so they can come back and

be farmers. And some of them were letters relating to this

woman named Tsuneno. And the first letter I encountered was a

letter written by a woman named Tsuneno, who had found herself

in the big city of Edo, which is now Tokyo, in 1839, and she was

writing a letter back to her mother, and she said, "I made it

to Edo. I'm in this neighborhood, Kanda Minagawa

Cho. I found myself in so much trouble, but actually now things

are going pretty well." And the thing that I remember most

vividly from this letter is she said, 'I have no trouble about

food.

Everything in Edo is delicious," and that to me was like so kind

of relatable. Like you know, I, everybody goes to Tokyo now, and

they say, "Oh, everything in Tokyo is delicious." And it was

really interesting to me to hear somebody in 1839 saying, "Yeah,

everything in Edo was delicious," and in the

explanation that the archive gave, they said, you know, we

have a lot of letters from Tsuneno and her family members

in the archive in this collection called the Nanzenji

Monjo, and her life is really interesting because eventually

she married a man who ended up in the service of a very famous

Edo City magistrate who is a samurai, Who's a figure who

appears all the time on in popular fiction and in like

historical television shows. And you know, if you want to come to

the archive, you can see all these letters. And so I thought,

well, yeah, I want to go the archive. I want to see all these

letters. So I went to the archive and started

photographing the letters. And as I relate in the book, the

problem was the paleography. I could not read them. I couldn't

read Tsuneno's handwriting, which was difficult because she

wrote in the phonetic alphabet and in her own regional accent.

I couldn't read her brother's letters because they wrote in

complicated Chinese characters. I could read 19th-century

Japanese when it was transcribed and printed, and I had a little

training in paleography, but as most historians know, letters

are the hardest things to read because people will refer to

things that they know and their interlocutors know, and

historians have no idea what they're talking about. So I was

confronted with, you know, over 100 letters that I had

photographed and could not read, and so I had this kind of

intuitive sense that there's an amazing story here, but I don't

know if I have the technical skills to pull it off. And then,

meanwhile, I had to get tenure, and so in order to get tenure, I

had to have my first book, which I did, and then I had to have

quote unquote meaningful progress on a second project, so

I needed to demonstrate a second project that was going to be

like even bigger and better than my first project and show my

career trajectory. And so I thought to myself, this can't be

my real second project because of this kind of preconception

that microhistory is a small and irrelevant thing, and also I

don't know if I actually can pull it off. So I had this whole

other idea for a second project, which I put in my tenure file

and could be convincing about. And yet, even then, this was the

project I was really passionate about. So even in my tenure

statement, I had this little paragraph about yet I'm also

working on this other thing about all these letters from

this Japanese woman in the early 19th century, and then as I was

kind of considering whether to push on with this or whether it

would just prove to be too technically difficult to

actually do, I had a conversation with my senior

colleague. His name is Ed Muir, and he does the history of the

Renaissance, and he actually has worked in microhistory too. But

he's a great source of kind of wisdom and career advice of all

kinds. And I remember sitting with him in a room downstairs in

our department, saying, "Ed, I just don't know what to do with

my second project." And he said, "You have to go big with your

second project because your second project is often what

makes your career, but you shouldn't be put off by the

technical difficulty because there you can actually push

yourself right up to the edge of what you can do." And he said,

"and in my second book, I did that same thing. I had these

really difficult documents, and I had to push to the very edge

of what I could do." And as I said before, at the time I was,

I had babies, right? So I was raising a, I think my younger

son was then maybe one and a half, and one of the things

about toddlers and babies is you see them every single day push

themselves absolutely to what the edge of they could what they

can do is, and then they fail.

You know, they try to walk so many times and they fall down.

They try to say sentences and they can't get them out, and

they just persist every day until they can. And I always

found something kind of inspiring and moving in that.

And so I think I thought once I actually did succeed in getting

tenure, I can push myself to the edge of what I can do and trust

that eventually it will be fine. So even though it was such a

long and difficult process to read those documents, I did

reach a point where it was like, you know what? I'm just going to

say this is a book, and eventually I'm going to be able

to do it, and that is in fact what happened.

