Judges 5:27

“Why are you so enraptured by my face
as to deny your eyes of the sight of that
fair garden blossoming beneath Christ’s rays?”

A Japanese Nightingale is, in essence, a fraud of a fraud of a fraud, every little piece of it wrapped in some package of its own accord, formed from predispositions or assumptions or counterfeit ideologies – fraud. The author is a Chinese-Canadian woman living as a Japanese-American, writing of a culture which she has never been exposed to in a voice of falsified colloquialisms & minuscule antiquities of which she has no part. The story follows a romance structured on guessing games & physical infatuation &, more than anything else, money, money, & more money. This is essentially just an example of shallow writing creating inept plot lines, nothing completely true because nothing is completely experienced (& in certain cases, not experienced even a little bit). I strongly believe that enough knowledge can make you an expert of that which you are not, but it works both ways, & ignorance only breeds cultural idiocy. It’s possible that this language is a bit harsh, but in the case of Winnifred Eaton, it’s only appropriate.

The question, then, becomes one of whether the author here is hurting or helping her “cause” (that of the Asian American Woman Writer). Here are the facts (& arguable facts are still facts):

• She masks her natural heredity by feeding off of the stereotype that “they all look alike to Americans.”

• The Japanese characters in her book are highly Orientalized by language alone (in other words, they are “mysterious” women & “weak” men).

• The main female character in her book is mocked by her own voice as a character; she is not only flat from a literary standpoint, but is framed as unintelligent, greedy, & unattractively deceptive.

• The American male in her book is written as an ignorant, lovesick, unaware “barbarian.”

This last fact, I think, is the most interesting, as it showcases a point concerning her portrayal of non-Asian characters in her writing, & still it is not a positive. This makes one wonder whether Eaton writes poorly of all of her characters, playing off stereotypes & preconceived notions for every race & gender simply to gather more rewards from her fanbase. If this is the case, perhaps her only crime, then, is that she is a poor writer & not just an offense to the Asian American authorial community. Either way, though, examples should only be taken concerning what not to do as a member of this rather exclusive community when reading Eaton’s work.