(Ebook) Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration by Simon Partner ISBN 9780231559102, 9780231211840, 9780231211857, 0231559100, 0231211848, 0231211856

(Ebook) Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration by Simon Partner ISBN 9780231559102, 9780231211840, 9780231211857, 0231559100, 0231211848, 0231211856

Kawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji Restoration and the radical changes that followed, including the famine of 1837, the great earthquake of 1854, the cholera epidemic of 1859, and the departure of samurai to fight in the civil wars of the 1860s. For more than fifty years, she kept a diary recording her family's daily life—meals and expenses, visitors and the weather, small-town gossip and news of momentous events.Through Koume's eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan's transformative nineteenth century. Koume's World vividly portrays the everyday activities, social interactions, information networks, cultural production, and household economy of a samurai...