I am definitely not a gamer. In fact, I’m terrible at video games of all kinds. When I was a senior in college, my roommates acquired a Nintendo 64 and became obsessed with the first-person shooter game Goldeneye. The entire time I was writing my senior thesis, they were trying to convince me to play Goldeneye, and they couldn’t believe it when I said I’d rather work on my footnotes.

That year, the only thing I was willing to make time for was a boy I met in the elevator of our dorm. He started coming to visit me, or so I thought, until he discovered that my roommates had the N64. After that, he, too, spent most of his time playing Goldeneye, and I went back to my senior thesis. Like many Harvard men who spent their college years getting stoned and gaming, he later became a sucessful venture capitalist. 

Maybe it was the bad memory of the Goldeneye fiasco, but twenty years later, my roommates were still playing Nintendo games, and I was still refusing to join them. I managed to ignore Zelda and all things Mario, cart or otherwise. But when they started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, our group chat shifted to Japanese language questions. “Amy, what is a kotatsu?” they wrote. “What is a suteteko? What is a jinbei?”  

Finally, after months of this, they convinced me that I should play Animal Crossing. “It’s relaxing!” they said. “You don’t have to shoot anyone. You don’t even need to talk to anyone if you don’t want to.” And I thought they had a point – anything would be better than endlessly doom scrolling Twitter. Meanwhile, I was stuck at home in a pandemic with two Nintendo Switch-obsessed children. I couldn’t summon the concentration to do scholarship, but I could certainly move to an imaginary island and harvest oranges.

But unfortunately, twenty years later, even in the middle of a pandemic, I’m still myself. While playing what should have been a completely relaxing game, I found myself considering . . . the robust English-language scholarship on the Japanese empire.

In my defense, this isn’t an entirely ridiculous thing to think about while playing Animal Crossing. As most gamers know, Nintendo is a Japanese company that has its roots in the Meiji Period. It began in 1889 as a Kyoto firm that manufactured the playing cards used in Japanese games such as karuta, where players matched the verses of famous poems. The cards seemed “traditional,” but in fact they were global artifacts: playing cards were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, at which point much older games were adapted to fit the new form. Nintendo extended this legacy of adaptation, moving into electronic toys in the 1970s, and ultimately becoming a world-dominating video game company. The story of the company itself is, in essence, a story about Japan’s changing relationship with the rest of the world, mediated through the constant recasting of “traditional” culture. 

This brings us to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It goes like this: Your avatar is sent to a deserted island with a unique layout and a certain kind of indigenous fruit tree (mine is an orange) and a certain kind of indigenous flower (mine is a lily). An enthusiastic but dimwitted capitalist named Nook has sponsored the journey, and he expects to be paid back, but – as will be the case throughout the game – he charges no interest. You arrive along with other newcomers, your “villagers,” and your task is to develop the island by creating habitations and infrastructure. The best way to earn money is to harvest the natural resources of the island and sell them to a petty shopkeeper; you can also use these resources to construct tools that will aid you in development. Eventually, you meet a naturalist who wants to build a museum on your island, so you donate materials for his collections. You can do all this while dressed in an increasingly varied and ridiculous series of outfits. That, more or less, is the game.

All of this – including the construction of new infrastructure, the intense interest in natural phenomena, and the ridiculous outfits – sounds a lot like an early twentieth-century colonial enterprise. In fact, it is distressingly reminiscent of the Japanese empire itself.

I’m sure that this is not at all what Nintendo intended, especially given the fraught and controversial legacy of the Japanese empire in important East Asian markets. In fact, the game goes to great lengths to emphasize that the island is completely uninhabited: the “villagers” are fellow migrants. This makes the Animal Crossing world completely different from the actual Japanese colonial enterprise, which variously exploited, suppressed, negotiated with, and collaborated with the Chinese, Korean, Ainu, Pacific Islander, Taiwanese, Okinawan and other indigenous people inhabiting the empire. But the ghost of the imperial subject haunts the game, literally. Soon after you arrive on the island, you encounter a drifting ghost, who is shocked at your intrusion on his territory. He seems to predate your settlement by many years. When he sees you, he falls to pieces; throughout the game, he demands to be remembered and reconstructed. 

Many of the game’s most charming features can also be read as ghostly reminders of the Japanese empire. So in the rest of this essay, with my tongue only very slightly in cheek, I am going to offer a very brief introduction to the historiography of Japanese empire, as you might encounter it in its far more pleasant and relaxing Animal Crossing form. (One caveat: I am not a historian of Japanese empire. In fact, I tend to avoid the twentieth century as assiduously as I once avoided video games. So please understand this as a beginner’s perspective on the scholarship of empire, just as it is a beginner’s perspective on the game.)

One of the main tasks of Animal Crossing is cultivation: the player is invited to plant trees, bushes, and flowers. The trees are not only decorative; they are also harvested for hardwood, softwood, and branches, which the player can sell or use in construction. In fact, it is impossible to play this game without planting and harvesting trees. The same was true of the real-world Japanese empire. David Fedman’s work explains how the Japanese pursued a “greenification” policy in colonial Korea. They replanted denuded forests, which they then consumed in an orgy of resource extraction. At the same time, they restricted the consumption of wood by their Korean subjects, trying to turn them from their traditional wood-burning practices to more fuel-efficient means of heating (and, in wartime, to much less nearing overall). The Japanese aimed much of their ire at the ondol, a combination stove and floor heater. As far as I know, you cannot buy an ondol in Animal Crossing, but you can certainly buy a Japanese kotatsu table heater (which sparked my roommates’ curiosity). 

Ultimately, resource extraction on one’s own island is limited – to succeed in the game, the player has to find outlying islands from which to harvest iron ore, wood, and different kinds of fruits. The game encourages the player to find these small islands, gather as much as possible (including, sometimes, people!) and bring them back to the main island. Recruiting “desirable” settlers is, of course, the defining characteristic of actual settler colonialism. Kidnapping was also a real strategy of Pacific empires – in fact, as Viktor Shmagin mentions in his dissertation, in the nineteenth century the Russians briefly contemplated expropriating the Japanese inhabitants of Karafuto in order to resettle them in Alaska.

Island resource extraction, too, was a common strategy of Pacific empires. Paul Kreitman’s dissertation explores the “guano islands” where Japanese and Americans competed to harvest albatross excrement (which was useful as fertilizer). He argues that both American and Japanese imperial actors used the discourse of “conservation” even as they scrambled to gather feathers and guano. Meanwhile, both sides used the islands to make territorial claims. This process involved deliberately occluding or ignoring the inhabitants of these islands and their work. In contrast, the Animal Crossing player is never called upon to annex new territory, but she is encouraged to concentrate on extraction to an almost unsettling degree – once these islands are abandoned, full of holes, stumps, and shattered rocks, the player never encounters them again. 

While the player has to engage in resource extraction in order to make progress, most of the travel in the game is coded as tourism. The player is issued a passport, which receives stamps, and is encouraged to take pictures with her “phone.” In fact, leisure travel is marketed as a feature of island life, encouraged by the cheerful pilot who mans the island’s makeshift airport. This, too, was a feature of Japanese empire. Louise Young writes about how Manchukuo was marketed as a tourist destination – the “dark valley” of the Pacific War, she argues, was considerably brightened for middle-class Japanese by the prospect of imperial recreation. Kate MacDonald, focusing on a longer period, contends that the conditions of travel were uneven; leisure mobility for middle-class Japanese subjects was undergirded by the coerced travel and difficult circumstances of lower-class Japanese laborers and colonial subjects who occupied lower berths and third-class cars. Meanwhile, the central place of travel photography in making empire (the “visual economy of race-making”) is discussed in Paul Barclay’s work on Taiwan. 

