A 'Japanese' Nightingale: Winnifred Eaton at 150

A Japanese Nightingale

Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]

New York: Harper, 1901

226 pages

Onoto Watanna was her own creation. She was not a Japanese princess; she was not Japanese at all. Onoto Watanna was Winnifred Eaton, a Montrealer born to a former Chinese circus performer and an Englishman who struggled to support his family through painting and people smuggling.

Winnifred made a better life for herself. She sold her first short story as a teenager. Dozens more followed, as did thirteen novels. There were stage and film adaptations. Winnifred spent six years working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

A Japanese Nightingale was Winnifred Eaton's second novel and first big commercial success. She claimed it had sold 200,000 copies.

I don't doubt it.

The novel landed at the height of the Japanese Craze; the very same craze that encouraged Winnifred Eaton to cast herself variously as "Kitishima Taka Hasche," "Kitishina Taka Hasche," or "Tacki Hashi,"a young woman from Yokohama writing under the nom de plume "Onoto Watanna."

It's all a bit confusing. 

A Japanese Nightingale itself is not at all confusing. A simple tale, at its centre is Jack Bigelow, son of American wealth, newly graduated from an unnamed university, who is whiling away his time on the outskirts of Tokyo. What drew him to the far east isn't clear, though it likely has something to do with his English-Japanese college chum Taro Burton. Looks like they were going to have a time together in Tokyo, but then Taro begged off. That Jack went off without him seems odd.

Never mind, the important thing is that Taro had warned him not to take a Japanese wife:

Taro Burton was almost a monomaniac on this subject, and denounced both the foreigners who took to themselves and deserted Japanese wives, and the native Japanese, who made such a practice possible. He himself was a half-caste, being the product of a marriage between an Englishman and a Japanese woman. In this case, however, the husband had proved faithful to his wife and children up to death...

From his earliest days in Tokyo, Jack had been visited by Ido, a nakōdo (read: matchmaker), who'd brought prospective wives for consideration. The wealthy American had found the efforts entertaining. One afternoon, Ido offers a young woman whom Jack had recently seen perform on a pleasure island in Tokyo Bay. 

Jack toys with Yuki cruelly before sending her away, just as he had Ido's other proposed brides. However, the heart will out. The American is haunted by the encounter. He starts on a quest to find the woman he'd rejected. Once found, he marries her.

Because the plot is so simple – twist included – it would spoil things to describe much more. It is important to the plot that, like Eaton herself, Yuki is "half-caste" – much is made of her blue eyes – and so is looked down upon by her fellow Japanese. More impactful to the plot is the clash of cultures, particularly as it concerns Oriental and Occidental understandings of marriage (here I employ the terms of the time). Reading in 2025, one hundred and fourteen years after publication I found interest in the married couple's reluctance to be open and share with one another.

In this one way, A Japanese Nightingale is a contemporary novel.

I finished A Japanese Nightingale last night. Today marks the sesquicentennial Winnifred Eaton's birth, which most likely took place in the family's rented row house on rue d'Iberville.

Once a bestseller, she has become Montreal's most neglected novelist.

Lillie Winnifred Eaton (née Winifred Lily Eaton)
21 August 1875 - 8 April 1954
RIP

Trivia: Adapted by Broadway and Hollywood, both subjects of the next post.

Object: A beautiful hardcover, issued without dust jacket with illustrations credited to Genjiro Yeto. The books features three colour plates and subtle illustrations on each of its pages. It is one of the most beautiful volumes in my collection.

Access: Easily found, the least expensive copy listed online is Constable's UK first. Price: £8.00. The Harper first edition can be had for under twenty-five dollars. 

The edition I read can be enjoyed online through this link to the Internet Archive.

The novel has been translated into Swedish (En japansk näktergal, 1904). German (Japanische Nachtigall, 1920), and Polish (Słowiczek japoński, 1922).

Related posts:

By Any Other Name: Onoto Watanna's Hyacinth

Beauty Ignored and Neglected
Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons

Alberta Gothic

A Pulp Writer's Challenge to Canadians

Original Detective Stories
Volume 1, Number 1
April 1948

Can a magazine written entirely by one person be considered a book? Of course not, but it does come close. Original Detective Stories was published Voyageur Press, which was owned and operated by author Horace Brown. As far as I've been able to determine, he was the only staff member and only writer. The debut issue features two works of fiction – both by Brown, of course – the first being 'Murder à la Carte.' A "BOOK LENGTH NOVEL – NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED," I first wrote about 'Murder à la Carte' fourteen years ago, wondering whether it may have found a second life as the 1950 News Stand Library novel The Penthouse Killings.

