An Imperial Concubine's Tale

Japan in the early seventeenth century was a wild place. Serial killers stalked the streets of Kyoto at night, while noblemen and women mingled freely at the imperial palace, drinking saké and watching kabuki dancing in the presence of the emperor's principal consort. Among these noblewomen was an imperial concubine named Nakanoin Nakako, who in 1609 became embroiled in a sex scandal involving both courtiers and young women in the emperor's service. As punishment, Nakako was banished to an island in the Pacific Ocean, but she never reached her destination. Instead, she was shipwrecked and spent fourteen years in a remote village on the Izu Peninsula before she was finally allowed to return to Kyoto. In 1641, Nakako began a new adventure: she entered a convent and became a Buddhist nun.

Recounting the remarkable story of this resilient woman and her war-torn world, G. G. Rowley investigates aristocratic family archives, village storehouses, and the records of imperial convents. She follows the banished concubine as she endures rural exile, receives an unexpected reprieve, and rediscovers herself as the abbess of a nunnery. While unraveling Nakako's unusual tale, Rowley also reveals the little-known lives of samurai women who sacrificed themselves on the fringes of the great battles that brought an end to more than a century of civil war. Written with keen insight and genuine affection, An Imperial Concubine's Tale tells the true story of a woman's extraordinary life in seventeenth-century Japan.

G. G. Rowley teaches English and Japanese literature at Waseda University in Tokyo. She has written and/or translated several biographies of Japanese women, including Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji and Masuda Sayo's Autobiography of a Geisha.

Yasuko Sato:
A lyrical portrayal of a concubine whose life resonates with Japan's cultural heritage as well as its historical background.

Sonja Arntzen:
An exciting account... does not disappoint... The rich content of this book will appeal to a wide range of readers. This is simply history at its best, rigorously researched and engagingly told.

William Fleming:
An Imperial Concubine's Tale is a most welcome contribution to our understanding of the lives of women in early modern Japan.

C. Miki Wheeler:
Even without the advantage of a single word written by the subject herself, Rowley has depicted about as full a portrait as anyone could of this remarkable life. The result is a valuable contribution to the history of women at the turn of the seventeenth century in Japan.

Adam Clulow:
Impressive and highly readable... Rowley's achievement is to produce a brilliantly realized depiction of the world around Nakako and as such the book should be of interest to anyone interested in the early Tokugawa period, the nature of court culture in Japan or Japanese literary culture.

Christina Laffin:
Ambitious... As an accessible and pleasurable read, this book is recommended to scholars, across disciplines and periods, grappling with the problem of constructing a narrative out of limited historical sources.

Laura Nenzi:
Sophisticated yet accessible, the book would be an ideal reading for an undergraduate class.

Satoko Shimazaki:
...A fresh, detailed engagement--simultaneously biographical, historical, and literary--with the lives of a court family that survived a tumultous age of war and exile.

John Butler:
...An enjoyable book