But let’s get back to the more enjoyable circumstances of Animal Crossing. On the main island, the player is encouraged to clear land and bring it under cultivation. Right now, I’m growing peach trees on my island, Stanlandia. Of course, this changes the ecology of the island, and the non-native species (non-indigenous fruit trees) bring higher prices in the island markets than the ubiquitous native fruits. The transformation of native ecologies – and the encouragement of settled agriculture – were, of course, prominent features of empire. But unlike in Animal Crossing, these real-world strategies had human and environmental costs. Wendy Matsumura discusses how the Japanese imposed a capitalist regime of resource-intensive sugar cultivation in Okinawa, transforming relations between elites and peasants and inspiring vigorous resistance. In Manchuria, the Japanese (extending similar efforts by Qing and Republican Chinese governments) transformed the pastoral territory of nomadic Mongols into soybean farms. Sakura Christmas describes how this initiative drained selenium from the soil and caused endemic disease among cultivators. Needless to say, horrific episodes of yellow diarrhea never appear in Animal Crossing (at least, they haven’t so far). 

As the player persists in the game, she meets more and more characters, many of whom seem reminiscent of real world settler colonialists. Even the more-or-less benevolent and harmless characters in Animal Crossing have their imperial equivalents. Nook – the hapless capitalist – is a benign version of the actual labor brokers who kept Japanese migrants in debt until they could reimburse their travel costs. The small shopkeepers and traveling merchants who appear to offer plants and strange assortments of clothes have their counterparts in the Omi merchants discussed in Jun Uchida’s work on Korea. She makes the argument that petty shopkeepers and enterprising small-time merchants were the backbone of Japan’s colonial enterprise on the peninsula. Similar, less family-friendly characters appear in David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds. This assortment of grifters, pirates, and prostitutes more closely resembles the character of Redd, a fox who appears on a boat and offers the player stolen artwork before drifting away to parts unknown. 

Finally, one of the most intriguing characters in the Animal Crossing world is the curator of the island museum, a pedantic owl named Blathers. Unlike the other characters, who don’t seem to have any ethnicity (at least in my reading), Blathers, who wears a tweed suit and speaks in the pompous cadences of Owl from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, seems unmistakably British. This is interesting, because the British Museum is probably the most famous example of imperial collection and display. In Japan, too, the construction of museums, zoos, and botanical gardens was a feature of what Robert Eskildsen calls (in a different context) “mimetic imperialism,” in which the Japanese copied the strategies of other empires. As Annika Culver has argued, Japanese and British and American ornithologists formed enduring scientific networks in the pre-war era, sharing a upper-class culture of birding, which Japanese elites found extremely attractive. (This is where the ridiculous outfits come in.) Meanwhile, Ian Miller points out that the Japanese were inspired by British and other European models when they constructed Ueno Zoo, which then served as a place to exhibit the fauna of empire. Alice Tseng describes how art museums, too, served the aims of state-building, and, later, empire – they were spaces where national identity was constructed and displayed. The design of Blathers’ museum looks modern, but it’s patterned on the Meiji-era institutions that Tseng describes.

There are many additional avenues of exploration here. There’s the history of Meiji-era mountaineering (hello, Kären Wigen!) and the construction of colonial transportation infrastructure (hello to my student Youjia Li!). If you’re an actual expert on this era, and the game, you can probably think of much more to say.

But for now, it’s after my kids’ bedtime, the Nintendo Switch is finally free, and I have some azaleas to plant in Stanlandia. 

(This essay is dedicated to Jennie Connery, Liz Marsham, and Jessica Jackson, in gratitude for iron ore, a marimba, a muscle suit, several bags of hyacinths, and 25 years of friendship) 

I have not read Alan Mikhail’s book on Selim the Grim, though I would like to. But like every global historian on Twitter, I have read the reviews. And I have also read the commentary on the reviews. Who could resist? The controversy has everything: brilliant and acclaimed historians, institutional rivalry, small field drama, accusations of selling out, counter-accusations of misogyny, and (always popular) critiques of global history. It also has a long discussion of the origins of coffee, a mention of the dowager empress Cixi, and a foray into the possible presence of Vikings in the Yucatán. 

I would be lying if I said none of this interested me. I find it all fascinating. But what I am most concerned about is the way everyone involved has been drawn into a discussion that, in my mind, conflates three very different things: popular history, “great man” history, and global history.

I understand why people are tempted to put these three kinds of work in the same category. It makes for a good story, in which bad incentives lead to bad ends. As I see it, it goes something like this: “Historians of places other than the United States have trouble competing in the market for trade books because publishers are looking to profit and only make offers on accessible, familiar topics. As a result, historians trying to write for trade end up making huge leaps to suit the demands of the market. They try to relate everything to the more familiar story of the United States (resulting in “fake global history”), or they choose a narrative approach that simplifies the past by attributing world historical change to the actions of a charismatic, famous man.”

This argument is appealing in some ways, but its premise is fundamentally flawed. “Popular” is an audience, not an approach. People write successful trade books about all kinds of things: eels, plant biology, poker, mundane suburban extra-marital affairs, Mumbai slums, and owls. John McPhee wrote a book about the cultivation of oranges and 2421 readers have rated it 4.07 stars on Goodreads. 

People will tell you it’s impossible to sell a trade history book that isn’t about the United States. They will tell you it’s impossible to sell a trade book that isn’t about a famous man. They will tell you it’s impossible to sell a trade book if you are not the chair of the History Department at Yale, or if you do not resemble David McCullough. I heard all of these things, and they are all wrong. I take it personally, because this kind of conventional wisdom discourages people who are already marginalized in academic history, particularly women and those who would write about them. 

Critics of trade history are not wrong when they point out that the History shelves at bookstores are overcrowded with biographies of famous men, and critics of global history are not wrong when they point out that the field is dominated by male historians. Both popular history and global history tend to encourage “great man” dynamics – in their subjects and in their practitioners. But trade history and global history are not the same thing, and there are different mechanisms at work. 

If successful non-fiction can be about anything, why does it seem as if trade history is entirely books about George Washington? One lazy answer is that readers are far more interested in the adventures of famous men than the mundane lives of non-famous women. But we know from other genres that this isn’t the case. The protagonists of literary fiction are often women living ordinary lives, and much of the memoir boom of the past twenty years has been sustained by non-famous women writing about themselves. If you wander from the History section to the Historical Fiction section of the bookstore, you’ll find a ridiculous number of books about the alchemist’s daughter and the shoemaker’s daughter and the painter’s daughter. All of them imagine the lives of ordinary women in the past – and not just in the United States! – and they all sell.

Other people might say that the readers of nonfiction and the readers of fiction and memoir are entirely different – and that history readers are men who like enormous, block-like tomes with pictures of Napoleon on the cover. But that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why wouldn’t the audiences for fiction and memoir read history, if we gave them something they were interested in? One explanation for women’s investment in historical fiction is that it allows them to read stories about the past that feature women, stories they are unable to find in their history courses or in the nonfiction section of the bookstore. 