After finally managing to find a copy of the magazine, I can now report that 'Murder à la Carte' and The Penthouse Killings are in fact one and the same.

It wasn't so wild a guess; the covers suggested as much.

I have no idea who provided the cover illustration for The Penthouse Killings, though the style reminds me of several other News Stand Library titles. The Original Detective Stories cover is credited to Jackson Heise, a man who began his career as a child. The 1931 census finds him living at 281 Milverton Boulevard in Toronto with his mother and father. Seventeen at the time, Heise had already left school and seems to have been making decent money through his art, earning $520 in the previous twelve months:*

Original Detective Stories features four more illustrations, masthead included.

The contents page is interesting in that it ignores 'On the Blotter,' the very first piece in this very first issue. A four-paragraph, half-page editorial credited to "The Sergeant," whom I have every reason to believe is Brown himself, it begins:

The bane of a policeman's unhappy lot is the one world "Unsolved."

   The aftermath of War, the spiritual and moral letdown that follows brutal conflict has unleashed murder throughout Canada. Many of these cases are sex crimes of the most atrocious sort. 

In fact, the homicide rate decreased in the years immediately following the Second World War.

'On the Blotter' calls for more police funding and "a tightening of the Law in the matter of of detaining known perverts until cure."

Lest you think you have Brown pegged, as a Toronto alderman he became a staunch defender of hippies and a promoter of tenants rights. We have Brown to thank for helping raise money for the Henry Moore sculpture in Nathan Philips Square after the city council had voted it down.

Horace Brown also founded of the Canadian March of Dimes (now March of Dimes Canada). He himself was stricken with polio at the age of eight months and walked with the aid of crutches. The disease influences 'The Scarf' the second of the magazine's two stories, written under the nom de plume "Leslie Allen."** 

The issue has no ads. Its back cover is taken up with a challenge and appeal: 

Canadian readers and advertisers did not respond. Were the magazines themselves to blame or the distributors and retailers? Frankly, I think the fault lies with Brown himself. The venture was unstable from the start. Original Detective Stories' second issue was the last. It appeared in July 1948, three months after the first. 

Brown's magazine empire had one other title in its fold. Like Original Detective Stories, All Star Western Stories debuted in April 1948, published a second issue in July 1948, and then disappeared.
   

Brown believed that Canadians would rally to the support of Canadian publications and publishing.

He wasn't wrong.

We saw this through much of the second half of the last century and into the early years of this one. I worked for a library wholesaler and major chain for the last fifteen of those years and remember well the number of Canadian titles on the weekly Globe & Mail bestseller lists. 

The newspaper's most recent hardcover fiction list features not one Canadian title. The non-fiction hardcover list has just one, Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Not one title is published by a Canadian publisher.

A question for Canadians: We're boycotting American produce, booze, and travel, so why are we not boycotting American cultural product? 

* Sadly, Jackson's father, a piano salesman, was not working. All evidence suggests that the boy was the family's sole breadwinner. According to the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator, $520 in 1931 is roughly the equivalent of $10,425 today, which may explain why the Heise family was sharing the small duplex with young marrieds Timothy and Elma Breuls and the bride's mother. 

** Brown had previously used "Leslie Allen" for his 1946 golfing mystery Murder in the Rough.  

Related posts:

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence
No Whack on the Side of the Head

Quebec City Noir
Whispering City: Horace Brown's Second Encore

The Urban Leacock

Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914
310 pages

On my most recent visit to Montreal I purchased a copy of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. It isn't that I hadn't one already, rather that I didn't have this particular edition. A thing of beauty, thus a joy forever, it is illustrated throughout by Seth. 

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013

It follows the 1999 McClelland & Stewart coffee table book illustrated by engraver Wesley W. Bates.

All to say that Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is still very much a thing in this country. It outshines and outsells the author's fifty other books combined. Throw in posthumous publications, if you like; I still stand by my words.

