The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman’s Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan by Laura Nenzi (review)

Whose history do I, as historian, write? Or, to paraphrase Lenin’s famous motto, the history of who doing what to whom else for whose sake do I write about? These questions point straight to the theoretical tension behind Laura Nenzi’s charming biography of Kurosawa Tokiko, an extraordinary woman whose long life (1806–90) accompanied some of the most radical transformations in Japanese history. Such questioning becomes all the more relevant as Nenzi conceives of her study as a “history writ large through the eyes of an unimportant person who did not change its course” (p. 6). From its opening pages, the book swears allegiance to “microhistory” and to research that focuses on “undistinguished” stories of “unsophisticated” lives in “banal” places (as in Giovanni Levi’s study of Giovanni Battista Chiesa, or Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio). These microhistories, obsessed with “cosmic irrelevance,” zoom in on the subtleties of seemingly insignificant details (ibid.). And what is (ostensibly) more irrelevant than a peasant woman, caught in the turmoil of revolutionary events dominated by male samurai and who intends to contribute to restore power to a male heavenly sovereign? What could such a meticulous study of a forgettable woman contribute to our understanding of a major turning point in Japanese history such as 1868, when many outstanding studies on the lives of “great historical figures” like Yoshida Shōin, Sakamoto Ryōma, and Saigō Takamori already exist? Besides, has not Anne Walthall already given us an account of a loyalist woman in her splendid biography of Matsuo Taseko?

Nenzi is aware of these objections, and her preemptive answer is perfect: “I challenge the notion that the study of any one given individual is meaningful only insofar as such person is representative of a collective trend” (p. 3). Not only is Tokiko’s exceptional life hardly exemplary of her social class, gender, or the dominant mentalités of nineteenth-century Japan, but, I would claim with Nenzi, no human life can be reduced to be exemplar or representative of anything else—a trend, a Weltanschauung, History with a capital “H,” Geist, etc.—under which it could be subsumed, without depriving it of its own historicity and particularity. In other words, we should not read of Kurosawa Tokiko in search of the secret history of Japanese revolutionary modernization; we should not read of her rich life to understand the condition of women in general in late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan; we should not expect to find here the last word on the vexed issue of “change” versus “continuity” to explain the Meiji Restoration; we should not hope to find in her life the relic of a mystifying realm of “tradition” or “authenticity” of an “abiding folk” (Yanagita Kunio’s jōmin); nor should we take her life at the margins of “history writ large” as the example of commoners’ passivity to big events—even though this beautifully crafted manuscript might offer suggestions to the reader who nourishes these sorts of question. Rather, Nenzi’s book reconstructs how an intelligent and perceptive woman experienced and recorded her own understanding of the chaotic events of her lifetime. In truth, Nenzi could have been less restrained and pushed her argument in more radical directions. Tokiko’s life is not simply like the flight of a humble sparrow through the big events of history (“history writ large” or “big history” in Nenzi’s language)—Nenzi adopts the recurring allegory of the sparrow from Marguerite Yourcenar’s Le temps, ce grand sculpteur (Gallimard, 1983). History itself is the unending process of recollection and reconstruction of all past experiences, not merely those of “great historical men,” and “big events” are not a fixed stage before which the lives of commoners unfold, but what later generations encode as big events are themselves the total sums of individuals’ actions.

Kurosawa...