So what keeps these women from reading popular history, and what keeps us from writing it for them? I think we might find an answer in the tension between the evidentiary standards of historical writing and the expectations and desires of readers. When people read fiction, they can often find pieces of their own experience rendered precisely, and beautifully, in someone else’s words. They care about Mrs. Dalloway because they, too, have gone out to buy flowers for a party, and because some of her darker thoughts have echoed in their own minds. When they read historical fiction, they think, “Who would I have been in seventeenth-century England, or in Renaissance Florence, or in Japanese-occupied Singapore?” 

The history of great men allows readers some of that joy of identification because the inner lives of famous men are so accessible – they wrote endlessly, and other people wrote about them. As a result, the many biographers of Thomas Jefferson can recreate his inner life, much as a novelist would, without sacrificing any of the standards of historical evidence. Historians of ordinary people can’t make this leap, because they rarely have enough to go on. They can write histories that are scrupulously non-fictional, and they don’t feel true, or readable, because they seem to stubbornly obscure the subject’s thoughts and feelings.. 

As I see it, the solution to this problem is not to abandon the standards of evidence, or to resign oneself to endlessly writing about the same dozen famous men. Instead, it’s to choose our subjects more carefully and – within reason – to speculate, so that ordinary people are allowed the same vibrancy, the same liveliness, the same sense of possibility as their more famous contemporaries. Saidiya Hartman accomplished this unforgettably in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And I believe such projects are essential if we want popular history books to be more democratic and less boring. 

The problem with global history is a different one. Although Subrahmanyam, Kafadar, and Fleischer critique the simplistic narrative ambitions of “fake global history,” the type of global history Subrahmanyam writes has an ambivalent relationship to narrative and a more openly troubled relationship to women’s and gender history. 

The problematic relationship between global history and narrative is, I think, relatively easy to explain. Many of the original leaders of the field – and here I’m thinking of people like Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam – thought of themselves as countering a dominant story about the Rise of the West by offering counterexamples and provocations from regional histories. That older story had its arc – the “rise” – and it had its protagonists, let’s say from Vasco Da Gama through maybe James Watt – who were all European men. With the new global history there were new protagonists (for Subrahmanyam, the King of Calicut), and new arcs (for Pomeranz it was “divergence” rather than rise).  But the goal was still to complicate the unified narrative, and as we began to account for new places, new actors, new conceptions of space and setting, the story split off in many directions. 

Yet women still did not feature very often as the protagonists of global history, particularly history set before the twentieth century. As many others have noted, traditional women’s and gender history came out of social history, which relies on intense archival work in obscure locations. In contrast, the new global history relied on surveying vast expanses and making comparisons. When new protagonists surfaced, they were those who were already prominent at the level of national histories: i.e. usually not women.* Thus it is no surprise that we are more likely to get a global history featuring Selim the Grim than an anonymous woman washing clothes in an Anatolian stream, even if we take the “trade book” question off the table. It is a surprise that global historians suddenly have a problem with great man history, but I assume that they are more upset with the greatness than the men, per se. 

Finally, as Patricia Crossley points out, the field of global history is stubbornly male dominated. This becomes particularly obvious whenever there is a big conference, but you can also see it in the citations of “state of the field” articles. For example, David Motadel and Richard Drayton’s defense of global history cites roughly thirty-five women and more than twice as many men, which is actually a good ratio by the standards of the field. There is no good intellectual explanation for this, so I will not offer one. But I will note that historians such as Lara Putnam, Emma Rothschild, and Linda Colley have been among the most vocal advocates of finding new kinds of global history protagonists, pointing out that new search technologies have made it possible to find obscure people and trace them through multiple archives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these historians are women. (And, for the record, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh was a trade book.)

This is now a very long blog post, and I have to go make dinner and tend to all kinds of domestic labor, but here is my point: there is no good reason that trade books have to feature famous men, familiar places, and dramatic, simple stories. There is also no good reason why global history has to foreground famous men. Thus there is no reason whatsoever that a good trade history that is also a global history must end up being a story about a famous man. By using this explanation – “well, it’s a popular history that features the non-West, so of course it’s a slap-dash story about a great man” – we are actually cutting off the possibility of more democratic, less boring, and more inclusive popular histories. And we desperately need them!

So we should be wary of how we frame the discussion of global history, trade history, and great men, lest we encourage the very dynamics we are trying to critique.

*The usual strategy of overcoming this is the “global microhistory,” that might have a woman at its center – think Linda Colley’s brilliant The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (mentioned above). Since microhistory is, in itself, a way of recuperating narrative in the wake of the cultural turn, this is an example of a way in which narrative, gender history, and global history can work together. But there are very serious limitations, and these, again, bring us back into the Eurocentric problems that the new global historians tried to disrupt. The protagonists of new global microhistories are generally European women, who moved more than their East Asian counterparts and left more records than the African women who were moved en masse during the slave trade. So this seems to me to be a great strategy that produces fascinating work, but I don’t think it solves the problem of narrating global history in a way that can account for non-European women as protagonists. 

Note: I edited this post on 9/27/20 to add the point about women historians and their search for new protagonists. Thanks to several people for their comments on this post!)

This is what it feels like right now, tonight. The dishes are still on the table – empty wineglasses, half a challah torn to pieces, honey dripped on my younger son’s chair. 

*********

Nearly four years ago my mother called me laughing. “Can you believe this? ‘Grab them by the pussy’? Thank God, he’ll never get elected now.” I was giving the two-year-old a bath, I remember so clearly. The phone kept slipping off my shoulder. 

Two months later I walked into a conference – how ridiculous, a conference in Japanese history! Were we really doing this? How could we be in a seminar room? The Americans seemed more jet-lagged than the Japanese scholars. My friend and I were both wearing black, as if someone had died. “I thought of you,” he said. “With the Cubs winning, and then . . . I know you would have had it the other way.” 

Those were the years when I traveled everywhere, leaving late at night and early in the morning. I was constantly sick, constantly exhausted. A kind older man pulled me aside and said, “Amy, you don’t actually need to travel so much.” But I did, because I was running.

I fell asleep in my friend’s office, wrapped in my coat, my blown-out curls crushed against the armrest.

********

Two years later – was it two years? – I sat in a coffee shop staring at my phone, watching a woman from my hometown. She had my accent, but she was softer spoken and more polite. I heard her tell us about all those familiar places. The Potomac Village Safeway. We used to shop at the Giant in Cabin John Mall.

She told us what happened to her, and I cried. 

So I worked. I wrote an essay. I finished the book. I must have given a hundred talks. No more diapers, just math homework and lunchboxes and band-aids. I made dinner almost every night. Every Rosh Hashanah we said, “This year.” 

**********

A year and a half later we were “safer at home.” I went grocery shopping in a cold panic. 

My son and I tried to fill out a worksheet about the “Signs of Spring,” a last-minute activity sent home from kindergarten. Find a butterfly. Find a daffodil. Find a bee. There weren’t any signs of spring – it was March in Chicago. He cried. I cried.

I taught a graduate seminar online. The students were exhausted. I was barely present. My children had tantrums. I couldn’t sleep. I thought, “Next year.”

