United States in the 1920s and has been translated
into seven languages, Etsu Sugimoto was born to
a prestigious samurai family in the Nagaoka do-
main in Echigo Province (present-day Niigata
Prefecture). The character for “Etsu” stands for
a “battle-ax,” an unusual choice for a girl’s name
even in a samurai family. Her father, Heisuke Ina-
gaki, was a former chief retainer of the Nagaoka
domain. The rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate had
just ended with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and
the samurai class had lost many privileges. In addi-
tion, the Nagaoka domain was recovering from the
devastation resulting from its fierce battles against
the new government’s army during the Boshin war
(1868). Etsu grew up under the guidance of her
mother and great-grandmother (“Grandmother”
in A Daughter of the Samurai). She received strict
education as a member of the samurai class, in part
because she was considered an heir after her elder
brother ran away from home. She recited the verses
from the Confucian classics while being ordered to
keep an upright position throughout the lesson.
At age 12 she was engaged to Matsunosuke Sug-
imoto (Matsuo in A Daughter), her brother’s friend
living in the United States. To become a good wife,
she continued her education in a Christian school.
While at the school, she enjoyed reading English
books, including the Bible and the poetry of Ten-
nyson, and soon converted to Christianity. In 1898
she moved to the United States to marry Matsu-
nosuke—then a merchant in Cincinnati whom
she had never met. In Cincinnati the couple lived
with the Wilsons—a distinguished local family
who served as host to Etsu. In particular, she be-
came friends with Florence Wilson, a collaborator
in writing A Daughter. Etsu lived in Cincinnati for
12 years, during which time she gave birth to two
daughters, Hanano and Chiyono. When she was
traveling in Japan with her two daughters, she re-
ceived the news that her husband had died of ap-
pendicitis. For a while she worked as a writer for a
magazine for a Christian women’s group in Tokyo
(the experience curiously omitted in A Daughter).
Worried about the education of her daughters,
who were experiencing culture shock, however,
she moved back to the United States, this time set-
tling in New York in 1916. She was determined to
make her living as a writer, and continued to sub-
mit articles despite many rejections. Eventually her
writing was discovered by the editor and author
Christopher Morley, who encouraged her to write
“some little memories of her girlhood in Japan”
for his newspaper column. The serialization of A
Daughter of the Samurai in a magazine called Asia
began in December 1923 and continued through- Florence Wilson encouraged Etsu and edited
her writing throughout the serialization. In 1925 it
was published in book form by Doubleday, Page &
Co. The publisher reported that the book was “the
most continuously successful book of non-fiction
on the Doubleday, Doran list” in 1932.
In 1927 she resigned from the teaching po-
sition at Columbia University—a post she had
occupied since 1920, teaching Japanese-culture
courses—and returned to Japan in order to con-
duct research for her new book. As Japan headed
for war with China first and then with the United
States in the 1930s, she continued to write for the
American audience. She published “The Daughter
of the Narikin” (1932), about a nouveau-riche in
Japan; “A Daughter of the Nohfu” (1937), about
peasant life in Niigata; and “Grandmother O Kyo”
(1940), about the lives of the people during the
Sino-Japanese War of 1937. Once the war was over
in 1945, she was able to regain her friendships in
the United States. In 1950 she died of liver cancer
at the age of 76.
Shion Kono
Sui Sin Far See FAR, SUI SIN.
Suitable Boy, A Vikram Seth (1993)
A daunting read at a hefty 1,325 pages, this winner
of the WHSmith Literary Award and the Common-
wealth Writer’s Prize is a notable departure from
the experimental, magical realist narrative style
of VIKRAM SETH’s contemporaries, such as Salman
Rushdie. Instead, Seth embraces the laid-back un-
obtrusiveness of the classic realism of 19th-century
novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens,
and Tolstoy. Indeed, A Suitable Boy outdoes the272 Sui Sin Far