A Daughter of the Samurai By Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto

Foreword by Janice P. Nimura
Introduction by Christopher Morley
This is the remarkable story of one woman’s journey
successfully navigating two very different cultures—the
first memoir ever written by an Asian-American woman.
Beautifully told, it is the story of a headstrong and
empowered woman—an obedient wife, widowed
mother and bilingual breadwinner—finding her way and
finding her voice in a strange new land.
Follow in her footsteps and trace the remarkable trajectory of her life as she:
• Witnesses her father's ritual seppuku and her mother burn down the family home
• Bids an emotional farewell to her homeland and sails across the ocean to marry a
wealthy merchant whom she has never met
• Returns to Japan with her two daughters and mother-in-law after the death of her
husband only to find Japan, the country of her birth, just as alien to her as America
• Returns to America after the death of her mother-in-law and reinvents herself again
An international bestseller when it was first published a century ago, A Daughter of the Samurai
emerges as a rare testament to a singular woman’s resolve, strength and perseverance.

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

\Janice P. Nimura is the author of Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West
and Back, a New York Times Notable book of 2015. More recently, she received a Public
Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on
The Doctors Blackwell, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in
biography.

Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was a journalist, author,
lecturer and theatrical producer best known for his novels
Parnassus on Wheels, The Haunted Bookshop and Kitty Foyle.

$15.99 paperback
$21.95 (CAD)
ISBN-13: 978-4-8053-1755-6
August
Literature
Tuttle Publishing
5 1/8 X 8 ● 288 pages