In contrast to the toweringly canonical writings by Japanese women from the late tenth through to the early fourteenth centuries – The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, The Sarashina Diary, The Confessions of Lady Nijō, to name but a few – the work of women who wrote during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) has received scant attention from scholarly translators working in English. This curious lacuna is all the more striking when the situation is compared to that of Japan's neighbours. There are several large English anthologies of traditional Chinese literature by women that include writing from the Qing dynasty (e.g. K.S. Chang and H. Saussy (eds), Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism, Stanford, CA, 1999). Likewise, there are many translations of Korean women's writing from the late Chosŏn period, such as JaHyun Kim Haboush's rendition of Hanjungnok (The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng, 1795–1805), which became the inspiration for British novelist Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen (2004). The neglect of early modern Japanese women's writing, therefore, is something of a mystery.

Into this gap comes G.G Rowley's In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan, a translation of the early eighteenth-century Matsukage Nikki by Ōgimachi Machiko (d. 1724). In the Shelter of the Pine is the first English translation of a full-length memoir by a Japanese woman writer of the Tokugawa period. The source text was the crowning literary achievement of a lifetime of service by the aristocrat Machiko, who was a concubine of the powerful warrior Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (1658–1714). Japan's elite warriors had long looked to court culture as a source of legitimation and prestige. Entering Yoshiyasu's womens’ quarters aged around sixteen in 1694, Machiko remained in his service until his death in 1714, providing him with two sons, and the benefits of her aristocratic literary education and court connections. Through Machiko and her family, Yoshiyasu was better able to serve the shogun, by obtaining honours – such as first court rank for the shogun's mother during her lifetime – and was able to obtain recognition of his own classical literary skills, such as the occasion on which Machiko's father arranged for the retired emperor to provide written assessment of a collection of Yoshiyasu's poems.

In the Shelter of the Pine represents on paper the political and cultural capital that Machiko possessed and for which she was valued by Yoshiyasu. It highlights in rich detail the life of Yoshiyasu and the splendour of his world, from formal visits by the shogun to the Yanagisawa mansion, Yoshiyasu's lifelong interest in Buddhism and his meetings with Chinese abbots, to literary celebrations and poetry parties. In this, Machiko was recording for posterity Yoshiyasu's virtue and the patronage he enjoyed under the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646–1709), who is the “Pine” of the title (pine, or matsu, being a reference to one of the family names used by the Tokugawa house, Matsudaira, and which was bestowed on Yoshiyasu in 1701). The work's great literary value lies in the use of a recognizable narrative voice to tell this story and the way the text is written in an emulation of the language of Japan's eleventh-century aristocratic classic, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, c. 1008). As Rowley notes in her introduction, by using Classical Japanese and by omitting vocabulary associated with the warrior estate, In the Shelter of the Pine translates the world of Yoshiyasu into one of elegant “aristocratic splendour” (p. xxii). Machiko recasts Yoshiyasu and his household as members of the illustrious household of the Shining Genji, protagonist of The Tale of Genji, “rhetorically lift[ing] [Yoshiyasu] above his relatively humble origins, dignify[ing] his rise to the heights of power…” (p. xxiii). Machiko furthermore uses this device to centre the court and decentre the warrior estate, a pretence that was at odds with the weakened position of the nobility in her day. Rowley notes that, although all the action takes place in the shogunal capital of Edo (now Tokyo, even at that time one of the world's largest cities), the city of Edo is not mentioned by name even once in Machiko's narrative. Instead the City is the royal capital of Kyoto, and Edo is referred to as “in the east” (azuma ni), that is to say, the east of Kyoto (p. xxii).

Rowley's English translation is both elegant and erudite. Most of the text may be parsed at a glance, but notes, a glossary, and a scholarly introduction are also there to frame the work and guide the reader. If, on occasion, the obtuse naming conventions make the text somewhat opaque – “His Highness”, “Her Ladyship of the First Perimeter”, “Her Ladyship of the Fifth Perimeter”, etc. – this is the result of Machiko's writing style and her adherence to Classical Japanese court conventions, while eschewing the vulgar use of personal names. A useful list of principal characters at the start of the translation aids navigation through this obstacle, while at the same time preserving an important characteristic of the text.

For its combination of detailed narration and literary complexity, In the Shelter of the Pine is valuable both as a source of information on the lives of Japanese elites in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as well as being a work of literature that will be of interest to students of narrative historiography, memoirs, and women's writing in Japanese and in world history. The translation represents the fruits of many years of careful research into a highly complex text and historical period, yet wears its erudition lightly and will be accessible to undergraduate students as well as to seasoned researchers – a fact reflected by its availability in both hardback and paperback. At a time when scholarly translations are increasingly devalued by the Anglophone university system, the potential of this translation to open up new vistas is a timely reminder of the place such scholarship has in our collective understanding of world history and literature.