********

We wrote to the dean. We wrote to the provost. We wrote to the president of the university. He referred us to the VP of Risk Management. “I understand,” he wrote back. “I have kids, too (though luckily my wife is bearing most of the burden of childcare so I can do my work for the university!)”

Later, I watched a meeting and stared at the VPs in their boxes. Scrubbed faces and purple ties, every piece of them so obviously the product of some woman’s labor. Like golems conjured from sandwiches and shopping trips, sex and kind words, everything it takes to create a man like that. 

“My wife and I,” one of them said, and smirked.

I thought about what they get paid. I thought about what I get paid. I thought about my book about to come out, my promotion about to go through. “Hold on,” I thought. “Next year.”

******

Fall 2020 and none of the kids are in school. They are “remote.” I am remote.

We go to the playground, even though the kids have forgotten how to play. The mothers still have their pale winter faces. They are wearing sweatpants. They are covered in lint. They look five years older. 

We all work, but none of us can work. “But I’m lucky,” they say. “My boss is understanding. My husband helps.” 

I think, “This is not my life.” But the mothers are looking at the ground. Their shoes are falling apart. They’re talking about cutting their husbands’ hair.

I write that I want my six-year-old to go back to school and a stranger surfaces from the depths of the internet to call me a whiny, entitled Karen. 

*****

RBG meant that you didn’t have to choose. Your babies or your life. Your career or your husband. Your body or your mind. She seemed like the last person who understood what that meant, who didn’t apologize, who had the clarity to say, “No, this is not enough.”

All my life – all these things I depended on – unraveled in four years. I would have had it the other way. I would have moved the earth backward. Unmade the sandwiches and unknotted the ties. Let the men in their boxes feel what it’s like to be dragged back in time.

Yes, I believed that I didn’t have to choose, but I would have undone everything, made any bargain. Take my book, take my career. I would’ve given it all back if it meant I could still lift a glass and think, “This year.”

In November 2016, I knew who I was and what I was doing. I had a two-year-old, a six-year-old, and an aging, floppy-eared mutt. My husband and I paid bills and entered events into our calendar; we scheduled appointments and poured cups of milk and faxed forms that shouldn’t have needed to be faxed. I had all the numbers in my phone and the lists in my head. I had a name for every bunny in our yard. I could find the words to rebuild a lost city and populate it with ghosts. But overnight I realized that none of that mattered: I couldn’t decide the election. 

I had always understood, intellectually, that my world was small. I knew it was possible to be overwhelmed by historical forces I didn’t understand. But when the election happened, my attention had been turned in the opposite direction, toward my own domestic realm, where I was supposed to assess and mitigate every risk. Suddenly, I was unable to reconcile the vastness of my responsibilities – which included, as a citizen, the election – and the very limited extent of my power. Many of us who had been privileged enough to enjoy the illusion of control, who spent the months and years after the election thinking about how we could have done more, or tried something different, felt the same way. 

In my work, I thought a lot about power, but on a very small scale. I wrote about who spent the money and who scrubbed the floor. My book’s protagonist, Tsuneno, tried to seize control of her own life; she rejected her father’s and brothers’ choices and made her own. But in the aftermath of the election, I thought more about the people on the edges of her story, who seemed less assertive, maybe more ordinary. 

I considered a man named Yasugoro, a native of Ishigami village, the author of two very awkwardly written letters in Tsuneno’s family’s archive. He was well-educated for a peasant, but his characters were blocky, his orthography was unconventional, and his meanings were difficult to follow. I tried to piece together a life for him out of the scattered mentions in registers and other people’s letters. I wrote a tiny biography:

“Yasugoro was a peasant from Ishigami Village in Echigo province. He must have been married; he lost two young children in the same terrible year, 1822. His two daughters, Saku and Mayo, died in 1849 at the ages of thirteen and twenty-one. Yasugoro was a devoted patron of his village temple. He was invited to weddings and sent appropriate gifts when he couldn't attend. He worked some winters in the city of Edo, but he always came home. He had terrible handwriting and could barely write a coherent letter, but he was a faithful correspondent. He lent his neighbor a few coins when she got herself in trouble in Edo. He died in the eleventh month of 1853.”

But what could I make out of that life? He was no one’s idea of a progatonist. Not even mine.

Thinking about Yasugoro made me realize that I’ve never had a good answer to my central question: how to measure the smallness of an ordinary life against the terrifying immensity of history. It’s easier when the person in question was clearly a rebel, when, to put in terms of historical jargon, she “had agency.” Then you can establish a classic narrative conflict: an individual against society. But what about the others, the ones who are overwhelmed, carried along, complicit or victimized, or both?

I’m not a historian of the Holocaust, slavery, indigenous dispossession, or war; my scholarship doesn’t tend to explore the limits of what a human being can endure. My subjects’ lives were more difficult than I can fathom, but in some ways the shape of their experience is still familiar. When I thought about the ordinary people who populated my work, I could see myself in the choices they made. My students would ask whether the subjects of the work we read “had agency,” and I would be frustrated. “Do you have agency?” I would ask.

It isn’t that we look for our modern, liberated selves in our historical actors, I would say. It’s that we misunderstand who we are and what our seemingly infinite choices add up to. We focus on individual effort because it’s easier than acknowledging our collective failure, and because it’s paralyzing to realize we don’t know if anything we can do will make a difference. Now, in the midst of disaster, we obsess over our personal choices – don’t go out, wear a mask, wear the mask correctly, wipe down every package, educate the children, make sure you exercise, don’t buy too much, don’t prepare too little – and avoid the hard truth that very little is in our control.

I’m not sure whether the people I study, who lived in Japan two hundred years ago, thought about choice in the same way. But it’s wrong to assume that they were resigned to disaster, believing it was karma. During the catastrophe of the Tenpo Famine, four straight years of failed harvests and epidemics in the late 1830s, priests turned to the language of faith to explain their plight: “The suffering of ordinary people makes me think of the impermanence of this world,” one wrote. “My only hope is to pray for salvation in the next life.” But village headmen, facing impending doom, pleaded for help from their overlords in a tone that reminds me of today’s governors. They understood that the natural disaster was partially manmade, that a different policy might help. The headman in one village in Echigo composed a thorough account of the entire crisis so that people would understand what had happened. He wrote that he wanted people to be prepared so that it could never happen again. 

Social historians like to match effects to events, to describe the consequences of failure. We look to mass movements, to rebellions, to numbers and ratios – almost always aggregates, usually involving hundreds if not thousands or even millions of people. Abandoned fields and deaths are (relatively) easy to count. And we know why rioters smashed rice shops and why rebels took up arms. When the samurai Oshio Heihachiro started an uprising in 1837, he wrote a manifesto. His signs read “Save the People.” He wasn’t subtle. If the scale is large enough, or the actors are dramatic and eloquent enough, it isn’t difficult to understand how disaster leads to unrest. It’s a useful kind of story. It enables us to imagine, now, how this catastrophe might give birth to much-needed change.  

But what about ordinary people, individuals? In the Tenpo Famine, hundreds of thousands died, but many more survived. What about them? Did they make different choices in the aftermath?

Most of the people I study were fortunate, literate, and wealthy. They survived and wrote very little about the suffering of their neighbors. Maybe they were entirely self-involved, but it’s more likely that they didn’t see the need to keep a record. But as a result, it’s difficult to perceive how the famine shaped their lives, and then it’s mostly guesswork. Did economic stress cause a marriage to fail, or did the couple just not get along? Did the patriarch die of an epidemic disease, or was it something else?

