Description
Book SynopsisKawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in a provincial castle town. Through her eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan’s transformative nineteenth century.
Trade ReviewSimon Partner’s latest biography
offers a fresh look at nineteenth-century Japan through the diary of a Wakayama artist. In elegant prose,
Koume’s World reconstructs how this prolific painter gained the respect of her castle-town community and helped steer her family’s fortunes through tumultuous times. A valuable addition to the slim shelf of English-language volumes on Tokugawa women's lives. -- Kären Wigen, Stanford University
Simon Partner’s
Koume’s World is a tremendously interesting account of the daily life of a samurai woman based on her detailed diary about how she took care of her household, engaged in painting and poetry, and observed her world. Partner employs many other sources to present an uncommonly sensitive view of regional urban society, in this case the understudied and fascinating city of Wakayama, which he reveals in its normal rhythms and the riveting drama pervading the collapse of the Tokugawa regime and the dynamic society of the early Meiji era. -- Luke Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
Simon Partner’s wonderfully engaging
Koume’s World is chockablock with surprising details about the uncertain fortunes of a poor but respectable samurai family during a time of unprecedented change. Based on the matriarch’s diary, this book opens a window onto the travails of samurai in real life in mid-nineteenth-century Japan. -- David L. Howell, Harvard University
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments
Kawai Family Tree
Monetary Values
Chronology
Introduction
1. Growing Up in Kishū Domain
2. A Year of Calamities
3. In the Shadow of the Black Ships
4. Work and Family
5. War and Revolution
6. The Artist’s Life
7. Across the Divide
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