That's amazing. I also want to know, okay, so

this trove of letters is incredible. What what an amazing

resource! But it also seems like it's, it was probably not enough

to write an entire book and the entire narrative. How did you

think about reconstructing the rest of Tsuneno's world and

circumstances? What were your approaches to that?

This was also kind of a worry because the the kind

of the source base has all these gaps in it, right? So, like, I

think the entire first chapter of the book, I only really have

one primary source about Tsuneno's life to go on, and

it's just a record of gifts that she received when she was born.

And I didn't even find that source until after I had written

a draft of the entire book. So the original version of that

first chapter didn't even have that, and so it became this idea

of you know how do you write about a life in periods when it

is entirely undocumented, and I kind of had the idea that by

filling in the negative space around a person, by kind of

describing the world in all of its like intense sensory detail,

you can kind of create an outline of the person that

should be there, so that's how I thought about doing it. I

thought about kind of what kinds of materials can I use to give

you the sense of the world that this person lived in so vividly

that you feel like that person is actually there. And I think I

also thought, in regard to the really problematic part of the

book, in which you know, for the first maybe you know at least 14

years of her life, we have nothing, and then her first

marriage we also have almost nothing, and the story really

starts when she's 35. I did think about I keep talking about

my kids, but it was really-I mean, to me, this book really

came out of a particular moment in life when I was raising small

children, and I thought about the experience of being a child,

and I also thought about what does a reader need in order to

understand the rest of the narrative, and so the reader

needs a whole introduction to Japan in the early 19th century.

What is Japan like around 1804, 1805? But I didn't just want to

write, okay, this is my introductory chapter, and then

I'm going to get you into the story. So I thought about, you

know, watching my own children, like how do you come into

knowledge about the world that you live in, and the way that

children experience the world is, you know, first the only

thing they know is like their mom and maybe their dad, and

then they start kind of exploring the house, and then

they kind of come to understand the neighborhood, and their

world enlarges in concentric circles, and I thought, okay,

that device of being a child and coming to understand the world

can be the way that I order the reader's introduction to the

world as well. And so, in that kind of first chapter where I

have nothing to go on, I am doing two, two or three things

at once. One is creating the negative space around the

person, so you feel like the person's there. Another is

taking you through the kind of developmental stages of

childhood, and then the other is taking the reader through that

same process, so that they will come to understand the world in

which the rest of the narrative takes place.

Wow, that's so great! You obviously did

incredible research. So much of the brilliance of the narrative,

though, comes from your empathy as a writer-sort of your ability

to imagine possibilities for different people. I don't want

to necessarily say like put yourself in their shoes because

we know that for historians it's hard to ever exactly do that,

but you really do like, even though you don't know for sure

how someone, including Tsuneno, felt or reacted to something,

you help the reader sort of imagine the realistic options,

and as a result, feel like we might have a sense of how she

felt or or what she did, even when we don't know. Was it hard

for you to think about writing in that mode? How did you kind

of imagine yourself into those spaces?

