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Patricia Kennedy Bostian
Miss Numé of Japan:
A Japanese-American Romance
Winnifred Eaton (1899)
The first known novel to be published by an Asian
American, Miss Numé of Japan chronicles the re-
lationships of two couples, one Japanese and one
American, as they fall out of love with one another
and in love with members of the other couple in an
interracial romance. Central to this drama is Numé
Watanabe. Betrothed since early childhood to Orito
Takashima, the son of her father’s closest friend,
Numé has become increasingly unhappy with the
match in the long years that Orito has spent pursu-
ing his education in America. Awaiting his return,
she meets the dashing young vice counsul of the
American Legation in Kyoto, Arthur Sinclair, who
becomes infatuated with Numé in return.
Meanwhile, Orito meets Sinclair’s fiancée,
Cleo Ballard, on the ship bringing them both to
Japan for their marriages. Cleo is the archetypal
“New Woman” of the 19th century, not unlike the
Chinese-Canadian WINNIFRED EATO N herself: She
is brazen and flirtatious, criticized by her cousin
Tom for toying mercilessly with Orito’s heart as it
becomes increasingly clear that the Japanese man
has fallen in love with her.
Rather than allowing this match to succeed,
Eaton caters to 19th-century convention by block-
ing a happy union between Cleo and Orito, while
allowing one between Numé and Sinclair. This
hesitation to subvert cultural expectation makes
Miss Numé more cautious than Eaton’s later nine
novels set in Japan. In subsequent works such as
Heart of Hyacinth (1903) and A Japanese Blossom
(1906), for instance, Eaton does portray successful
marriages between Caucasian women and Japa-
nese men, but in Miss Numé, Orito commits sui-
cide, and Cleo is paired off, unsatisfactorily, with
her cousin.
Miss Numé was not only the first novel to be
published by Eaton; she also used a false name,
Onoto Watanna, that was accompanied by a pub-
licity campaign to make Eaton’s fabricated Japa-
nese biography the central selling point of the
book. As part of this campaign, articles profiling
Miss Numé were accompanied by photographs of
Eaton in Japanese costume, supplemented with
fictional details about her Japanese background. At
times, the photographs were not even of her. Yet, as
Jean Lee Cole notes in The Literary Voices of Win-
nifred Eaton, this conflation of book and author
was a potent fiction because it allowed readers “to
indulge in erotic fantasies of possessing a geisha of
their very own.” By dressing in kimonos, wearing
her hair in a Japanese style, and posing in front of
Japanese screens, Eaton “reinforced the idea that
when readers purchased her books, they were also,
in a sense, purchasing her” (Cole 27).
Until recently literary critics have been reluc-
tant to embrace Eaton as the first Asian-American
novelist, or to accord Miss Numé its place within
the Asian-American literary canon. “In order to
fully understand Eaton’s literary contribution,”
Eve Oishi points out in her introduction to Miss
Numé, “scholars must first come to terms with the
criteria they employ when analyzing ethnic fiction.
Do we define this fiction by the author’s biological
identity? By her cultural identification? By the per-
sona marketed to her audience? By the content and
address of the work?” (Eaton xvii–xviii). In short,
scholars have simply not known what to do with
a woman who lied about her real background in
order to sell her books.19 4 Miss Numé of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance