Chicago continues. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the 36th annual printers role lit fast. Please help me get a special thank you to all of the sponsors. [applause] before we begin, we ask that you silence your cell phones and turn off your cameras. We will have time at the end for questions and answers and ask that you use the microphone thats over here to ask your questions when that time comes but please welcome amy stanley and deborah cohen. [applause] its great to be here and wonderful to be here talking about this book. If you pick up a amy stanleys stranger, you can smell the tofu and hear the click in the shops. You can even feel the chills in the country. This is one of the most evocative and gorgeously written examples of the historians craft that you will read. In this marvelous book, amy tells the story of a frustrated, stubborn japanese woman in the early part of the 19th century that runs off to the big city, the predecessors city to todays tokyo. This is the tale of migration, the lure of the city, aspirations of the constraints on womens lives and the force of personalities. And in this year and a half of tragedy, the emergence that the book authors and a different world is really iconic. It won the 2021 penned prize for biography and the 2021 National Book critics circle award for biography. It was also a finalist for the pulitzer and for the most prestigious nonfiction prize. Amy and i will talk for about 20, 25 minutes and then we will open up for questions. So, can we start by talking about what your First Encounter was . I would like to say we met in a romantic place in the snow country and archive and the truth is i met her on the internet. I was in my office at northwestern where i was at the time and assistant professor planning my first class on the history of early japan between 161868 and that is my favorite subject. Its what i specialize in and i was very excited. I was looking around for documents about everyday life because while there was a lot of material on thoughts and eventually warfare, there wasnt a lot on this mundane everyday life that most people experienced so i went to the archive and they had an internet document reading course and this was aimed at the local archives that had a Public Mission to educate people in the area about the holdings of the archives and so what they found was a course where they introduced one document at a time and because they are difficult to read they included a transcription of the documents and one of the documents i think that it was number 12 or 13 was about this woman i didnt know at all at the time to her mother saying she was in the city and everything was delicious and she just raves about her life in the city and it struck me so powerfully that this was a voice that i recognized and in fact this could have been my own voice writing back for my own first trip in tokyo where everything is still delicious and the archive reported that it had many letters and i was incredibly intrigued so i went back to japan and i looked up about 100 of those letters and that is how i encountered those. You wonderfully describe how they constructed this archives as documenting their life but it was a descriptive presence that ended up taking it over so can you explain to us what that looks like and what did that mean . With a highly literate society, even if people in villages could read and write especially men and people in high social positions, so for example the wealthy farmers. And her family operated a buddhist temple and if you are a buddhist priest obviously you have to be able to read and write. Priests were responsible for keeping track of the population of the village. They kept the population registered so they wrote and collected a lot of documents but mostly they were things like correspondence with other temples or agreement to lend out land or somebody borrowed a book from somebody else, just the mundane business but when the citadel comes along suddenly you have all of this writing by a woman. There had been a few things earlier, but maybe only one or two and she caused so much trouble for this family that they were constantly writing about her. Its a very mundane temple and business that is quite boring and all of a sudden you get to about 1837 and its all about the hundreds of documents about her so that was a good example of the force of the personality reorienting this families archives. Will you talk about that question of what she was like. One of the interesting things its such a visual book one of the undescribed things is what it looks like so will you tell us about that process of reconstruction . That is a good point because most of the time i think we dont even realize it most of the time we read about womens lives whether its in fiction or a biography, we start with a description of what the women looked like and that is not only because we are kind of conditioned to think about women as being beautiful or not beautiful but because what a woman looks like has a profound impact so it is Important Information but if you then think about okay how do we know what people look like, we know because there are photos and paintings but for most ordinary people before the 20th century, unless you are a monarch or patriot of the arts or some other important person we have no record and i think its the same for many of us. We have photos that we put on social media but if we didnt have those and somebody looked through your correspondence like your twitter feed or didnt include pictures or emails, they would have no idea. My friends dont write me and say you are only 5 feet 1 inch tall. Because we already know that information that was the case. Nobody referenced what she looked like at all whether she was beautiful, ugly, tall, short, nothing about her and yet when i told the story, people often say she must have been extremely beautiful because that must account for how she was able to attract men. I am not sure that is the case. Im not sure whether it was beauty or some kind of intelligence or skill or even the position of her family that made her so compelling. So i was left with the idea how do you describe her and that