I love that you mentioned shoes because shoes

are really important. Actually, literally, I thought a lot about

shoes, and I thought a lot about clothing because those are

something I'm interested in in my everyday life anyway. And

shoes actually provide a really good example of the way that I

tried to get myself into the world of the book. So, for most

of the book, or for most of her life, Tsuneno lived in a part of

Japan that's called the Snow Country, and in Niigata

Prefecture, still today, there is really a lot of snow, and it

piles up so much that people have to go up to their rooftops

and shovel the snow off of it because otherwise their roofs

will collapse. It really is an impressive amount of snow, and

it's very cold. And I live in Illinois, you know, near Chicago

where Northwestern is, and I hate the snow, but unfortunately

it snows a lot almost every winter, and one of the things

that I really hate about when it snows is that I can't wear my

nice shoes to work because--I walk to work--because I'll get

ruined by the salt. And so when I was thinking about like

Tsuneno and her life and her kind of experience of the world,

I was thinking like, you know, Japanese people in the Edo

period basically wore what we would think of as flip-flops and

socks, but you know, how did they walk around in all of this

snow in these shoes? You know, their, their toes must have

frozen, and so then I started looking up, you know, these like

encyclopedias published in the Edo period that would show you

like the range of, you know, straw boots that people wore in

the snow, and thinking about, you know, what it would be like

to wear straw boots and clomp around in all of this very very

heavy snow, and then I thought to myself, well like actually

you know when I travel outside of Illinois, like when I go to

Miami to visit my in-laws in the winter, one of the things I'm

really happy about is there isn't all this snow, so I don't

have to wear my snow boots, and I can wear my regular shoes, and

that makes me feel really like much more comfortable and and

happy about my experience in the world. And then I thought, oh,

you know, when Tsuneno moved to Edo where it doesn't snow, she

must have had that same experience because suddenly it

is you know the first month of the year, and everybody is

walking around in their normal geta, their normal kind of flip

flop type shoes and socks, and they don't have to put on these

heavy snow boots. And that detail actually is in the book.

She must have thought it was, you know, like I don't remember

what I said, odd to be walking around in her normal shoes at

this time of year. And so I think that that is a kind of

evidence from experience, or just from thinking very

concretely about the kind of details of material culture,

that was a kind of way in to thinking about another time and

place and a person who is not me. When you don't know what's

going on exactly inside their head, you do know about the

tools that they used and what the environment was like around

them, and so I think that kind of thinking was really helpful.

But it's not infallible, and often it's actually misleading.

So I often would have to check myself. So my best example of

this is, I went to Tsuneno's village, or what's left of it,

and now it's a nature preserve. And because I wanted to see, you

know, what does this place look like? What does it sound like?

What, how are the mountains arranged on the horizon? And I

got there to this train station that's kind of now in the middle

of nowhere, and there was nothing there, and I really

couldn't use it. It was just like you know grass and trees,

and I stood there, and it was it was in the middle of summer.

It was really hot, and I was like, well, you know, at least I

can you know feel the heat and the humidity, and I can hear,

you know, the sounds of nature that maybe she would have heard,

and then I heard a really familiar sound, which was this

really bellowing croak of what I knew was a bullfrog. And the

reason I knew it was a bullfrog is because I'd been to the

nature museum in Chicago where I used to take my kids, and they

had this display where you could press buttons and hear frog

sounds, and the bullfrog has a very distinct sound. And my

older son was always terrified of it, and he'd always push it

and then like jump back and be really horrified. And so I was

like, "Oh, okay. Well, I heard a bullfrog, so I can say you know

something about like the sound of bullfrogs." So I was somewhat

satisfied with that. And then the next day, I was having

dinner with a Japanese historian colleague, and I explained this

whole experience in hearing a bullfrog. And he said, "Oh, you

met an American." And I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, all

bullfrogs are American. They were introduced with Commodore

Perry in 1853," and so they would not have existed in

Tsuneno's time at all, and it turns out that story is not

true. They came to Japan later, but it was a real reminder that

even things you think you know about the natural world that you

think you can include are also often historically situated, and

so you have to do a lot of research in order to really be

able to use that evidence from experience effectively. I also

think that there are limits and kind of controversies of

thinking about about thinking about embodied experience as

something that's shared across time. And I did my grad training

in the late '90s and early 2000s when it was taken for granted

that you know all embodied experience is socially

constructed, and so that we cannot really say anything for

certain about you know the body in a different time and place,

and so you know according to that idea that just because I

know what nursing a baby is like or was like in, you know, 2011,

I don't necessarily know what it was like in 1839. I came to

think that I was not satisfied with that explanation, and I do

think that there are embodied experiences that are shared

across time, and so I did allow myself to imagine things like

you know wearing the shoes in Edo, or you know not in

Tsuneno's case because Tsuneno herself did not have children,

but in the case of her sister-in-law Sano who had five

children in a very short span of time, I imagine myself to think

about what grueling physical labor that would be, and of

course, it is historically situated differently. There are

no antibiotics, there is no formula, but on the other hand,

you are surrounded by people and servants, but you don't have,

you know, like a baby swing. A lot of the things I relied on,

she didn't have access to. But I could say I thought, with almost

certainty, that having five children in less than a decade

would be incredibly physically difficult. And so when I tried

to imagine Sano's experience, I imagined it as something that

was hard, and that maybe she would have sometimes wanted to

imagine herself into a different kind of life, and that actually

got me in trouble with other historians. And I remember at my

manuscript workshop, some of the historians who came and read it

said, "Well, you know, actually, Sano, who was the mistress of a

temple that was doing quite well, whose children lived, who

was married to the head of the household, who you know kind of

had a very secure existence for that time and place, was leading

what people would think of as an ideal life, and you are reading

your kind of 21st century feminist preconceptions back

into it when you think about the fact that she might have wanted

something else." And I countered with, well, just because one

lives what is kind of thought of as the socially or culturally

ideal life doesn't mean that it's not difficult, and doesn't

mean that people didn't imagine other possibilities.