And what I really want to know is even more inaccessible. What changed in their interior lives? Did they make different marriages, go new places, forge new friendships? 

Yasugoro survived the famine. He welcomed a new baby, Mayo, at the height of the crisis, and lost his mother two years later. He still went to Edo; he continued to work as a servant in the winters. I don’t know what, if anything, changed for him. But two years after the famine, Tsuneno met a man who made her a proposition. Run away with me, he said. Abandon your village, lie to your family, and pawn your clothes. We’ll leave tomorrow. And given the option, she decided to go. 

I can’t connect her decision to the catastrophe of the famine, as much as I would like to. When I look to her neighbors and relatives, more conventional people, I can’t say how the disaster reverberated years and decades later, sending ripples of change into the quiet of everyday life. Some shifts are so subtle that even the people involved in them can’t trace their origin. Some historical phenomena are just too small to see.

I sit in the orange chair in my children’s playroom, surrounded by scattered baseball cards and chess pieces, safe for now. I send messages to my college roommate group chat. Long ago, my friend, also a writer, gave it a jokey title: “Strong Female Protagonists.” Right now it’s hard to believe. I open a new window and email a colleague. “Maybe someday someone will find this correspondence and write a thesis about us,” I write, half seriously. “The minor intellectuals of the disaster era.”

I like to imagine that hypothetical historian, somewhere far away, a native speaker of a different language, puzzling through the English in my emails. I wonder what she will decide about me, sitting in my house, scrolling through Twitter, writing about two hundred year old problems, watching the catastrophe unfold.

When my older son was six and my younger son was two, I spent a week teaching the Ibsen play A Doll’s House to sixteen brilliant first-year students. This was an unusual assignment for me – most of the time I teach premodern Japanese history – but the seminar was part of an interdisciplinary, co-taught course on the subject of marriage, and one of my colleagues in the English department had assigned it.

My students that quarter were so eager to speak that I barely had to guide the discussion at all. It was like a lovely vacation from the real work of teaching. I spent an hour and a half, twice a week, just sitting at the head of a seminar table marveling at the intellectual energy of eighteen-year-olds. That week, I listened as they returned again and again to the question that people have been asking about Ibsen’s heroine for nearly a hundred fifty years: How could she leave her children?

After seminar, one of my students came to my office to pick up a paper. On her way out, she turned back and asked, shyly, “Is it hard to be a professor and have two little kids?” 

I was surprised, and definitely sleep deprived, and I think I answered more honestly than I needed to. “It’s pretty much impossible,” I said. 

She looked thoughtful. “Did do you ever think about maybe not being a professor? Maybe just for a little while?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh. “No,” I said, “never.” 

Two weeks later, I stayed up late writing in my journal. 

H was sick after Thanksgiving, up in the night crying. He was feverish all weekend and into Monday. We sent him to daycare Tuesday, but he got sent home with a fever again, so I brought him to the doctor. Ear infections. Both ears. They said the tubes fell out already. Antibiotics. So he was out Wednesday, too. Wednesday night S woke up in the night saying his stomach hurt. Thursday night he was awake all night with a fever and then threw up, and then in the morning H woke up with a 102 fever and vomit all over his crib. B stayed home most of the day so I could go in. And I still have the cold I’ve had for weeks and weeks. I feel bad for being so desperate for it to be over. But we’ve been doing this for six winters now, and I’m exhausted.

But no, I never thought about not being a professor. Not ever. 

My first baby – now a lovely, easy child -- was a hard labor and a c-section. He cried all the time. I used to listen to “Winterreise” over and over again in the middle of the night, trying to get him to settle. It was summer in Chicago, but the nursery was a snow-crusted forest in Germany. “The depressed German man again?” my husband would ask. 

When the baby was six weeks old I brought him to campus for a visit. He was asleep in the stroller when I wheeled him into my office, which already seemed like it belonged to someone else. I saw the printed pages of the first draft of my book manuscript sitting on the desk and turned them, feeling like I was engaged in some thrilling transgression, until he woke up and started screaming. “You must be so happy to have this time with him,” people would say, and I would think of the manuscript lying on the desk in my dark office.

The problem wasn’t that having a baby changed me; it was that it didn’t. What was I supposed to do about that?

Often, when I look back on those years, I find strange holes in my memory. I’ll encounter pages of notes that I don't remember writing, on a book that I would swear that I’ve never read. The year my younger son turned one, I wrote twenty-six lectures about early modern global history. I know this because I use them to this day, but it’s as if they spontaneously materialized in my files, containing information that appeared in my sentences without ever passing through my brain. When did I learn about the extinction of land birds on Barbados? Where did I read about the sale of used tea leaves in Amsterdam? 

I do remember that the strangest things would strike me as funny. Commercials for sleeping pills. The entire concept of golf. Anyone trying to flirt with me, anywhere, under any circumstances. The emeritus professor who cornered me at the mailboxes and commented that I’d gotten my figure back. The well-meaning older woman – a professor with no children – who looked at me across a table, and asked me, quite sincerely, “Amy, what feeds your inner life?” My inner life. Hilarious.

I still encounter versions of my brilliant student who was disturbed by the firmly closed door at the end of A Doll’s House. They’re young women, and some older women, who want to have children. In office hours, at conference dinners, after class in seminar rooms, they ask me, “How did you do it?”

I think they expect me to have some practical advice, or rules. Plan to give birth in the summer, and submit your manuscript before your due date. Write while your baby is napping.* Schedule all your courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and never teach a winter quarter if you can help it. 

But instead I think of the extinct land birds in Barbados, and the depressed German man singing in a dark room, the incomprehensible commercials for sleeping pills, the crinkle of a diaper against my arm when I picked up my baby from daycare. Napping on the floor of my office. The paralyzing despair of unlocking a car seat’s five-point-harness for the fifth time in a day, for the fifth year straight. The crayon Valentines that said “I love Mommy,” decorated with lopsided hearts. “Did you ever think about maybe not being a professor?” All the things I know I can’t remember.

“There isn’t any way to do it,” I say. “You just do.” 

*hahahahhahahahaha. babies don’t nap.

I’m a historian of Japan, so whenever anyone mentions 1868, I think of the Meiji Restoration. It’s one of the most important things you learn in the Japanese history survey: in January 1868, Emperor Meiji announced the abolition of the Tokugawa shogunate and the restoration of direct imperial rule. In the months and years to follow, the new central government embarked on a series of modernizing reforms, which were more consequential than the moment of restoration itself. But the year is still a marker, and in 2018, there was a flurry of scholarly activity – podcasts, conferences, special volumes, etc. – to commemorate the 150th anniversary. 

I commemorated and conferenced along with everyone else, even though (with the exception of one article) I tend to avoid the Meiji period entirely, and I can never even keep the events of the Restoration straight in my head.* In the middle of that year, 2018, which seemed endless for so many reasons, I tweeted: “I’m far more excited about the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Little Women than I am about the anniversary of the Meiji Restoration – maybe I’m in the wrong field.”

It was a joke, but I also meant it.

I read Little Women over and over again when I was a child. I picked it up again many years later, as a graduate student living in Osaka, during a year and a half that I spent compulsively reading novels. I checked out the book from the library at Kansai University, telling myself that the detour into American children’s literature was defensible. After all, it was women’s history, contemporaneous with the period I studied. 

