[2] She graduated from Tsuda College, and spent five years in the United States, in part to avoid family pressures to marry.

"[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] Seo married Hajime Mishima, a professor of Chinese studies who had four young children from his first marriage.