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Nenzi on Ōgimachi, 'In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of

Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan'

Review published on Sunday, April 17, 2022

Machiko Ōgimachi. In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa

Japan. Translated by G. G. Rowley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 368 pp. $34.99 (e￾book), ISBN 978-0-231-55316-2; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-19951-3.

Reviewed by Laura Nenzi (University of Tennessee) Published on H-Japan (April, 2022)

Commissioned by Martha Chaiklin

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=57306

Sometime around 1693 the Kyoto aristocrat Ōgimachi Machiko (1679?-1724) moved to Edo to

become the second concubine of the daimyo Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (1658-1714). She bore him two

sons and spent much time in his Komagome villa and its splendid landscape garden. She also kept a

memoir, Matsukage nikki, which is now available in G. G. Rowley’s elegant translation as In the

Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan.

The volume is organized in thirty short chapters arranged chronologically from before 1690 to 1709.

A brief introduction presents Machiko’s background, follows the afterlife of her memoir, and narrates

Rowley’s efforts to piece together the fragments of Machiko’s life, triangulating with existing sources

while reckoning with the silences of some and the loss of others. Rowley is no stranger to this kind of

work, having already recovered the life of another Kyoto woman removed from her world (albeit

under very different circumstances), the imperial concubine Nakanoin Nakako (ca. 1591–1671).[1]

As the first part of the subtitle anticipates, Machiko’s main goal was to celebrate the greatness of her

husband as a domainal lord and administrator and, by extension, to extol the shogun Tsunayoshi, to

whom Yoshiyasu owed his privilege. Early modern works of literature (and art) abound with

depictions of women as projections of male fantasies; In the Shelter of the Pine offers a rare example

of how a woman saw, and idealized, a man.

Machiko casts Yoshiyasu in the most favorable of lights, presenting him as a man with “nobility of

purpose” (p. 17), a filial son, an erudite scholar, and “a pillar of the realm” (p. 2). Her hagiographic

effort requires creativity. To provide a complete picture of Yoshiyasu’s achievements, thus, she

includes anecdotes she did not personally witness. Elsewhere Machiko chooses to omit details,

feigning ignorance or professing reluctance to address topics better suited, in her opinion, for men or

scholars. Yoshiyasu’s accomplishments are a “vast strand,” but her words, as a woman, amount to a

mere grain of sand, she laments (p. 208).

Do not take her self-effacement as an indication that Machiko is a passive observer, however, for as

often as she minimizes her presence, Machiko also takes center stage. She writes of her joys

(spending time practicing poetry with her husband, pp. 122-124) and missed opportunities (“suffering

the usual defilement” and not being able attend the ceremonies for one of the shogun’s visits, p. 78);

of her distress (when an illness prevented her from caring for her sons, p. 73) and her proud