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Simon Partner’s latest biography offers a fresh look at nineteenth-century Japan through the diary of a Wakayama artist. In elegant prose, Koume’s World reconstructs how this prolific painter gained the respect of her castle-town community and helped steer her family’s fortunes through tumultuous times. A valuable addition to the slim shelf of English-language volumes on Tokugawa women's lives. -- Kären Wigen, Stanford University Simon Partner’s Koume’s World is a tremendously interesting account of the daily life of a samurai woman based on her detailed diary about how she took care of her household, engaged in painting and poetry, and observed her world. Partner employs many other sources to present an uncommonly sensitive view of regional urban society, in this case the understudied and fascinating city of Wakayama, which he reveals in its normal rhythms and the riveting drama pervading the collapse of the Tokugawa regime and the dynamic society of the early Meiji era. -- Luke Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara Simon Partner’s wonderfully engaging Koume’s World is chockablock with surprising details about the uncertain fortunes of a poor but respectable samurai family during a time of unprecedented change. Based on the matriarch’s diary, this book opens a window onto the travails of samurai in real life in mid-nineteenth-century Japan. -- David L. Howell, Harvard University

Simon Partner’s latest biography offers a fresh look at nineteenth-century Japan through the diary of a Wakayama artist. In elegant prose, Koume’s World reconstructs how this prolific painter gained the respect of her castle-town community and helped steer her family’s fortunes through tumultuous times. A valuable addition to the slim shelf of English-language volumes on Tokugawa women's lives. -- Kären Wigen, Stanford University

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Simon Partner is professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of three previous books that chronicle modern Japanese history through the lives of ordinary people such as farmers, shopkeepers, and housewives, including most recently The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan (Columbia, 2018).

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