Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto

First edition of this novel by the famous Japanese American author about a teenage girl growing up in rural Japan amidst the cultural upheavals of the Meiji era.

• Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (Japanese American).
• Illustrated by Tekisui Ishii (Japanese).
• Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc, 1935.
• [12], 340 pages.
• In original unclipped ($2.50) color pictorial jacket with art after Tekisui Ishii.
• Color pictorial endpapers designed by Ishii.
• Bound in original blue cloth stamped elaborately in lower front corner with landscape in gilt and fore-edge machine deckle.

Sugimoto rose to fame with the publication of her 1925 memoir, A Daughter of the Samuari, which detailed the story of her immigration to the United States from her birthplace in Japan via an arranged marriage; by the publication of this book, her memoir had sold over 80,000 copies. Born in the immediate wake of the Meiji Restoration, Sugimoto dramatizes another aspect of her life in novel form here: the intergenerational conflicts spurred by the rapid changes of the Meiji era, when the feudal system of the samurai (which included Sugimoto's father) was being supplanted by Western influences in commerce and technology. Reviewed favorably at publication by Alfred Kazin in The New York Times, especially for its lyrical descriptions of the natural world while living in small village, A Daughter of the Nohfu is also one of the earliest novels published by a Japanese American woman writer. Sugimoto's story is poised at a rare crossroads of 1930s US publishing, narrating the effects of Western influences on Japan to a popular US American public, but through the voice of a Japanese woman who lived it. A notable landmark in US literature.

"To the young women of the rural districts, who, withstanding the glittering lure of modernism, choose to endure the heat of the golden sun and the weight of the silver snow, close to nature's heart."