When I reread Little Women in Japan, the parts of the book that had always bothered me seemed liberating, even radical. I had never been able to relate to Jo March, even though I felt like I was supposed to, because she so emphatically rejected conventional femininity. Her sisters Meg and Amy, who did not go on to write their own books, liked white gloves, lace-trimmed dresses, and delicate shoes with heels. Meg curled her hair. Amy slept with a clothespin on her nose to try to make it pointier. I have always been an Amy. I can’t manage a curling iron, but if I thought a clothespin would work I would try it. 

As a twenty-three-year-old woman in Japan, I was tired of everyone telling me that I was “cute,” or that I would be if I used more make-up or lost weight. “Cute” seemed like a mandate, not a compliment. For the first time, I envied Jo’s lack of vanity and understood her rejection of feminine beauty.

But as I sat through the conferences and commemorations of Meiji at 150, it was that mundane world of beauty and domesticity – the sewing kits and gilt-edged mirrors – that seemed unaccountably missing. The world of Little Women was the world of the Restoration: Louisa May Alcott began writing in May 1868, just as Katsu Kaishu surrendered the shogun’s capital to imperial forces. And yet, those two narratives could not seem more distant. In one, mud, guns, tense negotiations, the fate of a city and a nation in the balance; in the other, pen and ink, a wooden desk, a print run of 2,000 copies, and a woman’s livelihood at stake.   

In “domestic” histories of the Restoration, which focus on women, you can see the places where the two narratives might converge.** The Japanese loyalist activist Matsuo Taseko was, in some ways, much like Louisa May Alcott, though she was more than twenty-five years older. She, too, was a writer, and she, too, was passionately invested in the civil war that consumed her country in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both women reached toward traditionally feminine literary forms, love poetry and the domestic novel, but both were also ambivalent, at best, about femininity and domesticity. Louisa May Alcott, who was famous for her tender evocation of a household full of women, always spoke wistfully about liking boy things better than girl things. Her heroine, Jo, wants to be a boy so that she can fight in the Civil War. Matsuo Taseko, matriarch of a multi-generational household, wrote of her frustration with inhabiting the “weak body of a useless woman.” She, too, expressed her desire to be a man so that she could fight for a cause. 

These women were also connected by the global market in textiles, in ways Louisa might not have recognized, but Taseko certainly did. When Taseko was not writing poetry, she was raising silkworms. The intense, but unstable, foreign demand for silk cocoons and thread caused wild swings in price and fueled her xenophobia. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Louisa and her family contributed to the demand that destabilized Taseko’s community. Louisa’s characters used yards and yards of silk in their bell-like, full-skirted dresses. In Little Women, there is pink silk, violet silk, black silk (unsuitable), glimmering grey silk (coveted – “if only I had a silk,” Meg sighs), and a much-wished-for pair of silk buttoned boots. There is also Asian silk being carried on Laurie’s uncle’s ships, which are involved in the “India trade.” But there is not much cotton, possibly because abolitionist families like the Alcotts boycotted the products of American slave plantations.

To both women, then, the domestic realm was politically engaged, even if it was stifling to the individual, even if it was a world that they needed desperately to escape. Both discovered how to rework the material of domestic life into artistic accomplishment. They returned again and again to an ideal of feminine beauty for inspiration, even though they struggled to free themselves from the incessant, voracious demand for female labor that made that beauty possible. This fundamental conflict echoed in their writing about revolution, about politics, about change. But with few exceptions, it has fallen out of ours.

Sitting in the conferences and listening to the podcasts in 2018, I heard about historical actors who were predominantly men. This did not bother me as much as hearing about the intellectual debates over the Restoration, which happened a century later, and which invariably involved men and their ideas of what mattered. I heard a voice in my head that I often hear when I try to engage with high intellectual history, and which might as well belong to Amy March, or to her sister Meg: What does this have to do with nursing a baby? Or hanging out laundry, making pickles, bringing in water, worrying over a fever, sweeping a floor, scrubbing a child’s face? What does it have to do with falling in love, or wanting a violet silk dress, or getting angry at your sister? What does this have to do with anything that seems real to me?

I think we can do a better job of finding answers. 

*I have one document on my computer entitled “explaining the bakumatsu currency crisis to myself” and another called “Restoration timeline,” and I consult both far too often.

** Here I’m citing Anne Walthall’s amazing The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration — historians of East Asia already know this, but everyone else should go click the link!

Note: I edited this on 2/10/20 to add the explicit citation to Walthall (in addition to the link) and to be a little clearer in my second-to-last paragraph.

When I was sixteen, I appeared on tv for the one and only time in my life. The program was ill-conceived from the start. A group of local high school students gathered to discuss academic and political issues in a roundtable format, with an adult moderator, and accepted questions from people who called in. For reasons I still don’t understand, we were asked to discuss the representation of history in movies. Equally incomprehensibly, this program aired live.

This was on C-SPAN – the network that televises the proceedings of the federal government. This makes for unpleasantly riveting content now, but in the mid-1990s it was reliably dull. Still, it was television, in the age before streaming, and people would flip through their few dozen channels, land on C-SPAN, and actually watch it. 

I was excited to be on C-SPAN. I dutifully watched all the movies – the one I remember best is Quiz Show– and thought about what I would say. I wore a red sweater, thinking it would show up better onscreen. I even put on make-up. I was good at speaking in class, as I would later be good at speaking in seminar. I thought I might also be good at tv. 

The roundtable discussion was fine, though I have no recollection of what I said. What I do remember is the second caller, an older man. “I have a question for Amy,” he said.

I leaned forward, in my red sweater and unfamiliar eyeliner, and smiled.

“What do you think of Howard Stern’s big dick?”

The moderator cut off the call. “This happens,” she said briskly, and moved on. There were other callers and more questions, and the other students must have answered them. I couldn’t speak. Or move. I tried not to cry. Why was it a question for me? He did say Amy, didn’t he? I thought of my mother, who had come with me and was watching from the greenroom. Was it something about the sweater? (Strangely, ever since, I have been fixated on that red sweater.) Was there something else I could have said? 

I’m sure the caller was watching. I’m sure he noticed my misery. 

I wonder if he was jerking off.

I wonder if I should have written that.

I’m not supposed to use the phrase “jerking off,” just like I’m not supposed to talk about a “big dick,” because I’m an academic historian who adheres to the basic conventions of professional politeness, because I’m a respectable married woman with children, and, most importantly, because it seems like an invitation. It’s the verbal equivalent of that pretty smile and red sweater.

My entire professional life, I’ve written about desire and subjugation, and I’ve tried to avoid issuing that invitation. I wrote the world’s least sexy article about adultery and the world’s least sexy book about prostitution. If a man brings up anything related to sex in a professional setting, I issue a practiced blank stare. No, I have never heard that term, it says. No, I do not understand that joke. 

And yet. 

As an assistant professor, I went to a campus interview and found myself alone in an interview with two men who asked me about the depiction of Korean women in Japanese pornography. It was a joke, apparently. By then I was an exhausted mother with better coping strategies. I dramatically looked at my watch. “Congratulations,” I said, “it’s 8:30 in the morning and you’ve already asked the one female job candidate about pornography.” And then I smiled my most non-threatening smile. I knew I was not getting that job.

