60
orful descriptions of annual events and festivals,
including the New Year and Ura-bon (“A Welcome
of Souls Returned” during the summer). The nar-
rator also discusses Japanese religions, myths and
legends extensively and informatively. Even some
flashbacks about her father and mother are intro-
duced as illustrations of the Way of the Samurai.
The narrative often seems educational without
being scholarly.
While the narrative is rife with descriptions of
traditional values and practices of Japanese society,
the narrator also makes observations of American
society in the early 20th century. One of the recur-
ring issues is the status of women. While Etsu-bo
is sympathetic to the values that govern the lives of
her mother and grandmother in Japan, she also en-
vies the freedom and honesty of American women,
whom she first encountered in a missionary school
in Tokyo. Etsu also discusses the issue of reconcil-
ing her newfound Christian faith with her family
religion. Overall, Etsu-bo’s view of American cul-
ture and society is as positive as her view on her
native practice. Etsu-bo concludes: “Hearts are the
same on both sides of the world; but this is a secret
that is hidden from the people of the East, and hid-
den from the people of the West.” Because of the
positive assessment of both cultures, this book is
often regarded as the work of a cultural ambassa-
dor, introducing Japanese culture to an American
audience and building a positive relationship be-
tween the two nations.
The stylistic elegance and flow of A Daughter
owes much to the skillful editing of Florence Wil-
son (1861–1932). A daughter of the Wilson fam-
ily who acted as a host when the author came to
Cincinnati to marry Matsunosuke (Matsuo in
A Daughter), Wilson encouraged Sugimoto and
helped her throughout the writing process.
Almost immediately after the publication, the
book was a great commercial success. In 1932 it
became “the most continuously successful book
of non-fiction on the Doubleday, Doran list.” A
Daughter was included in an anthology entitled
A Book of Great Autobiography (1934), alongside
the autobiographical texts by Helen Keller, Joseph
Conrad, and Walt Whitman. Albert Einstein and
Rabindranath Tagore wrote letters of apprecia-
tion, and Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the
Sword quotes and refers to A Daughter as a source
of information on Japanese culture.Bibliography
Hirakawa, Setsuko. “Etsu I. Sugimoto’s A Daughter of
the Samurai in America.” Comparative Literature
Studies, 30, no. 4 (1993): 397–407.
Shion KonoDawesar, Abha (1974– )
The novelist Abha Dawesar was born in New
Delhi, India, to upper-caste Brahmin parents.
After graduating from Army Public School in
India, she moved to the United States to study po-
litical philosophy at Harvard University, where she
completed her honors thesis on the conception of
human greatness in Frederick Nietzsche’s On the
Genealogy of Morals. She worked for a few years
in financial services but later resigned to become
a full-time novelist. She currently lives and works
in New York.
Dawesar published her first novel entitled Mini-
planner in 2000, and the event has been considered
“a coming-of-age of Indian diaspora writers” since
the book introduces an innovative subject matter
and challenges the stereotypes of South Asian–
American characters. The book was also issued in
India under the title The Three of Us. Dawesar’s
next novel Babyji was published in 2005, win-
ning the American Library Association’s Stonewall
Award for 2006, and has already been translated
into Spanish and Italian. The author’s third novel
is That Summer in Paris.
The author has been noted for experimenting
with various narrative voices in her fiction, in-
variably employing first-person narration. Mini-
planner is written from the perspective of Andre,
a 24-year-old white man for whom moving to
New York to pursue a career in the banking sec-
tor leads to the exploration of his sexual identity.
Andre finds himself seduced by a male top execu-
tive working for the same company and soon leads
a very active sexual life, dating men and women
alike. Explicit sexual scenes abound in the novel,60 Dawesar, Abha