became the case so i had to create a portrait without actually having a portrait. One of the interesting things i want to come back to the question of literacy to talk about Something Else first. The statistics are wild so for the consequence of a very rigid family system what, i mean, by that is most households although not all of them in the period that i talked about operated on the principle of what the anthropologists would call stem the family which means that the child that is designated mary is under remains in the parents parentshome and raises the child the parents home they will take over the business of the household whether they are merchants or priests. If you think about this practically lets say i have two sons and my oldest is going to take over my vocation as a College Professor and going to take a wife, this is a heterosexual system and they are going to live with me and my husband for ever, that kind of brings up certain dangers what if he brings home someone we all hate, what if she is terrible about being a professors wife, what if she doesnt get along with anyone or ruins the whole entire family business. So for the system to work there has to be flexibility built in. This is in fact what they did. So its very rigid but it has to be quite flexible and it wasnt unusual for someone to marry until they found the right fit for the larger family and their enterprise. Maybe it is a generic point her sister ends up in prison in a cage. Can you talk about that and then can you also kind of give us a sense of how many others are there. It was lost or wasnt literate. How do you think that was . I dont think she was that unusual. One of the wonderful things about early modern japan is the most extensive archives of the modern society on the face of the earth so there are so many documents waiting to be discovered either in the public archives are peoples attics. Theres probably hundreds of others its just that theres so much material people havent even gone through it yet. In the process of research i found other women that have been divorced three or four times, so she, her family found her annoying and rebellious and they were always complaining about her but they didnt find it in possible that she would do these things, so she was kind of at the edge of what we would consider kind of normal ordinary behavior. Her sister though, who deborah just brought up, was also a rebel in her own way. Her sister had a much more conventional marriage and married another temple priest. Even though she had been raised the family was complaining about her and she wasnt nice or helpful and finally her fatherinlaw wrote to her parents if she doesnt change her behavior, im building a cage and im putting her in this cage. That seemed to us absolutely crazy putting your daughterinlaw in a cage, but this was a common kind of household punishment because the idea was the family had to have a way of controlling people it was a good way to keep tabs on them and show the community that you are doing something about this person. There are memoirs from the period of people that spent months. This is a book that fundamentally without being subconsciously so about the craft about how is it that we know what we know and what do we do when we want to know stuff and we cant find it out. For me, a great example is how you deal with the moment when she makes a break for it. Will you tell us about that story and how you came to think about the various stories that it yielded and produced . After being married and divorced, she decided she needed to escape and wanted to go to the big city. None of her family would let her go. A woman couldnt just take off on the highway for the city so she needed an escort and found someone a friend of hers to take her and the funny thing about this, its the word we use in modern japanese for people who sexually harass women like on subways. So its like when modern readers read this and no japanese they asked me was his name really chacon. He might have been the original because what happened as she escaped with him and said he would escort her but as soon as they got on the road, he starts bothering her about getting married and he said he would desert her by herself on the side of the road if she didnt do what he wanted so he sexually assaulted her, she was raped and had a difficult time writing about this in her letters. She uses the vocabulary of marriage. He wanted to marry me. We think of it as a very positive thing but for somebody that had been through three arranged marriages in which she had no consent, that might be something very different. I went back to the letters because she also changes her story and other rich people report that she told the story to try to reconstruct what happens between those two people on that journey and how i was going to present that information because i could have said she says this but it might not be true. She ran away with a man that was a stranger to her family. This was incredibly embarrassing for the family. Maybe she made this up to see more sympathetic but then i decided i wasnt going to give the counter narrative because i had no reason to think she was lying. I have to be very careful to not think about that incident in a modern framework it is not to hurt the defining part of that story. An important part is that she made it out. Another main character is glory and part of the story youre telling is the dramatic reforms. Will you set the scene that its coming and living and will you talk about that early 1840s and whats going on . We describe as a sort of old chinese thing which is troubles at home and threats from abroad so whats happening in japan first of all there was a catastrophic famine for years in a row and following that, the shock of the opium war in china which britain defeated the empire and the japanese had always thought was the dominant power in the region. When the news comes to japan there is a panic among the defense which is totally justifiable. They died in that catastrophic famine and the epidemics that followed. The government of japan is a series of social reform. Not only were they going to strengthen the government and the taxation