Description: In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan's early modern era.
Review Quotes: 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.--Marcia Yonemoto, author of The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan