I live in the city where I was born, like my parents and grandparents before me. But my story converges with the one I'm telling in "Daughters of the Samurai." On the first day of college, I met a boy who was born in Japan. His family had left Tokyo for Seattle when he was very small, and announced the decision to return "home" when he was sixteen. For him, home was America. They left, and he stayed.Two years after our graduation and two months after our wedding, we moved to Tokyo ourselves. As my Japanese improved, I was praised for my accent, my manners, my taste for sea urchin and pickled plums. My face excused me from my failures--I was a foreigner, after all. My husband enjoyed no such immunity. He looked Japanese, he sounded Japanese--why didn't he act Japanese? Upon our return to New York three years later, I went to graduate school in East Asian studies and fell into a fascination with Meiji-era Japan, the moment when the Land of the Gods wrenched its gaze from the past and turned toward the shiny idols of western industrial progress. One day, in the basement stacks of a venerable library, I found a slim green volume by one Alice Mabel Bacon, a Connecticut schoolteacher. She had written a memoir of a year spent in Tokyo in the late 1880s, where she had lived with "Japanese friends, known long and intimately in America." This was strange. Nineteenth-century American women didn't generally have Japanese friends, especially not ones they had met in America. Alice came from New Haven, where I had spent my college years; she moved to Tokyo and lived not among foreigners but in a Japanese household, as I had; she taught at one of Japan's first schools for girls, founded within a year of the one I attended in New York a century later. She wrote with a candid wit that reminded me of my own bluestocking teachers. Following where Alice led, I discovered the entwined lives of Sutematsu Yamakawa Oyama, Alice's foster sister and Vassar College's first Japanese graduate; Ume Tsuda, whose pioneering women's English school Sutematsu and Alice helped to launch; and Shige Nagai Uriu, who juggled seven children and a teaching career generations before the phrase "working mother" was coined.I recognized these women. I knew what it felt like to arrive in Japan with little or no language, to want desperately to fit into a Japanese home, and at the same time to chafe against Japanese attitudes toward women. A hundred years before "globalization" and "multiculturalism" became the goals of every corporation and curriculum, three Japanese girls spanned the globe and became fluent in two worlds at once--other to everyone except each other. Their story would not let me go.Read more about the book, see a gallery of photographs, and learn about events near you at www.janicepnimura.com.