Sumie Mishima

Seo was born into a samurai-class household near Osaka; her father was a teacher who studied in the United States. After her father died, she lived in her grandfather's household,^[1] and then with a paternal aunt in Tokyo.^[2] She graduated from Tsuda College, and spent five years in the United States, in part to avoid family pressures to marry.^[3][4] She attended Dana Hall School, and Wellesley College in 1927.^[5]

Mishima taught at her alma mater, Tsuda College,^[5] and gave private lessons in English.^[6] She translated a volume of historical legal documents, and other titles.^[5] She worked as a translator for the defense at the war crimes tribunals after World War II.^[7]

Mishima wrote two memoirs in English.^[8] The first, My Narrow Isle (1941), was reviewed in The Atlantic and The New York Times.^[9] Her second memoir, The Broader Way (1953), covered her experiences in Tokyo during and after World War II;^[3][10] it was described by one American reviewer as "the most important book to be written in English by a Japanese woman since the end of World War II."^[11] An Australian reviewer found it "an intensely personal account of one Japanese housewife's journey through a world war and a revolution in social custom."^[7]

In 1942, her Wellesley classmate Ruth Tilford Clowes profiled Mishima as a woman "caught between worlds".^[6] Ruth Benedict considered Mishima's My Narrow Isle in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), and anthropological study of Japanese culture in the mid-twentieth century.^[12]

• My Narrow Isle: The Story of a Modern Woman in Japan (1941)^[13]
• The Broader Way: A Woman's Life in the New Japan (1953)^[14]

Seo married Hajime Mishima, a professor of Chinese studies who had four young children from his first marriage.^[5][6] She died in 1992, in her nineties.