I was thinking from my experience leading a very, very

privileged and in many ways ideal life myself, and I also

thought, you know, when we think about manual laborers, like when

we think about men and women who went down into coal mines. We

understand that that's grueling physical labor, and we don't get

ourselves all preoccupied with: Is it the same experience to

shovel coal with your bare hands now as it would be back then? We

just kind of assume, like, yes, this is very hard on the body,

and this is terrible. So why is it that when we're considering

reproduction, when we're considering pregnancy and

childbirth and nursing, that we suddenly get caught up in, well,

we can't make these assumptions? And I just wanted to say that

actually that is a very difficult form of physical

labor, and it is okay for me to say so. And so in that sense, I

think I had a different perspective on some of those

issues than some of my interlocutors did, and I think

it's it's still kind of an open question.

I like that a lot. I want to ask you a

question. I'm trying to think of how to formulate it in the right

way, but I guess it's that I have a small child myself. He's

three. I only have one. I find his existence a very immersive

experience. As you're talking, and I'm thinking about just the

incredible thinking and research you're doing in this book, and

all of the different facets that you are engaging with. It seems

to me that writing this book is an incredibly immersive

experience too, and the fact that you are living both of

those things at the same time, seems honestly almost impossible

to me. I'm I'm imagining you in that play space, being in

Tsuneno's world, but also being aware of your small children and

how that must have sort of torn your brain in two in some ways.

What was that like? I mean, to be to be in these two very

intense projects, for lack of a better word, at the same time.

I can't reread that book without, obviously, as I'm

talking, it's coming out, putting myself right back in

that very intense period of life. I think, in some ways,

writing this book was an act of desperation. It was like I have

these two small children who are occupying all of my emotional

and physical energy, but I really struggled because I was

like, I am supposed to be a writer and I'm supposed to be an

intellectual, and yet you know, I'm just constantly cutting up

strawberries. You know, I mean, my my husband, I have to say,

you know, he did a ton of domestic labor himself, so I'm

I'm not trying to be a martyr here. But having two children

definitely absorbs all of the energy of two fully grown adults

at all times, especially if they're kind of rambunctious

little boys who get into everything, and I needed

desperately to reconnect with that side of myself. I also

think it's not a coincidence that I wrote an entire book

about a woman who not only never had children but ran away,

completely rejected that life, and so while I am nothing like

Tsuneno at all as a person, and my life experience is definitely

not hers, I think that there was a kind of a kind of experience

of escaping from one life into another one, even as my daily

experience being a mother absolutely shaped every aspect

of how I wrote that book, and the intensity of that is

something that I will never experience again. I will not

experience it, I don't think, ever with another writing

project, with another historical subject, or with a kind of time

in life that seemed that demanding. I think there is a

sentence where I write about Tsuneno. I mean, not about

Tsuneno, about her sister-in-law Sano, who's the mother in that

book. That she was really the vital center of everything, and

I think that's how you feel when you're the mother of a small

child. That if your existence stopped, everything would fall

apart. You know, that you are, in some sense, holding your

small world together with your own energy, and as your children

grow up, that that feeling dissipates. And while it's an

incredible, crushing amount of responsibility, and it is so

hard, and I don't think I would want to go back and live it

again because it was intensely painful at times, there is

something really exhilarating and irreplaceable about that.

And I think being the center of your kind of your own domestic

world, and being the author of a world that goes on the page,

there is something analogous about those two experiences that

I think work together in some way. I don't think I'm being

intellectually clear, but hopefully I'm being emotionally clear.

No, you are also. I'm tearing up. So you're

clearly being emotionally clear.

