A Daughter of the Samurai

A Daughter of the Samurai offers an elegant account of a world that had all but vanished by the time Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto put pen to paper. In her beguiling memoir Sugimoto chronicles her childhood in the frozen Nagaoka region of Japan, where she grows up in a high-ranking samurai family in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration that stripped the samurai class of many of its privileges.

Although originally destined to be a Buddhist priestess, at the age of twelve she becomes engaged by family arrangement to a Japanese merchant in Cincinnati, Ohio. To prepare for her new life in the United States Etsu attends a Methodist school in Tokyo where she studies English.

In 1898 she boards a ship and leaves the only land she has ever known. An emissary of her native culture even while she is fascinated by American customs, Sugimoto keenly observes the two worlds she inhabits. Sugimoto’s profound, poignant, and sometimes wry perceptions continue to resonate with authenticity and insight to this day.