Steven Carter, author of How to Read a Japanese Poem:
G. G. Rowley’s sparkling translation of Ōgimachi Machiko’s memoir reveals Machiko’s experience as a woman of great learning, sensitivity, and taste whose study of the Japanese classics thoroughly informed her writing. Despite her use of a classical idiom, one has the strong sense that she is writing of her own place in the scheme of Edo period society. The book will be a must-read for all students of Edo history, government, and literature.

Marcia Yonemoto, author of The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan:
This is an enormously important work, wonderfully translated and annotated. Not only is it one of the few lengthy memoirs written by a woman during the Tokugawa period, it offers the reader insight into daily life, sociopolitical networks, and the symbolic and practical manifestations of power during the reign of the fifth shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi.

Amy Beth Stanley, author of Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World:
A graceful translation of an eighteenth-century classic, In the Shelter of the Pine introduces readers to a world in which little girls grind their fathers’ ink, concubines write elegant prose, and an ambitious man—the author’s husband—defies social convention to rise in the world.