I believe me. I cried a lot while I was writing

this book. There were a lot of tears that went into it. Not

necessarily, some tears of frustration, or just tears of

being tired and overwhelmed, but places where I think I had to

tap into my own kind of emotional experiences to get

across what I was trying to say.

I also want to talk a little bit about how you

show the reader. I love at the end of this book you talk about

how this is a place that doesn't exist anymore, and you are kind

of bringing it back. You know that it's, as I understand it,

an oversimplification to say that Edo became Tokyo, right?

Because in many ways, Edo ceased to exist for various historical

reasons. But you really bring it to life. I mean, it became very

real to me reading this book, and yet, as you talk about,

you're not able to go visit much of it as a modern scholar. You

know, you can, there are a few little glimpses here and there,

but it's it's kind of mostly physically erased. How did you

think about recreating the physicality of the city when you

were writing this book?

I think this is a place where my engagement with

Japanese scholars in Japanese academia was really, really

important. It is very different to research and write about a

place where you live versus researching and writing about

what is a foreign country. So I'm sitting here in Illinois and

I'm writing about Japan, but scholars who work in Japan in

Japanese academia write about a place that they experience every

day, and even if the past is always a foreign country, that

is a very different experience than the one that I'm having.

And so, one of the things that Japanese academics often do as a

kind of common historical practice is they will lead

walking tours of the places that they research, and in fact, when

I go back to Japan this summer, there is a professor at Niigata

University who was a translation supervisor on the Japanese

edition of the book, who is going to be leading a walking

tour of the places where Tsuneno lived in Niigata. This is just a

kind of very common thing to do, and so I had been many times

with Japanese historians out into the field in which they

will kind of create a map and an itinerary and go around to

different neighborhoods and talk about kind of what these places

were like historically and what you still can see and what you

can't see. Also, part of the practice of being in a Japanese

seminar, which I also did in graduate school, is that when

you have like basically a Japanese seminar, or at least a

style of seminar I was at, every meeting a student is responsible

for introducing a primary source or part of a primary source, and

writing what is basically a long exegesis about it. And one of

the parts of understanding a primary source is to look up

every location that is mentioned in that source, many of which no

longer exist because they've merged and become other places

in a dictionary of historical places, and explain where was

this place? Is this a village? How many people live there? How

many kilometers is it away from the place that you're talking

about? With every single place name that is in that source, and

so there's a level of kind of grounding references in concrete

physical places that is central to Japanese historical practice,

and so I think it is from that experience, and because in order

to do this, Japanese scholars have compiled amazing reference

materials. Like you can buy any number of maps that will

superimpose the contemporary map of Tokyo, or even the train and

subway map, onto the old map of Edo, so that you know exactly

where you are at all times. And I think it's from that academic

culture that I was able to actually engage in this

imaginative reconstruction.

Wow, I love that. That's so cool. I want to

shift gears a little bit because Stranger in the Shogun City was

so well received, and it got a lot of really great honors,

which were very well deserved. But I'm curious what that

experience was like, and has it affected your writing life going

forward from that?

So it was a very weird experience. In part, I

mean, I think it's probably always a weird experience when

your book wins a big literary award because those things are

so rare. But I think it was a particularly strange experience

because all of this happened in 2020 and 2021, and so I was not

really leaving the house, and no one was leaving the house that I

knew. And also, all of these things were happening on Zoom,

so there were no actual in-person award ceremonies of

any kind. And I remember when I won one of them, the National

Book Critics Circle Award. That was held entirely on Zoom, and I

zoomed in from my dining room. And what was nice about it was

like my family was there, my dog was there, hanging out watching

the Zoom, and then then I won, and then I said thank you, and

then I closed my laptop and I went and did laundry. It was

just this kind of weird collision of everyday life and

these like strange public occurrences I think many of us

experienced during the pandemic, but just in this kind of

heightened way. So, in a way, that meant that none of it

seemed like it really happened, and so it was like the book came

out in this strange world. These awards, I won these awards, but

it all seemed like it happened in a kind of alternate timeline

or different time and space, and in that sense, so in that sense,

it wasn't like I was like, oh, I am like a really big deal now.

