A Daughter of the Samurai: Memoir of a Remarkable Asian-American Woman - Paperback

by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (Author), Janice P. Nimura (Foreword by)

"Her life was a bridge from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from the time-hallowed beauty and rigidity of a samurai household to the disorienting, forward-looking freedoms of the West." --Janice P. Nimura, from the foreword.

• Witnesses her father prepare and perform ritual seppuku, and her mother burn down the ancestral home
• Bids an emotional farewell and sails across the ocean to marry a wealthy merchant in a new land
• Returns to Tokyo with her two daughters and mother-in-law, only to find her homeland as alien as America, forcing her to reinvent herself to provide for her family
• Eventually returns to America with her children after the death of her mother-in-law

Author Biography

Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (1874-1950) was a Japanese-American writer and educator. She began writing essays on Japan for local Cincinnati newspapers to practice her English, then for the magazine Asia, which were later published in book form as A Daughter of the Samurai. This book became an international bestseller. Sugimoto went on to publish several other novels and eventually moved to New York where she taught Japanese language and history at Columbia University.