A Daughter of the Samurai

A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) is Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s autobiography, written in English and widely read in its day. It begins in the snow country of Echigo, in the household of a high-ranking samurai, and gives an intimate portrait of the disciplined Confucian and Buddhist upbringing that shaped her — its manners, its duties, and its deep sense of honor.

The memoir follows her from that traditional world into a new one. As a young woman she converted to Christianity, and her marriage eventually carried her across the ocean to make a home in the United States. She writes with warmth and a keen eye about the contrasts she lived through, holding the ethic of her childhood and the faith and freedoms of the West together in a single life.

Gentler than an evangelist’s testimony, the book is nonetheless a genuine first-person account of a Confucian-formed woman who became a Christian. Its grace as literature made it a bestseller in its time and one of the best-loved memoirs of the meeting between Japan and the West.

Sugimoto wrote her memoir in English, and our public-domain edition presents her own words in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, together with a link to a free source.

This is a clean reading edition of A Daughter of the Samurai, which Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto published in 1925. The text is in the public domain and we set it from the Project Gutenberg transcription.

Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (1874–1950) was born in Echigo, on the snow side of Japan, the daughter of a samurai of the Nagaoka clan who had been on the losing side of the restoration. She was raised to be a Buddhist priest until her family's fall made that impossible, and was then betrothed to a merchant in America whom she had never seen. Sent to a mission school in Tokyo to learn English before she sailed, she was baptised there, against her family's wish and at real cost to it. She married in Cincinnati, was widowed young, and wrote this book in English, which was not her language, about the two worlds she belonged to and the distance between them.

A note on what we changed. The transcription kept the line breaks of the printed page, so 1,221 paragraphs arrived as columns of short lines; we joined them back, which is whitespace and nothing else. We broke her longest paragraphs at sentences she had already ended, and the pass checks chapter by chapter that the words and their order are unaltered. We removed Project Gutenberg's licence, which is not hers, and the header line it repeats at the top of every file, which had landed in the middle of three chapters.

We corrected nothing in the text. A checker proposed five changes and all five were wrong: Rongo and Moshi are the Analects and Mencius, Chuyo is the Doctrine of the Mean, Yodo is a domain and Tosa another, and passerby is a word. Her Japanese is hers.

The free transcription is linked from this book's page.