But I do think it definitely gave me visibility, and I was

really happy that it gave Japanese history and

particularly the history of the Edo period visibility in kind of

the American literary scene that it hadn't had, at least in

nonfiction, and so that to me was really, really gratifying

because everyone had always told me there is no place for the

history of Japan in trade publishing if it doesn't feature

a white man or World War II, and the fact that I was able to win

those awards with a protagonist that nobody, you know, nobody

can pronounce her name in a city that you know nobody has ever

heard of because they only know Tokyo was really actually

surprising, but surprising in a good way. I do think that it's

true though that when you win, when I won these literary

awards, it's like confirmation that like oh you're actually a

good writer, and while that's like so validating, it is like a

lot of pressure because then it's hard to return to your

writing and think like when you write that horrible first draft,

you think oh no like I'm supposed to be a good writer,

and look at this-it's terrible. And so I think that I just have

to get out of the mindset of thinking that that will ever

happen again. I just have to appreciate that as a thing that

happened, which is a little easier because of that weird

2020 moment, and just move on.

I guess that makes sense. You mentioned

something that I want to bring up too, which is that in

preparation for this interview, I was reading back through your

old blog posts, which I love, by the way, it made me wish that

you had a like a newsletter that you write. You you wrote

something back then about trade books. It was about other things

too, but I'm going to quote this line that I loved from it, where

you said, "There is no good reason that trade books have to

feature famous men, familiar places, and dramatic, simple

stories." I love this, obviously, but it also made me

wonder if you still feel that's true now. From from a market

perspective, obviously, from a storytelling perspective, it's

true. But do you think there's still room in trade publishing,

in this moment, are more complicated stories about more

complicated people?

You know what? I I'm not sure because I don't

know the market, right? So I don't necessarily keep up with,

this is what's selling, this is what's not selling. I do know

that people, and this especially includes students, are

interested in all kinds of things, and often what we say

about, you know, oh, well, like this is what drives enrollment

is not really what drives enrollment. I mean our, some of

our most popular classes in our department are about the Mongols

and Indo Persian literature, and you would think, you know, these

are obscure subjects, but when they're taught in a compelling

way by great professors, students will flock to them

because often people don't want to read the same thing or think

about the same thing over and over again. They want to think

about something different, and I think that we have more of a

burden when we're explaining things that people don't already

think they know about to present it in a kind of compelling and

lively way in order to convince people it's worth paying

attention to. But I don't think that human curiosity has

fundamentally changed, and in some ways, I think it is easier,

at least it was when I first sold this book on the market, to

say this is a story you don't already know, and I can tell it

to you, and I just have to believe that that is always

going to be compelling. Now, of course, we all know that the

market right now is kind of a mess, and that readerships are

contracting and shifting. But I think doing the same thing over

and over does not always guarantee success. And so

sometimes doing something completely unexpected is the way

to go.

Was it a hard book to sell because it was, you

know, not a familiar subject?

Surprisingly, no. I, I, I did not have an agent,

of course, we know, starting out. So I just kind of, you

know, emailed a pitch. My agent now was working as an assistant

at the agency and kind of picked it out of the slush pile and

read it and thought, you know, this is actually good, and

partly because there was nothing else like it, there was really a

lot of interest, and the pitch was, you know, how many people

in the English speaking world are there who can read these

letters, and of course I know the scholars who can read these

letters. But in general terms, considering the population, it's

a, it's a very small number, and I think that publishers were

really interested in in something that was never going

to come around again. So you know if it's, like, I don't want

to kind of pick on anyone specific, but like if it's a

biography of like, you know, Abraham Lincoln, there will be

another one pitched next year and the year after that and the

year after that, and they'll all be interesting. They'll all have

different angles, but you're not losing your only chance to have

a biography of Abraham Lincoln, whereas you might be losing the

only chance that comes around in the next decade or two decades

to you know have a book about a woman in the Edo period, and

that kind of creates a kind of excitement, or did an excitement

and a feeling of scarcity.

Oh, that's cool! I often, when I do these

interviews, am speaking to someone right after the book has

come out, so they usually have another book project that

they're working on, but it's very early. We are talking

several years after *Stranger in the Shogun City* comes out, and

I know you've been working on another book for several years.

How do you approach that subject?

So you've actually caught me at a time when I was

working on another book for several years and gotten a big

grant for it, and then ultimately decided that it was

better off as a series of articles. I think one of the

things that motivated me was I needed to do something really

different from the Tsuneno book. I could not write that book over

again, and I could not do another micro history, and I

could not return at that point to the early 19th century

because I'd really said what I wanted to say, and one of my

real beliefs about books, whether it's writing like moving

from the dissertation book to the second book or the second

book to now the third book, is that you cannot write the same

book over again, and if you try, you will only be disappointed.

So you have to really radically change modes, and, and in my

case, I decided, okay, I'm going to change historical periods,

and I'm going to write about the 20th century, which I'd been

involved in some other research about, and I had become really

interested in Burma and the experiences of Japanese women,

but also Burmese women and women who were kind of affiliated with

the British Empire, who all ended up in Burma during World

War II, and I even started learning Burmese, and I studied

Burmese for about two years and learned to read a bit. And I

thought, okay, you know, this is where my next project is going,

and I wrote two essays about this, and I'm involved in a

translation project from a Japanese book related to it, but

ultimately I thought I can't actually do this project. I

don't have enough of an immersive sense of that period,

in part because right now I can't travel to Myanmar, and I

can't do the linguistic training on the level that I would

really, really need to do it to write the kind of book that I'm

good at, and I also thought, you know, I really did train as a

historian of the Edo period, and there aren't really that many of

us, and I started to feel like I wanted to return to the world

that I knew best. So I made this foray into the history of World

War II and the history of the kind of the Japanese in Burma,

and you can read some of my work about that. I just had an essay

about it published in the American Historical Review, but

I ultimately decided, you know what, I have to leave that

project there, and I am embarking on a new project,

which is the real third book, which is a big narrative history

of Japan during the early modern period, which I am very

individualistically defining as between 1582 with the

assassination of the warlord Oda Nobunaga to 1868 with the Meiji

Restoration, and that to me is enough of a difference and

enough of a challenge because rather than being a very intense

microhistory, it's like a big sweeping epic, and I get to

write about warfare and castles and samurai, and also just kind

of consider places and perspectives that I didn't have

in Tsuneno's story. So right now I am working on the proposal of

that, and I've written about the first 70 pages or so, and that

is the project. But I think my lesson from that, which I kind

of knew intellectually but hadn't actually done, is that it

is okay to change course, and it's okay to kind of leave

something where it is and think, I'm going to come back to it

later, or I'm not going to come back to it later, and do

something else because otherwise, I think the danger

was kind of getting stuck and like spinning my wheels for a while.

Wow, I love hearing about that, and that

that feels like pretty good advice to end on. So--

Oh, but can I also can I tell you one one other

thing? I was really excited about, when you when you put the

question of what's the best piece of writing advice you've

ever received.

Oh yeah, please tell me

Because I always love to credit this piece of

writing advice, which I think is so helpful. So my senior

colleague at Northwestern, Laura Hein, who's also a professor of

Japanese history, once said to me, an article is only an

expression of what you think about a topic at the time you

wrote it. That was like absolutely a revelation for me

because I was like, oh, I only have to treat this as an

expression of what I think right now, and that means that it

doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. It doesn't have to

stand for all time, and it liberates me to change my mind

in the future. And I think that's where a lot of people get

stuck, is like, they have to have the perfect take on an

issue, and they're going to have to stand by it forever. And the

idea of like, an article is a moment in time, and it's a

record of what you thought, and then you can kind of go on to

new things, or change your mind, or revisit it later, is so

liberating, and it is like, it enables me to write in a way

that I think I would not have written had I not received that

advice. So I wanted to definitely get that out.

Thank you, thank you for sharing it. That does

sound like extremely freeing advice. Dr. Amy Stanley, thank

you so much for joining me. What a pleasure to hear about your

writing process and talk with you for Drafting the Past.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of

the Drafting the Past podcast. Find links to Dr. Amy Stanley's

Stranger in the Shogun City and everything else we talked about

in the show notes. And stay tuned for some exciting

announcements coming soon as we get ready to open the next

chapter of Drafting the Past. Until next time, remember that

friends don't let friends write boring history.