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.
Includes a biographical note on the author’s life and work.
Table of Content
Contents
Introduction
Chapter I. Winters in Echigo
Chapter II. Curly Hair
Chapter III. Days of Kan
Chapter IV. The Old and the New
Chapter V. Falling Leaves
Chapter VI. A Sunny New Year
Chapter VII. The Wedding That Never Was
Chapter VIII. Two Ventures
Chapter IX. The Story of a Marionette
Chapter X. The Day of the Bird
Chapter XI. My First Journey
Chapter XII. Travel Education
Chapter XIII. Foreigners
Chapter XIV. Lessons
Chapter XV. How I Became a Christian
Chapter XVI. Sailing Unknown Seas
Chapter XVII. First Impressions
Chapter XVIII. Strange Customs
Chapter XIX. Thinking
Chapter XX. Neighbors
Chapter XXI. New Experiences
Chapter XXII. Flower in a Strange Land
Chapter XXIII. Chiyo
Chapter XXIV. In Japan Again
Chapter XXV. Our Tokyo Home
Chapter XXVI. Tragic Trifles
Chapter XXVII. Honourable Grandmother
Chapter XXVIII. Sister’s Visit
Chapter XXIX. A Lady of Old Japan
Chapter XXX. The White Cow
Chapter XXXI. Worthless Treasures
Chapter XXXI.I The Black Ships
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
About the author
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (1874-1950) was a Japanese American autobiographer and novelist. She started writing about Japan in local Cincinnati newspapers and then in a series of articles for the magazine Asia, later published in book form as A Daughter of Samurai (1925). The book became an international bestseller. Sugimoto went on to publish several other books and eventually moved to New York and taught Japanese language and culture at Columbia University.
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