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.
Includes a biographical note on the author\'s life and work..
Sugimoto\'s profound, poignant, and sometimes wry perceptions continue to resonate with authenticity and insight to this day.
An emissary of her native culture even while she is fascinated by American customs, Sugimoto keenly observes the two worlds she inhabits.
In 1898 she boards a ship and leaves the only land she has ever known.
To prepare for her new life in the United States Etsu attends a Methodist school in Tokyo where she studies English.
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.
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.
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
