Outside the inner quarters

This paper moves between text and context in order to trace the personal, familial and narrative connections between two women, Nakayama Suzuko (b. c. 1675), wife of a Mito domain official stationed in Edo, and her sister-in-law Kuroda Tosako (1682–1758), wife of an official of Tatebayashi domain. Drawing on four extant texts – two travel accounts and two diary/memoirs – the paper argues that, although marriage and family fundamentally shaped these bushi-class women's lives, these factors did not confine them to the home, but pushed them out into the world to act on behalf of their families as well as for their own enrichment and pleasure. I would also like to thank all the participants in the conference on ‘Narrative Narrativehood, Narrativity, and Nonnarrative in Japanese Prose of the Edo Period’, in Rome in May 2007, as well as two anonymous readers for Japan Forum, and the journal's editor, Angus Lockyer, for helpful comments and criticisms on the draft. Marcia Yonemoto is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her BA, MA and PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests are in the cultural history of early modern Japan (c. 1590–1868). She is the author of a book, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–1868 (University of California Press, 2003), and numerous articles in scholarly journals. Her current research is on the history of gender and women in early modern Japan. She can be contacted at: [email protected]. Notes 1. For an overview of Japanese scholarship on early modern travel writing, see Itasaka (Citation1991, Citation1993); on early modern travel writing by women, see Shiba (1997, 2005); in English, see CitationNenzi (2004). 2. As CitationMarie-Laure Ryan (2009) suggests, the ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities has served to globalize as well as generalize the study of narrativity and narratology. Understanding narrative as a way of thinking, structuring and conveying meaning allows us to examine texts of the Edo period as varieties of narrative, rather than as representatives of particular genres of fiction or non-fiction, prose or poetry, diary or memoir. Problematizing narrative also moves us away from gendered categories of literary production and reception that are particularly deeply entrenched in the Japanese context. 3. Naoharu was descended from the Kaji, one of seven historically prominent clans in Musashi. See the genealogy for the Nakayama clan in Edo daimyo kōkyō. 4. The distance between the two is approximately 4km. 5. For biographical information on the Nakayama family, see CitationKuramoto (2001). 6. This collection was titled Hengyokushū, and was an anthology of prose from the Heian through Edo periods compiled by a wealthy merchant literatus in the service of the Satake of Akita domain named Tsumura Sōan (1736–1806). See Kuramoto (2001). 7. For biographical information about Kuroda Tosako and the Kuroda family, see Shiba (Citation2000: 95–155). 8. See entries for the Kuroda family in Edo daimyo kōkyō. 9. For a partial transcription and discussion of the text, see Shiba (Citation2000: 95–117); all quotations from Ishihara-ki in this article are from this text. While this article was in press, a full-length edited version of Ishihara-ki appeared as CitationKuroda (2008). The manuscript, which was discovered and dated only in 1986, is in the collection of the Naikaku Bunkō, Tokyo. 10. See, for example, the writings of the aforementioned Ōgimachi Machiko, as well as Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825), especially her Mukashibanashi; on Makuzu's life and work, see CitationGramlich-Oka (2006). For an edited version of Mukashibanashi, see CitationNakayama (1984)

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Pleasure · Political science · Sister · Sociology · Wife · Anthropology · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Gender Studies · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Psychology

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