Much of the appeal of Sunshine Sketches has to do with structure. Unlike previous collections, its twelve stories – each labelled a "Chapter" – share the same characters and Canadian small town setting. It stands with this collection as the closest thing Leacock ever came to writing a novel.*

Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich too has stories presented as chapters. Like Sunshine Sketches, its recurring characters move about a common setting, only this time that setting is urban and American.

The first chapter, 'A Little Dinner With Mr. Lucullus Fyshe,' sets the stage by introducing the elm-shaded, Grecian-columned Mausoleum Club on Plutoria Avenue, located in a metropolis all evidence suggests is also named Plutoria. Fyshe, who is chief director of the People’s District Loan and Savings and president of both the People’s Traction and Suburban Company and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, has learned that a member of the English aristocracy, Duke of Dunham, is visiting the United States. Fyshe intends to mine some Old World money; the idle rich are always looking for more, it seems. Mergers are particularly effective. Fyshe himself had brought about a merger of four soda-water companies, "bringing what was called industrial peace over an area as big as Texas and raising the price of soda by three peaceful cents per bottle." Things with the Duke don't go quite as he'd hoped, but there is no harm done; Fyshe's wealth continues to grow.

Indeed, the idle rich only get richer, the sole exception being their newest member, Tomlinson, the central figure of 'The Wizard of Finance' and 'The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson.' Once a struggling bush farmer, he anticipates Beverley hillbilly Jed Clampett, though the gold discovered on his Ohio land is of the traditional kind, not black Texas tea. Tomlinson's newfound wealth is unwelcome and is slowly destroying his family. Son Fred, once a strapping seventeen-year-old, has taken to a sofa in the Grand Palaver Hotel, where he lies in flowered dressing gown next to a pack of cigarettes and box of chocolates with blinds drawn and eyes half-open.

American Magazine, June 1914.
Illustration: F. Strothmann

'The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown,' the fourth chapter, was inspired by the 1912 Montreal visit of Abdu'l-Bahá, eldest son of founder the Bahá'í faith Bahá'u'lláh. As such, it has become the most notable and notorious. A nouvelle a clèf, here Abdu'l-Bahá becomes "celebrated Oriental mystic" Yahi-Bahi, a leader in the new cult of Boohooism. "Many things are yet to happen before other's begin," is a prophesy this reader has taken to heart.

Not every Arcadian adventure takes place in Plutoria. Come summer those of the city's leisure class make for the country. One such member is Newberry, who worked with Fyshe on the merger that birthed the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative. Mr Newberry is a firm believer in "getting right out into the bush and putting on old clothes,":

This was why he had built Castel Casteggio. It stood about forty miles from the city, out among the wooded hills on the shore of a little lake. Except for the fifteen or twenty residences like it that dotted the sides of the lake, it was entirely isolated. The only way to reach it was by the motor road that wound its way among leafy hills from the railway station fifteen miles away. Every foot of the road was private property, as all nature ought to be.
   The whole country about Castel Casteggio was absolutely primeval, or at any rate as primeval as Scotch gardeners and French landscape artists could make it. The lake itself lay like a sparkling gem from nature’s workshop—except that they had raised the level of it ten feet, stone-banked the sides, cleared out the brush, and put a motor road round it. Beyond that it was pure nature.

 American Magazine, July 1914.
Illustration: F. Strothmann

The passage comes from the 'The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins,' which concerns an innocent dimwit and how he came to marry an older woman with four adult sons. My favourite of the eight stories chapters, it begins:

Meanwhile, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is looked after by Captain Cormorant of the United States Navy. If not Cormorant, there's Lieutenant Hawk:

Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time. 

 I do like a good love story.

'The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph' and 'The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing,' concern Plutoria Avenue's impressive Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches. Rev. Edward Fareforth Furlong, the charismatic youngish minister of St. Asaph, appears throughout Arcadian Adventures. Whether accompanying a fair lady harpist of his choir on flute or dancing "the new episcopal tango" with the daughters of elderly parishioners, he's a popular figure – so much more fun than St. Osoph's Rev Dr McTeague with his lectures on philosophy and focus on Hegel.

Rev James Barclay (1844-1920) of St Paul's Presbyterian Church, Montreal, 
model for Rev Dr McTeague and grandfather of painter Marian Dale Scott.

