Amy Stanley has written an important work that not only sheds new light on the social, economic, and legal aspects of prostitution in early modern Japan, but also explores its political and ideological significance. Although there is an extensive literature on prostitution in this period, the bulk of this work focuses on the urban “pleasure quarters,” the celebrated brothel districts of major cities. Stanley draws upon this literature, but Selling Women is distinguished by its ambitious spatial and chronological scope. It traces the development over the course of two centuries of a vast market of sexual services that, in Stanley's words, “spread its tentacles of into every corner of the archipelago” (189).

The work begins by examining the remote northern mining town of Innai Ginzan in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Through a reading of the records of the mine's magistrate, Stanley reveals the plight of women in the period before the Tokugawa legal order took form: both townsmen and the magistrate in Innai Ginzan viewed women as simply property that could be bought, sold, or traded as the need arose. By exploring the fate of women who attempted to resist their reduction to an economic asset, Stanley calls into question the orthodox characterization of Tokugawa law as simply and uniformly oppressive.

The impact of the state's intervention is the topic of the next chapter, which examines the formation of the “pleasure quarters” in Edo, the seat of Tokugawa power. Stanley argues that as the shogunate began to utilize the patriarchal household as a representation of the realm united under its benevolent rule, it gave husbands and fathers legal authority over their wives, children, and dependents. The sex trade was reconfigured in relation to this new legal order: the “prostitute” became a distinct form of female status, differentiated from that of wives and other “ordinary” women, and legally defined as a form of indentured servitude. Stanley's discussion of the indenture system reveals how neatly the interests of the state meshed with those of the brothel owners. The latter benefited from the officially sanctioned monopoly on prostitution, while the former could position itself as the protector of chaste wives and daughters.

The ideal of the patriarchal household required that the indenture of a daughter be understood in specific terms: as the act of reluctant parents and a dutiful daughter. The reality was far more complicated. To explore that reality, Stanley turns to a third site, the port city of Nagasaki, where the shogunate controlled foreign trade with the Dutch and the Chinese. Stanley argues that in this context prostitutes, who benefited from the proximity of the brothel quarters to their family homes, were able to exploit the ideal of filial piety for their own benefit: to resist the authority of brothel keepers, to explain away their involvement in illegal activities such as smuggling, and to justify breaking their contracts by running away.

The final three chapters of the book are devoted to explaining the expansion of the sex trade beyond the segregated “pleasure quarters,” and outside the indenture system. Chapter Three focuses on the port of Niigata in northeastern Japan, Chapter Four on the post-stations that lined the major highways, and Chapter Five on the port towns on the Inland Sea. In each case, Stanley demonstrates how economic need and a new culture of commerce resulted in new kinds of prostitutes who operated outside segregated brothel quarters. Although the growth of the sex trade was both recognized and criticized, those involved in its expansion had no investment in upholding the state's patriarchal ideal. By the late eighteenth century, Stanley suggests, “the gendered order of the realm had fallen victim to the creative and destructive energies of entrepreneurial commoners” (190).

Selling Women is a sophisticated work that succeeds in narrating the intertwined processes of political and economic change while also conveying something of the lived experience of women within the sex trade. If there is a weakness to this book, it is the brevity of its conclusion. In only eight pages, Stanley attempts to trace out in very broad strokes the historical legacy of early modern prostitution, referencing not only the reorganization of legalized prostitution in the 1870s but also the wartime system of military “comfort women,” occupation era panpan girls, and the recent phenomenon of “compensated dating.” But this is a small quibble about what is a very fine work. Exhaustively researched and clearly written in a lively style, Selling Women should be of interest to students and scholars of law and gender history both within and beyond Japan.