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.