Daughters of Nijo: A Romance of Japan by Onoto Watanna

Description

Onoto Watanna — the pen name of the pioneering novelist Winnifred Eaton — wrote this romance of Japan from intimate acquaintance with its subject. It begins on the shore at Hayama, where the dissolute Prince of Nijo keeps a summer villa his household rarely sees, and his mother, the Empress Dowager, passes the years after the Restoration watched over by a daughter more gentle than the court deserves. Into this closed world come courtship, a portrait painted by a visiting artist, moonlit meetings, and the slow awakening of a princess to a wider life.

Watanna’s Japan is neither exotic spectacle nor tourist postcard but a society observed from within — its gossips, its mirrors and photographs, its family councils and gently tyrannical customs. Her romance of the princess Sado-ko and the commoner who loves her cuts across every barrier her world erects, and the book holds its emotion on a very Japanese rein, which only deepens it.

Why readers still come back to it

• A romance of the Japanese court written by a Japanese-American pioneer
• A moving study of duty, love, and the birth of the new Japan
• Exquisite sense of place, from Hayama beach to Kamakura mists

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition gives you the complete text with clean, professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and careful chapter navigation — designed for comfortable reading on phones, tablets, and e-readers. Instant download after purchase.