Edo Before It Became a Capital

Timon Screech looks at Edo, the city that would later become Tokyo, during its rise under the Tokugawa shogunate from the early seventeenth century through to the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Rather than a conventional chronological history, the book moves through a series of vignettes covering the shogun's castle, the bridges and pleasure districts of the city, and the beliefs and rituals that gave the growing metropolis its sense of sacred purpose.

Screech draws on contemporary poetry, art and literary sources to recreate a city that no longer physically exists, showing how architecture and geomancy were used to project the shogunate's authority.

Timon Screech is a professor of art history specialising in Japanese studies, and the book will suit readers interested in Japanese history, urban history and the culture of early modern Japan.

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