The haunting is both literal-there are plenty of creepy ghosties and ghoulies lurking in the dark-and figurative. It’s hard to describe Violet Kupersmith’s novel, Build Your House Around My Body, without resorting to a thesaurus-reviewers have used everything from “unsettling” and “hypnotic” to “acrobatic” and “shivery-back-of-the-neck terrifying.” And it is all of those things, but it’s also so much more.Īt its heart, Build Your House Around My Body is the story of a haunting-not of a house (or rather, not just of a house) but of a country: Vietnam, where the book is set.
Violet Kupersmith (Random House, 400 pp., $27, July 2021) The details of Tsuneno’s existence-the books she read, a mother-in-law’s expectations for her housekeeping, and the clothes she wore for her first snow in Edo-give this depiction of a society in flux an almost novelistic texture.
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“Together, the people of the Japanese archipelago created what was probably the most extensive archive ever of an early modern society,” Stanley writes. Stanley’s recreation of Tsuneno’s story is possible because even in the early years of the 19th century, an unusually high number of Tsuneno’s countrymen-and women-were literate. Tsuneno died in 1853, the same year Commodore Matthew Perry would arrive in Japan with a scheme to open the country for cross-continental commerce. There, in the final years of the shogun’s rule, she reinvented herself. After she ran away from that union and endured two more unhappy marriages-women at the time were confined to the domestic sphere, but there was no stigma around divorce-Tsuneno left her mountainous countryside forever and set off on foot to Edo, Japan’s imperial capital. Tsuneno was raised to be the wife of a temple priest, and at the age of 12, she was married off to someone who lived hundreds of miles away. In January 1801, a Buddhist priest named Emon lived in a Japanese village called Ishigami 200 years later, Amy Stanley, a historian at Northwestern University, pored over Emon’s financial records and realized he saved hundreds of letters from his daughter Tsuneno that documented her extraordinary, rebellious life. This compelling biography begins in the least promising way possible: with a tax return.
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