Sometimes her husband went with her, sometimes not. There she hung out with lords, ladies, poets and even the women of the Emperor’s court and wrote poetry. In the mid nineteenth century a peasant woman named Matsue Taseko, who happened to be a poet, informed her husband she was off to Kyoto and walked through the mountains alone. In Japan in those days the lower you were on the social scale the freer you were. Gate that led to the Women's Palace in Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace Tokyoīut for commoners like my heroine, Atsu, life was quite different. She would have had her only glimpse of the big wide world through the slats of her window as she was carried the 450 kilometres to Edo.

When she married the shogun the imperial princess would have stepped into a palanquin and left her palace for the first time. It’s said that one emperor once climbed to the top of the topmost tower in his palace to take a look at the world outside. They were born and grew up in their palaces and never left, in the same way that our queen can’t just go to the shops like an ordinary person. (The emperor was a Pope-like figure who lived in seclusion in Kyoto while the shogun, who lived in Edo, now Tokyo, was the temporal ruler.) Imperial princesses were used to a life within walls.

Traditionally the shogun would have been married to an imperial princess, a member of the emperor's family. He had a whole government that did the ruling. Like Charles, this ruler didn’t actually wield much power at all. Then, when she was 17, like Diana she was chosen to marry the ruler of the country - not the ruler-in-waiting, like Prince Charles, but the actual ruler, the shogun. She started life as a commoner, in fact very minor nobility, much like Diana, and grew up in relative freedom. In a way she was a bit like Princess Diana. The heroine of The Shogun’s Queen really lived. The shogun celebrating New Year's Day with his women (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912) Unravelling the web of secrecy around The Shogun’s ‘Harem’ London and lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I.

Programme in Creative Writing (non-fiction ) at City University in Lesey is currently a visiting lecturer, teaching on the MA The Shogun’s Queen, takes place largely in the Women’s Palace. World, Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West and The LastĬoncubine, short listed for Romantic Novel of the Year. Many books on Japan, including Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing Wrestlers and enjoyed the glitzy life of Tokyo. Narrow Road the Deep North, lived among geisha, interviewed sumo Lesley Downer lived in Japan for many years. Our November Guest is Lesley Downer, who will become a regular History Girl next year.

The Last Concubine by Lesley Downer