This Naoki Prize-winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600-1868). In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the rising merchant class, and repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women vigorously built themselves independent lives with unusual careers--working as designers of ornamental hairpins, or even scribes--in the male-dominated society of the day. The stories in The Budding Tree recount the conditions in which these women lived.