The balance between the two churches shifts dramatically with St Osoph's appointment of Rev Dr Uttermust Dumfarthing. An unpleasant, unfriendly, judgmental man who is unlikely to acknowledge a parishioner encountered on Plutoria Avenue, he is given to talk of burning souls and eternal damnation and so becomes all the rage. The decline in St Asaph's fortunes, as reflected in near-barren communion plates, is all too evident. Where once Newberry had pushed for expensive expansions of the Episcopalian church – dynamiting the entrance so as to construct a Norman gateway, for example – he and other mortgage-holders grow concerned. There being too much uncertainty, the men work to bring about a merger of the two churches. Creation of this "United Church" is in the hands of Mr. Furlong, senior, who is not only the father of the rector of St. Asaph’s, but  also president of the New Amalgamated Hymnal Corporation, and director of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited.  He is joined in this good work by Newberry, of course, along with Skinyer, a partner in the law firm Skinyer-Beatem. Mr Furlong lays out the terms to Mr Newberry: 

"All the present mortgagees will be converted into unified bond-holders, the pew rents will be capitalised into preferred stock, and the common stock, drawing its dividend from the offertory, will be distributed among all members in standing. Skinyer says that it is really an ideal form of church union, one that he thinks is likely-to be widely adopted. It has the advantages of removing all questions of religion, which he says are practically the only remaining obstacle to a union of all the churches. In fact, it puts the churches once and for all on a business basis.”
   “But what about the question of doctrine, of belief?” asked Mr. Newberry.
   "Skinyer says he can settle it,’’ answered Mr. Furlong.

In the final chapter, the gentlemen of the Mausoleum Club set their sights on civic politics with Lucullus Fyshe leading the charge for clean government: "He wanted, he said, to see everything done henceforth in broad daylight, and for this purpose he had summoned them at night to discuss ways and means of action."

The enduring popularity of Sunshine Sketches has us associating Leacock with small towns. This makes sense. I will note, however, that the man himself lived most of his life in cities. I won't pretend to have read all his writing, but what I have read tends to be set in urban and suburban settings. For this reason, I tend to think Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich is more representative of Leacock's work.

Of course, as a city boy, I may be biased. What I can say without prejudice is that it is every bit as true as The Theory of the Leisure Class, only funnier.

*  In fact, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has been described as a novel. Canadian Book Review Annual describes it as such. On the other hand, it also has it that the book is "set in the little Town of Sunshine."

A Bonus: 

The Montreal Gazette, 19 December 1914

Object and Access: A first edition, sans jacket, I purchased my copy forty or so years ago at Montreal's Word Bookstore, not a half-kilometre to the east of McGill University's Stephen Leacock Building. Price: $5.00.

The least expensive copy listed online is a 1989 New Canadian Library mass market edition offered at US$2.80 by a Dallas bookseller who dares charge US$100 in shipping to Canada. At US$778, the most expensive is a Bell & Cockburn first edition in "very good," very rare dust jacket. It is being sold by a Monterey bookseller. Shipping for this copy is US$18.

The book to buy is a jacket-less signed copy of the first UK edition, published in 1915 by John Lane. Price: £375 (w/ £18 shipping). I share the bookseller's image so as to encourage repatriation.

Fifteen-year-old "new" New Canadian Library copies of Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich are available from Penguin Random House Canada at $22. Though I do recommend Gerald Lynch's introduction, at $19.95 you can do better with the Tecumseh Press Canadian Critical Edition edited by D.M.R. Bentley. 

First editions, sans jacket, are listed for sale online at under ten dollars.

Related posts:

Average Leacock for the Average Man

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like
Professor Leacock Sets the Stage
Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

Sunshine Scandals of a Little Town

A View of the Town
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster & Scott, 1954
269 pages

There is no town of Inverness on Nova Scotia's mainland. That I wasn't sure says as much of my shaky knowledge of the Maritimes as it does the author's talent. Her Inverness seems real. At first, I thought it might have been inspired by an actual town – as Southport in Hilliard's Miranda (1960) is modeled on Yarmouth – but I've since come to realize that it is based on no one town, rather seventy or eighty of them.

