The Budding Tree - Six stories of love in Edo

Kitahara Aiko

Dalkey Archive Press

2007

170 páginas

5h 40m

ISBN-13: 9781564784896

This Naoki Prize-winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600 1868).

In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the rising merchant class,
and repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women vigorously built themselves independent lives with unusual careers—working as designers of ornamental hairpins, or even scribes—in the male-dominated society of the day. The stories in The Budding Tree recount the conditions in which these women lived.