Sone's best-known work, the memoir Nisei Daughter, was originally published by Little, Brown in 1953. It tells the story of a Japanese immigrant family's life in the United States before and during the war. Sone's parents are from Japan (Issei), and their children are born in the States, making them Nisei (as in the title). The book explores the cultural differences the family faced before the war, both in the States and on a visit to Japan, and their incarceration during World War II. The story is told from Sone's perspective. The cover photograph of the original edition shows Sone and her sister Sammy smiling and sitting on the steps of the Carrollton Hotel, their father's establishment, in 1932.
Exposition concerning the initial meeting and marriage of Sone's parents and the births of their four children is described early in the book. A comfortable childhood existence is nostalgically portrayed in the environs of the Skid Road hotel, which Mr. Itoi operates near the Seattle waterfront. He is portrayed as a hard worker and a resourceful provider, refusing rooms to characters who seem drunk or otherwise unsavory, and continually repairing and improving his establishment. Mrs. Itoi is more colorfully portrayed as a woman who is capable of having fun and who wants to indulge her children in their creativity and their whims. The "shocking" fact of life that Sone discovers when she is six is that she is ethnic Japanese and, because of that fact, she and her siblings must attend weekday sessions at Seattle's Japanese school rather than play after their regular grammar school classes. The conflict between Sone's Japanese heritage and her American situation is developed throughout the book as its main theme, as the author continually searches for who she is and where she belongs.
Sone offers a first-hand account of life at the Puyallup Assembly Center and at Minidoka, one of ten public concentration camps where Japanese Americans were detained during the war. Her account offers her observations of life in the camps and describes how its residents struggled to accommodate their situation. By the time Nisei Daughter was reissued in 1979, Americans were becoming increasingly aware of and sensitive to mistreatment of people of Japanese descent in the United States during World War II. The role of Nikkei in raising awareness to their internment story reflected in Sone's preface for the 1979 edition.[7]
