Many critics consider Tamura Toshiko the archetypal Japanese New Woman writer. While this label might accurately describe Tamura's progressive lifestyle, it does not reflect her own ambivalence about Japan's modernization in terms of gender issues. The female protagonists in Tamura's Taishô period (1912 - 1926) fiction ponder emancipation from Japan's patriarchal family system, but rarely achieve their goals. Not until almost twenty years after the New Woman discourse ended in Japan did Tamura Toshiko write a story in which a female protagonist successfully creates an independent lifestyle. Yet, the success of the protagonist in "Karihorunia Monogatari" (California Story, 1937) is problematized by the way in which she is exoticized as a "Japanese" artist though she is a second generation Japanese-American. Written during Tamura's brief attempt to re-enter the Bundan (literary circle) after an eighteen- year absence from Japan, this work, as well as her writing from 1936 - 1938, has been generally overlooked. I argue that Tamura Toshiko's marginalized perspective as a returned Japanese subtly challenges Japan's militarist capitalism but through the guise of Japanese-American protagonists who grapple with the "humiliation" of gender as well as race and class discrimination. By discussing "Karihorunia Monogatari" in conjunction with "Kanojô no seikatsu" (Her Life, 1915), emblematic of New Woman writing in which the protagonist unsuccessfully struggles for freedom, I show how by the 1930s, Tamura Toshiko confronts problems of gender as well as issues of class and race in Japan's modernization process.