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.
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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
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
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.
Amy Stanley 0:27
I'm so happy to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:28
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.
Amy Stanley 1:36
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.
Kate Carpenter 3:22
Well, let's start with just kind of the details of your work. So, when and where do you like to do writing?
Amy Stanley 3:28
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.
Kate Carpenter 4:30
Do you try to write every day, or do you go sort of through periods where you write more and less?
Amy Stanley 4:35
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.
Kate Carpenter 5:27
How do you like to organize your sources and your writing?
Amy Stanley 5:30
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.
Kate Carpenter 7:06
That's what matters.
Amy Stanley 7:07
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.
Kate Carpenter 7:39
Absolutely. Where in the research process do you like to start writing?
Amy Stanley 7:43
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.
Kate Carpenter 8:37
Interesting. How do you approach revision?
Amy Stanley 8:40
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
Kate Carpenter 10:42
I love that so much. Have you found that your approach to writing has changed over the course of your career?
Amy Stanley 10:48
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.
Kate Carpenter 11:51
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?
Amy Stanley 12:08
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.
Kate Carpenter 14:05
Do you then go back before you get to the concluding paragraph, or how do you get to the point that you have one?
Amy Stanley 14:09
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.
Kate Carpenter 15:10
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?
Amy Stanley 15:33
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.
Amy Stanley 19:43
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.
Amy Stanley 23:42
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.
Kate Carpenter 24:19
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?
Amy Stanley 24:40
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.
Kate Carpenter 28:00
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?
Amy Stanley 28:49
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.
Amy Stanley 32:32
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.
Amy Stanley 37:08
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.
Kate Carpenter 38:06
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.
Amy Stanley 39:07
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.
Kate Carpenter 42:07
No, you are also. I'm tearing up. So you're clearly being emotionally clear.
Amy Stanley 42:12
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.
Kate Carpenter 42:30
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?
Amy Stanley 43:17
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.
Kate Carpenter 46:15
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?
Amy Stanley 46:37
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.
Kate Carpenter 49:37
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?
Amy Stanley 50:25
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.
Kate Carpenter 52:18
Was it a hard book to sell because it was, you know, not a familiar subject?
Amy Stanley 52:23
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.
Kate Carpenter 53:53
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?
Amy Stanley 54:12
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.
Kate Carpenter 57:56
Wow, I love hearing about that, and that that feels like pretty good advice to end on. So--
Amy Stanley 58:02
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.
Kate Carpenter 58:09
Oh yeah, please tell me.
Amy Stanley 58:11
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.
Kate Carpenter 59:15
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.
Amy Stanley 59:26
Thank you so much.
Kate Carpenter 59:28
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.
