He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Despite hunger, cold, illness, and betrayal, she persisted, determined to achieve the independence she desperately desired.Īn absorbing history of a vanished world.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Stanley creates a palpable sense of the Japanese capital: a teeming, highly stratified city where newcomers faced poverty and discrimination, migrants lived in hovels, and the only jobs available to Tsuneno-if she was lucky-were in service to a shogun or samurai. A year later, her family found her another husband, but that marriage lasted only four years another match was made for the 34-year-old Tsuneno, but this one endured “four blurry, claustrophobic months.” After three failed marriages, Tsuneno decided to direct her own fate: She would finally leave home and travel, on foot, to Edo.

The marriage was childless, and Tsuneno returned to her family. Fifteen years later, though, her husband filed for divorce, for reasons that Stanley can only guess at. Although it was customary to wait until a girl was 14 before consummating the marriage, Tsuneno became integrated into her new family and, in time, her role as a wife. As Tsuneno grew up, going to school and learning the skills-needlework, especially-that she would need when she married, she heard enticing talk about Edo, which beckoned as a place of “fashion and sophistication.” Though she dreamed of seeing it, her life took a different direction: When she was 12, she was married to a True Land priest in another province, even farther from the capital and far from her home.

Tsuneno was born into a respected family-her father was head priest in a temple of the True Pure Land sect-in a rural province, two weeks’ walk from the capital, Edo. Historian Stanley brings a deep knowledge of Japanese culture to a vibrant portrait of the Asian nation centered on the struggles of one defiant woman. One woman's life reveals society and culture in 19th-century Japan.

Shogun book review