but they were going to kind of improve the moral character of the people. So what they did is interfere in daily life on a micromanaging level so they managed the price of tofu and how big the block would be. We can sell large plant we should only cell small plants. Even childrens toys started to be regulated. All of these kind of micromanaging social reforms killed of the Economic Life of the city that is based on consumption and all these things so the city experienced its own economic and social crisis in which women who went out on the street wearing outfits that were not modest enough were actually attacked and tied up and sometimes hauled off to prison so she lived through the famine in the countryside and the social panic in the city and has a lot of trouble finding work and then ultimately has to leave but i think it was interesting to spend all this time talking about the social life of cities and many of the same issues came up for Different Reasons so for example when people were talking about hairdressing. Is it essential, is it something we really need to be doing . It made me think of the fact hairdressing was also in the temple reform. Its frivolous for people to go do their hair. Obviously it wasnt a concern over the contagion but just kind of a moral concern and it was chilling to watch. It recovered from the earthquake that followed and from the arrival opening the city and losing half of its population. Cities are really resilient and thats one of the positive things i think i was able to take out of writing this book. You were also making a big argument which is that cities are fundamentally made by the labor and the presence of the women who were there. How much do you want to extrapolate that, is that something you would want to argue about migration in general . I think i would. And interesting, you know especially in this case that is a military city he is surrounded by samurai, the maledominated city in terms of numbers. We think of the way the cities are built and created as the way of the work in government and my argument in the book is that that is actually not the case. The people that built the cities and make the cities what they are are the ordinary people who are drawn to the promise of the city and participate in the economic and social life. So going to the theater for example. Living in cities like chicago that we engage in without thinking about it because it is a part of our daily lives actually contribute to the urbanization and as a result of that also globalization so i wanted to put the emphasis not on the kind of grand plans and designs but the everyday life of people and forgotten people, nameless people, people considered completely unimportant. Your skill as a historian is capturing the conversations. It stops the action and then you hear the voices of these people because she has so many documents to draw so this is just one tiny little moment and im going to read you a couple of sentences. It seemed small and bruised. And why is it that they were nothing like the hairstyles people actually wore . So these are letters you are drawing upon to give the sense of how people were talking. I guess i just want you to go underneath of that and talk about the craft. Are you reading documents thinking yes because thats what the book is doing is mine craft times 100. Unbelievably sophisticated it is the way that i would describe that. Can you talk us through some of the strategies . I always tell my students i believe social history should be noisy. I think that you should hear from a lot of different people directly if possible when you are describing the world in the past and ultimately we can do that. We have so many documents. And i am a little bit like some kind of bird who just flies around collecting shiny things and putting them into a nest. I love those things and the kind of strange echoes of everyday life that you can hear in the present and i am charged by the idea that in this setting like 1837 that we would think of as distant from ourselves, people are worried about these very just everyday things like where am i going to buy a hat, can i wear this outside because i think it enables us to connect with the world of those people in a way that we cant if we just kind of describe its features. So i was invested in finding those voices and concerns. Every direct quote about the samurai life is a by a woman. It was a wonderful experience in many ways that you can go into your office, close the door and sit down at your computer and three hours later you look up and there is a city on the page in front of you. Thats kind of what i felt like because i was so concerned with trying to will myself back into a space that i didnt physically inhabit and i think that you can get that wrong. I have gotten it wrong. My best example is i went to the village and stood in the field and i heard a bullfrog and i thought theres nothing here anymore but at least i can hear the sounds she would have heard in the village and then i described this to a japanese historian who is a friend of mine. He said they didnt enter until you have to be careful to not let yourself, not let your imagination run away with you and to look and verify and confirm. But you do have to allow your self that leeway to make those mistakes because otherwise if you are too constrained i think you cant get to that place where you can kind of envision and then describe the world. What do you want to ask her and what do you wish you could get an answer to from her . The one thing that i didnt understand and couldnt explain it is why she married her last husband twice, she married this man that had been basically her nextdoor neighbor and he was trying to find work as a samurai and said we will try to get together and see how it goes. She wrote a letter after letter complaining he was lazy and wouldnt go look for work. Whenever he got money he would spend it on his Favorite Foods and sleep all day. He insulted her, they fought all the time, he palmed her clothes. It was just a litany then she divorced him because she wanted him to let her go. Ive never understood exactly what happened there. Whether it was a love story or