What do you do when you want to explore a topic pertaining to the history of early modern Japanese women, but, aside from accounts of a few exceptional individuals, the sources either do not exist or are so fragmentary that they are little more than anecdotal? One solution has been to focus on elite women, the members of the ruling class who were more likely to be literate as well as scrutinized and admonished by men. Even for them, the historical record can remain frustratingly opaque. Getting at the life experiences of commoners has been harder. Dealing with this problem has forced historians to draw inferences based on scanty data, analyze visual representations whose meanings are by no means transparent, and mine records left by men while remaining alert to the danger of overstatement..