 Years later, after writing a book and getting tenure, I gave a big lecture at the Freer-Sackler museum and a man came up to the podium to ask a question. He had an unkempt beard. “So,” he asked, as I eyed his dirty sweatshirt, “do you watch Japanese porn?” I turned my back on him and walked away. Later, a graduate student chastised me. “You know, I don’t think he meant to offend you,” he said. 

I’m a professor in your field and you’re aligning yourself with the man in the dirty sweatshirt, I thought. 

By then, I didn’t think it was the green dress I had chosen, or the make-up and the blow-out. Or the jewelry and the wedding ring, all my usual armor. By then, I had read enough feminist theory and criticism to know that any woman speaking in public becomes a target for sexual objectification. But I still felt like the sixteen-year-old in the red sweater. I had seen myself as a professor, an intellectual. How stupid of me. How unrealistic. 

I can do everything possible to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention, to avoid issuing the invitation, to avoid opening the door. But the problem is that misogyny isn’t that polite. It doesn’t wait for an invitation. It will show up anyway, with an unkempt beard, and demand your attention. 

I can politely decline to say the words – “dick,” “jerking off” – and then I will be above reproach. But I will also be unable to explain my own life and the forces that have shaped my scholarship, often without my wanting them to. I think of the vulgar signs at the Women’s March that the National Archives blurred out for the sake of appropriateness. Sometimes, there is no other language.

If I’d known what I know now, that sixteen-year-old would have smiled her biggest, most nonthreatening smile. She would have said, “I think that Howard Stern’s big dick is trying to insert itself where it is unwanted and doesn’t belong.” She would have told that man that he was an asshole. And she would have ripped off her microphone and walked out. 

I sensed Sano’s presence everywhere, but for a long time I didn’t know her name. She was most difficult kind of person to trace through the archive, the quintessential “well-behaved woman” who seldom makes history.

Sano was married to Tsuneno’s oldest brother, the head priest at a small village temple. She tended the altar and ministered to the village women; she supervised servants and ran the household. She was the vital center of her world, and everyone depended on her. But as far as I could tell, she never signed a document that she wrote in her own hand.

I looked for her name in everything I read. The record of her marriage listed her father’s name but not hers. The record of her children’s births gave me her age, but it referred to her as “the head priest’s wife.” Her son wrote down her posthumous name, but that didn’t tell me what she was called when she was alive.

Years later, I finally found the name “Sano” buried in one of her husband’s letters: “The mistress of the temple, Sano, is pregnant, and she is also suffering from a diarrheal illness, and it’s been very difficult for her, though she seems to be getting a little better recently.” After that, I could see Sano more clearly. Tsuneno sometimes wrote about her and even sent her gifts. But since Tsuneno used phonetic script, and Japanese doesn’t have a system for capitalizing proper nouns or leaving space between words, I had never been able to decipher those passages.

The years I spent searching for Sano’s name were also the years I spent bearing and raising my own children. I thought of her as I cut endless strawberries and rinsed raspberries and unwrapped cheese sticks, as I chopped things into very small pieces and filled up cups and placed napkins. I thought of her when I rocked my toddler to sleep, as he squirmed and tried to bite me, and on the weekend days when I didn’t have time to sit down. 

I had only two children. Sano had five. I was alone with my husband. She had a mother-in-law and maidservants to help her. But I had electricity and running water and modern medicine. I also had options. Sano probably had little say in who she married, or when. She had no access to contraception and a limited capacity to refuse her husband if he demanded sex. She didn’t plan – or choose – her pregnancies in any meaningful way. She couldn’t. 

Sano could never have imagined how easy my life was, how I had escaped most of the constraints that she would have considered fundamental to being a woman. But during those endless nights when I comforted feverish children, racked with chills myself, or when my shin was bruised because my son had kicked me hard in the middle of a tantrum, or when I burned myself on the side of a pot of boiling water, I thought I understood something about her. I imagined that the physical labor of motherhood connected us. I knew about babies and nursing and laundry, stuffy noses and menstrual cramps and backaches. I knew how exhausting – and exhilarating – it was to believe that no one else could take my place. 

Sometimes, usually late at night, I worried that I, too, might disappear into the life I’d created, leaving only the shape of a wife and mother behind. 

But I could still find the time and space to write. So I wrote about myself, and Tsuneno, the rebel I never would have been. And I wrote about Sano:

At Rinsenji, Giyu’s second wife, Sano, kept quiet and stayed busy. Between 1832 and 1842, she had five babies. She had the help of servants, Tsuneno’s little sisters, and her still vigorous mother-in-law, but her days were occupied with babies and laundry, fevers and tantrums, broken dishes and runny noses. There were rooms to be swept and servants to be supervised, a husband to tend to, village women to visit, and always more offerings to be laid on the altar. During those years, she was the vital center of the household, and everyone depended on her efforts. Maybe she stopped in the middle of arranging her daughter’s hair and found herself staring at nothing or watched her son run through the garden and fantasized about leaving. Occasionally, during her daily prayers to the Amida Buddha, different, harsher words might have echoed in her head. But she still managed to do what was expected . . . She was bound by duty and routine, by the presence of children who needed her, by a workable, durable marriage, and maybe also by love.

This turned out to be the most controversial paragraph in my book manuscript.

“What is your problem with Sano?” my readers asked. They pointed out that by the standards of her time, Sano lived an ideal life. She was mistress of a wealthy temple; her children survived infancy. I argued back that Sano’s choices were severely limited, that having five babies in ten years is grueling physical labor, that no one would question me if I had suggested a coal miner might have resented his work. I said that personal contentment isn’t the same as the attainment of a cultural ideal, especially if that ideal is oppressive (and, to put my cards on the table, I think it was, and is).

I sat the head of a seminar table – the same one where I lead graduate classes – and said, “You can have everything – children who love you, a husband who loves you – and it still might not be enough.” *

The room fell silent. Immediately, I knew where I had gone wrong. A historian is not supposed to cite her own feelings of alienation in a discussion of someone who lived two hundred years ago. Finally, a kind older man with grown children interjected: “At least give us the other possibility. Give Sano a chance to be happy.” 

I had thought I could get away with the “maybe.” I had wanted to leave space for Sano’s anger, for the possibility of a different life, for a rebellion like Tsuneno’s, for something - anything - in place of her unyielding silence.** The evidence wasn’t there, and that was the substance of the other scholars’ objection. But nothing was there, where there should have been a person, and that was my objection. 

In the end, I rewrote the end of the paragraph: 

She must have known she was fortunate. Her marriage endured, and all of her children survived. Her household was secure, she didn’t have to go work in the fields, and she never had to worry about how to afford miso, sake, or lamp oil. If it wasn’t enough, if sometimes, during her prayers to Amida Buddha, different, harsher words echoed in her head, she didn’t let on. Sano was bound by duty and routine, by the presence of children who needed her, by a workable, durable marriage, and maybe also by love. 

I wonder if I gave Sano the chance to be happy. I wonder if she was happy. I know nothing about her personality. If she lived today, and I met her at the school bus stop, she might be the kind of mother who loves the work. She might caption every Instagram post with “#blessed,” and she might actually mean it. (“And,” the cynical, seminar room version of me protests, “she might still be angry all the time.”) 

