Kawai Koume (1804 - 1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji Restoration and the radical changes that followed. Through Koume's eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan's transformative nineteenth century.