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The Good Daughter
Paperback

The Good Daughter

$34.99
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The death of her estranged father made Kumi Taguchi realise how little she had known him and how ambivalent she had been about the Japanese side of her life. In a beautifully written memoir of captivating emotional honesty, the SBS Insight host sets out to find her dad, and herself.

Growing up, Kumi Taguchi thought her father was just difficult: reserved to the point of silence, obsessively frugal, and – after her parents’ divorce – almost entirely absent. At several points, Kumi decided to cut their few remaining ties, each time learning that denying a piece of your identity is no simple task. Still, when her father died, she was far away and Kumi’s feelings about him – and her own heritage – remained tangled.

But just because a parent has gone doesn’t mean they’re absent. Over time Kumi came to understand more about what made her father as he was, including his harrowing experiences as a child in wartime Japan and, above all, the culture she both loved and felt burdened by. She decided to travel to Japan to find the family home, and perhaps lay to rest some ghosts.

In this highly evocative journey of understanding, Kumi explores her divided self: the tension between duty and freedom; the people she’s felt drawn to and lost; and how to find your place when caught between two worlds. The result is a beautifully candid, resonant book about feeling comfortable in your own skin that will speak to the seeker in us all.

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MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Australia
Country
Australia
Date
29 April 2025
Pages
320
ISBN
9781925750799

The death of her estranged father made Kumi Taguchi realise how little she had known him and how ambivalent she had been about the Japanese side of her life. In a beautifully written memoir of captivating emotional honesty, the SBS Insight host sets out to find her dad, and herself.

Growing up, Kumi Taguchi thought her father was just difficult: reserved to the point of silence, obsessively frugal, and – after her parents’ divorce – almost entirely absent. At several points, Kumi decided to cut their few remaining ties, each time learning that denying a piece of your identity is no simple task. Still, when her father died, she was far away and Kumi’s feelings about him – and her own heritage – remained tangled.

But just because a parent has gone doesn’t mean they’re absent. Over time Kumi came to understand more about what made her father as he was, including his harrowing experiences as a child in wartime Japan and, above all, the culture she both loved and felt burdened by. She decided to travel to Japan to find the family home, and perhaps lay to rest some ghosts.

In this highly evocative journey of understanding, Kumi explores her divided self: the tension between duty and freedom; the people she’s felt drawn to and lost; and how to find your place when caught between two worlds. The result is a beautifully candid, resonant book about feeling comfortable in your own skin that will speak to the seeker in us all.

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Australia
Country
Australia
Date
29 April 2025
Pages
320
ISBN
9781925750799
 
Book Review

The Good Daughter
by Kumi Taguchi

by Nicole Vasilev, Apr 2025

The Good Daughter by Kumi Taguchi is a poignant and evocative memoir that navigates the complex emotions surrounding family, identity, and cultural heritage. Growing up in Australia with a Japanese father and an Australian mother, Taguchi’s early relationship with her father was defined by distance, both emotional and physical. Her father was a reserved, obsessively frugal figure, and after her parents’ divorce, he was almost entirely absent from her life. As a child, she struggled to understand the reasons for this, and after his death, her feelings about him and her Japanese heritage remained tangled and unresolved.

Taguchi embarks on a journey to understand the father she lost and the cultural legacy that she had inherited but never fully embraced. The journey that Taguchi takes to Japan, where she seeks to find her father’s family home, is not only about discovering physical locations, but also understanding the deep-seated emotional and cultural complexities that shaped her father’s behaviour. Her exploration of Japan allows her to reconnect with the heritage she had often felt burdened by, and in doing so, she unravels layers of her own identity. This personal odyssey is both a tribute to her father and a powerful reckoning with the divided sense of self that many people experience when straddling two cultures.

Taguchi’s writing is reflective, sensitive, and deeply thoughtful, and will resonate, I am sure, with many readers in Australia. She successfully brings to life the struggle of balancing the expectations of duty with the desire for freedom, and how our past – particularly the influence of our parents – continues to shape us even after they are gone. Taguchi crafts a compelling narrative that is not only about the search for personal understanding but also about finding a sense of belonging in a world that often feels divided.

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