The question isn’t really one of personality. It’s about the meaning of silence, and who can fill it in, and how. A good social historian can use context, understanding the values of the time and place, but then we’re left with a flat sameness: the sociological type rather than the individual, and the denial of the counter-narrative that plays in our heads even as we say and do all the conventional things, even as we’re grateful, humbled, overwhelmed with love.

Or maybe that’s only me.

 *Here my older son starts reading over my shoulder. “Did you actually say this?” he wants to know.

** Here my younger son starts whining that he wants to play a math game on the computer, and I have to close my laptop.

Writing calligraphy in Yabuta Yutaka’s seminar room at Kansai Daigaku in 2002. Note the old-fashioned phone in the foreground.

I’ve never been a good language student. I’m too introverted. Basically, I prefer not to talk to people at all. In college Japanese classes, our instructors would drill us by manufacturing conversations. “Stanley-san,” they would ask, “what is your favorite season? What do you like to read? Would you like to vacation at the beach or in the mountains?” I knew it was pedagogically sound, but I could never get past my first reaction: engaging in the conversation was exhausting, and I would rather be asleep. 

During my first years abroad in Japan, I went to Japanese classes at Osaka University of Foreign Languages. I got angry at an instructor of Classical Japanese who said that women in the Heian period didn’t work outside the home (as if that phrase had any meaning a thousand years ago). In that instance, a sudden rush of rage forced me to speak, which turned out to be good practice for my later career of getting angry at men in seminar rooms. Otherwise, I stared out the windows and watched dead cockroaches drift across the linoleum floors.

When I finished my four months of language courses, I walked to the library at Kansai University every day, and when I wasn’t in seminar I spent hours reading Japanese books and articles. I can’t fault myself for a lack of academic focus. But when I climbed the steps of Tarumi Shrine and descended the hills to campus, I was listening to Alicia Keys singing “Songs in A Minor” on my discman. At night, I really tried to watch Japanese tv. But except for a gothic drama featuring the heartthrob Kimura Takuya and a bizarre incest plot line, nothing held my interest.*

This was nearly twenty years ago, before smartphones, and I had no internet connection in my apartment. With nothing else to do, I wrote in my journal — in English — and read novels.

I love writing, but there is nothing - absolutely nothing - that compares with the pleasure of reading a novel when you should be doing something else. It’s even better when you’re reading in your native language and you’re really not supposed to. In my tiny studio apartment in northern Osaka, I read The Blind Assassin and failed to read The Corrections; I re-read Little Women and finally got through Middlemarch. But mostly I churned through books that I’ve now forgotten, paperback British editions that I bought at Kinokuniya for extortionate prices and stashed under my bed like contraband.

I probably should have been buying old volumes of Japanese history at the used bookstores in Umeda Station. But every time I entered one of those places, I felt overwhelmed and inadequate, dwarfed by decaying piles of books. I felt much more at home under the bright lights at Kinokuniya, reading the blurbs on the back of British chick-lit novels about shopping.**

I did manage to improve my Japanese, though not as quickly as I would have if I hadn’t been reading and writing so much English. I still remember exactly how I learned some of the vocabulary I acquired during that year and a half in Osaka. My reading taught me “patriarchy” (家父長制）and “collective” (共同体). My professor at Kansai University taught me “qualifications” (資格). All the undergrads taught me to say “Really??!” (マジで⁈) in a pretty good Kansai accent. On a seminar field trip to Okinawa, my friend Kotaro taught me “hermit crab” (ヤドカリ), which I never use, and “conscientious objector” (精神的参戦拒否者), which I have used exactly once. A young man I met at the Esaka Starbucks taught me “ambition” (向上心) and “regret” (後悔), both of which I use all the time. 

Do I regret my year and half of reading forgettable English novels and throwing them under the bed? I do, almost every day. After all that time in the library, my reading skills are great, but whether for reasons of gender or temperament, I will never be the kind of professor of Japanese history I feel like I should be: the one who goes out for beers with the seminar guys, who has shelves of old books in his office, who sends New Year’s greetings to dozens of Japanese colleagues.

On the other hand, during that year and a half in Osaka, I learned what I was suited to — what I was completely unable to stop doing. And I did immerse myself in a language. It just turns out that it was the one I already knew.

*Apologies for spoiling the plot of the 2002 Fuji television drama “Sora kara furu ichioku no hoshi.” You should really watch it anyway.

** It was 2001-2002. There were a lot of them.

I first encountered Tsuneno when I was a second-year assistant professor, desperate to find a document to assign in my Japanese history survey. I wanted them to read ordinary documents, the things of everyday life. Since not many of them were translated, I thought I’d do it myself.

Eventually, I landed on the website of the Niigata Prefectural Archives, which had an “online document-reading course” aimed at the local community. One of the featured documents was a letter from Tsuneno to her mother. If the archivists hadn’t transcribed it as part of the “document-reading course,” I never would have been able to read it. As it was, I still didn’t understand most of it. But some of the easier phrases jumped off the page. They seemed vivid, and almost shockingly contemporary. Tsuneno bragged about her wealthy boss and recommended a certain kind of hair oil. “Everything in Edo is delicious!” she wrote. She sounded exactly like me writing email home from my first trip to Tokyo. Even before I knew the rest of her story, I fell in love.

 The archive provided a brief synopsis of Tsuneno’s life history - that she had been divorced and run away, and that there were dozens of letters about her in their collection. I flew to Japan as soon as I could. When I got to the archive, I spent days taking pictures of documents, even though it seemed futile. I could read nineteenth-century Japanese, but I couldn’t decipher the handwriting or understand the dialect in Tsuneno’s letters. They all looked like meaningless scribbles. 

Even worse, I had the most terrible jet-lag I had ever experienced. I could barely stand up to take the photos. When I returned to Tokyo from the archive, I found out that it wasn’t jet-lag. I was pregnant.

 Over the next few years, I had two babies: both boys, both beautiful and mostly happy, both of whom had chronic ear infections and regarded sleep as a mortal enemy. I was constantly exhausted, but Tsuneno didn’t let me go. I returned to the letters again and again, trying to teach myself to read her handwriting, sounding out every word. I traveled back to the archive almost every year and photographed more and more: her brothers’ letters, her father’s diary, village maps. I hired a Japanese research assistant and wore out a series of dictionaries devoted to the “destroyed style” of calligraphy. The spines broke and the pages scattered. There were water-radical characters in the diaper bag. There were person-radical characters under the sofa.

But I tried to read, and mostly failed. And then failed again. And then, suddenly, after a few days of doing something else, I’d come back to a document and realize it suddenly made sense. I wrote compulsively, sometimes on my phone, while rocking babies to sleep, or in the middle of chaotic birthday parties. I felt like I was being haunted by a stubborn, obsessive nineteenth-century ghost.

When I finally finished most of the first draft of Stranger in the Shogun’s City, I returned to the archive for a final fact check. I called up a document I had never seen, catalogued as the record of Tsuneno’s older brother’s birth. I flipped through, dutifully, and then stopped short. Hidden in the last pages, scribbled in what must have been Tsuneno’s mother’s or grandmother’s handwriting, was another account: “Third month, twelfth day: Tsuneno’s birth.”

I had to turn around and pretend to look at the reference books to avoid crying all over the page. It wasn’t just that I had never known the exact date of Tsuneno’s birth. It was also that – after nearly ten years – I could read it.