whether she didnt want to be in this city and this is her only way to go back so thats what i would ask her what happened with you in . If you would like to ask a question and you could come to that microphone on the side of the stage and while people are thinking about questions, i have another one for you because this is a book about husbands and wives and also about siblings and i wonder if you will talk to us a little about did your ideas about siblings change from reading this correspondence . That is a great question. One of the most frequent correspondence was her older brother whod taken over the temple and was responsible for complaining she was ruining the families name and always they had a very close relationship it seemed like from the letters and also an adversarial one. As the kind of patriarch there were certain responsibilities to the house and the family and she was a rebel constantly messing up his plans. But i came to realize in the book that that relationship had to be at its heart. The reason i realized this is completely nonintuitive. I was listening to screenwriting podcasts and writing a plot and narrative and screen writers often have great ideas about what moves the narratives forward. And they tend to write in a more schematic way because they are more constrained we dont think about this in the history so much we just have subjects. But they said a protagonist really has to want something and i thought she wants to go and they talk about that then we talk about antagonists, who is the person who blocks from reaching that goal and i thought about it as kind of a woman against society but then i realized society is vague but the person that is trying to block the goal was her brother and in fact he had a personal investment in patriarchy and social rules that they are rebelling against and do so by putting that relationship more towards the center of the book i was trying to do something that i hope paid off but also more deeply about how ordinary men who are perfectly nice people, theres no ill will trying to do their best also become kind of enforcers because they were caught up in the same social system. I think that does work. Are you waiting to ask a question . Will you talk to us about what you are doing next . The next book, next project . A lot of things have grabbed my attention. First my children grabbed my attention during the pandemic. World war ii is a very popular topic. There are if you walked into barnes and noble right now there would be books about world war ii. Most of it in the United States is about the war in europe and some is about pearl harbor and the South Pacific but i started thinking about the stories of the war that in the United States we are not as familiar with and that story to me is the part of world war ii between the japanese and British Empire so they fight in malaya and burma and try to invade india and its this moment as a result both of the empires collapsed. I was looking at the stories of women who were caught up in that conflict and ended up in the battlefield on burma so im thinking about a korean woman who had been deceived and sent to Service Japanese soldiers in burma and about a british woman whod gone to india as an anthropologist and got caught up in the fighting and about a burmese woman who was an intellectual involved in student movements and then in the kind of japanese back to government and an indian girl born in japan and went to fight in the division on the japanese side of the complex. Im hoping in the same way that i did i can think about these womens lives on all different sides of this very complicated war and think a little bit harder about how those came into conflict and what womens roles in those were and what it did to them for the kind of trajectory of their lives and how they thought about belonging to different nations or ethnic groups. So hopefully that will be the next thing. It sounds wonderful. We have a few more minutes. Anybody that wishes to ask a question should move to the microphone but in the meantime, having talked to so much about how the book is written i would like to read from her favorite part. Lets see if i can balance the book and the microphone. I am i like to read from the end of the book rather than from the beginning. And so, this is from the very last chapter and its actually about the death. I write she couldnt have seen her life in heroic terms and the emergence of a new era. This was one person, an individual, a woman who made the choices and that left very little behind. No children, no legacy, just letters. But if women like her hadnt come in from the countryside, she wouldnt have grown if they hadnt kept the books, done laundry and served food, its economy couldnt have functioned and if they hadnt, the great city wouldnt have been a city at all it would have been a dusty military outpost full of men, one of a thousand not worth all the effort. Her ambition and lifes work, or her aspiration for a different kind of existence comp held her and said the experience changed her. But she also shaped the city. Every copper coin, every piece of clothing, every tray she carried, the big decision to migrate and every tiny choice she made later they send them on their rounds and made it possible for the city magistrate to issue and sent them out to the fields and the wholesalers to the market conduct. They lit lanterns and the stores. It wasnt just a backdrop about a place that she created day by day. Other women, other unknown people would take up her work. Will you join me in thanking hello, everyone. My name is morgan and im an event manager at politics and prose and id like to welcome you all to pmp live. Soon i will draw up a link in the chat for where you can purchase a copy of the strange career of a troublesome word, straight from panettis website, you can ask our speakers a question this afternoon by clicking on the q a box at the bottom of your screen, and we will try to get to as many of those questions as we can towards the end the program. But we apologize in advance if we dont have the time to address your question. Also, there are auto captions
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