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Oh, Seiwoong. “Hansu’s Journey by Philip Jaisohn:
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SuMee Lee
Japanese Nightingale, A
Winnifred Eaton (1901)
Adapted into both a play and a film in the early
1900s, WINNIFRED EATO N’s most successful work
rewrites the “Japanese” novel of desertion made
famous by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème
(1887) and John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly
(1898). These earlier novels portray marriages of
convenience in which, Eaton notes, foreigners in
Japan “for a short, happy and convenient season
cheerfully take unto themselves Japanese wives,
and with the same cheerfulness desert them” (90).
By contrast, in A Japanese Nightingale the love is
real, though not without its trials.
Beginning in a teahouse floating on a lake out-
side Tokyo, a beautiful, half-Japanese girl named
Yuki entertains foreigners. There she meets Jack
Bigelow, a recent college graduate who is staying
in Japan on the advice of a friend, another half-
Japanese named Taro Burton, whom he had met
in America. Although Taro made Jack promise not
to enter into a Japanese marriage, Jack is beset by
brokers, called nakodas, and at last accepts a “look
and see.” The girl is Yuki. Jack struggles for several
weeks because of his promise to Taro, but eventu-
ally succumbs and marries the girl because of her
beauty.
The difficulty, initially, is that Jack really loves
Yuki, while she seems to be doing it for the money.
Just as Jack “bought” Yuki from the nakoda, Yuki
seizes every opportunity to extract money from
Jack, much like Chysanthème in Loti’s novel. Un-
like Chrysanthème, however, her cause is noble:
She is trying to raise money for the return of her
brother, who turns out to be none other than
Jack’s friend Taro, who is staying in America.
Meanwhile, she too falls in love with Jack, but she
knows Taro will be enraged by what she has done.
She tries to leave Jack before Taro’s return, but her
husband prevents her. Meeting Taro as soon as he
returns to Tokyo, Jack brings him home, proudly
displaying his Japanese wife in his arms. When
Taro sees that Jack’s wife is Yuki, he is so overcome
by grief that he sickens and dies. Yuki runs away
in shame, and Jack spends several years searching
for her. He eventually finds her, accidentally, in
the house they both shared, and the implication
is that they will live happily ever after, rebuilding
their life together.
On the surface, such a story may seem to be
what Eaton herself dismissed as “a jumble of senti-
mental moonshine” (Me, 153). It is different, how-
ever, from other “Japanese” romances of the time
both because it ends happily and because Eaton’s
heroine is of mixed race. As the Japanese teahouse
proprietor declares at the start of the novel, dem-
onstrating the prejudice people like Yuki faced,
she “is but a cheap girl of Tokyo, with the blue-
glass eyes of the barbarian, the yellow skin of the
lower Japanese, hair of mixed color, black and red... alien at this country, alien at your honorable
country, augustly despicable—a half caste!” (89).
Belonging wholly neither to East nor West, Yuki’s
apparent “freakishness” is highlighted by the at-
tempts of an American circus manager to acquire
her for his show of pigmies, jugglers, wizards, and
dancers. To Jack, however, Yuki is “Japanese despite
the hair and eyes”: “There was no other country
she could belong to” (93). With this statement,
Eaton establishes that race is constructed socially
more than biologically, a particularly apt position
for a writer who pretended to be Japanese despite
her Chinese blood.
As such, A Japanese Nightingale poses inter-
esting questions about what truly constitutes an
individual’s ethnicity. Running alongside the ro-
mance between Jack and Yuki is a parallel narra-
tive of racial belonging for both figures, with Jack
promising in the final moments of the novel that
the couple will settle in Japan, where they will live
as Japanese and according to the principles of “the
simple peasant folk” (171). In this way, Eaton pos-
its that people can choose their race, just as they
choose their clothes, putting on alternative ethnici-
ties just as easily as donning kimonos. This theme
132 Japanese Nightingale, A