The history of Inverness is important to the plot. It was on 15 May 1781 that Captain Joshua Ward of Virginia landed on Nova Scotia's western shore, taking possession of five hundred acres of virgin soil he'd been awarded for his loyalty to the Crown. Two months later, the immigrant ship Holly arrived from Scotland bearing the Mackays, Fifes, Camerons, Loves, Leckeys, and Macdonalds. The leader of the expedition, Fergus Mackay, who'd spent much of the voyage below deck "guarding" the scotch, emerged in time to yell "I name thee Inverness!"

A View of the Town is not a historical novel, it takes place in 1930 as the sesquicentenary of Inverness approaches. Simon Ward is troubled. Pioneer Day, which celebrates the arrive of great-great-grandfather Joshua, has long been in the shadow of the Holly Day celebration of the Highlanders' arrival. This is easily understandable, after all, the Scottish ship brought the Mackays, Fifes, Camerons, Loves, Leckeys, and Macdonalds, whereas Joshua Ward brought only his family, crew, and a dozen slaves:

"The Wards, who had a weakness for begetting females, were outnumbered in no time."

Simon himself has two offspring, both female. Primrose, named for her late mother, is the eldest. An unmarried innocent of twenty-six, she

spends her days indoors caring for her skin and reading Ruth Fielding novels. Helen, Prim's younger sister, is the more grounded of the two, though recent history suggests otherwise. Wed at nineteen to Denis Cameron, son of the wealthy foundry-owning Camerons, she was abandoned a year later. Her estranged husband is thought to be in California trying to paint. 

Simon is trying to write. He has spent the past two decades working on a history of Inverness in a small octagonal room perched atop the otherwise three-storey Ward family home. The only intrusion he allows comes in late afternoon when the women of the house bring tea. Prim and Helen take their turns, as do Simon's sister-in-law Marlow, and housekeeper Katharine Macdonald (known to all as Katie Wee Duncan):

Nobody had ever caught him actually seated at his desk writing. He might be found taking a nap or reading a book, looking at something in the town, or simply waiting.

Simon means to set things right. Great-great-grandfather Joshua is the true founder of Inverness. It was the Ward family that built the foundation of this proud Nova Scotia town. Neighbour Mary Mackay, president of the Inverness Argus Society, wouldn't dare challenge Simon on this view – she's far too savvy. The play between the two in the months leading to the Pioneer and Holly Day sesquicentennial celebrations is something to see, but there's so much more.

There's Helen's failed marriage, of course. But what of spinster aunt Marlow, who lives in the Ward home next door to the fiancé who threw her over? That old beau went on to father Ian Cameron, Helen's missing husband. Unmarried Katie Wee Duncan, the Ward's housekeeper and cook, is the mother of Rose, who is Mary Mackay's unacknowledged granddaughter. Newly arrived lawyer Percy Mattheson divides his attention between Mary's daughter Florence and Prim Ward until the former runs off with her sister's husband. 

Capping it all off is a climactic scene clearly inspired by "The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle" (aka "The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias"). Harmless fun, A View of the Town is the most gentle of Hilliard's five novels in that no one dies and there are several happy endings. The black humour, very much present in the others, is here pale grey. This 23 October 1954 Globe & Mail ad is the very example of truth in advertizing:

Trivia I: Inverness, Nova Scotia is located on the western shore of Cape Breton. The Inverness of A View of the Town is described as being on the mainland, some one hundred miles north of Halifax. 

Trivia II: Prim's Ruth Fielding novels are just the beginning! Early in the novel, much to her horror, Marlow discovers a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover hidden under the mattress of Helen's bed. Confronting her niece, Marlow threatens to burn it, but puts the marches away when Helen tells her that it belongs to Mary Mackay's daughter Florence.

About the author:

Sadly, the author would never write or illustrate a travel book.

Object and Access: A green/grey hardcover, split-run with American publishing house Abelard-Schulman (for whom the author worked as a fiction editor). The jacket illustration is credited to George Thompson about whom I know nothing. I bought my copy in early 2024 from a southern Ontario bookseller. Price: $15. I purchased a signed Abelard-Schulman edition early this year. Price: US$30. It is guaranteed to place on my 2025 list of best book buys.

You too can own a signed copy! As of this writing a Calgary bookseller is offering not one but two at $40 apiece!

Get 'em while you can!

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Growing Up With Mother
As He Lay Dying