Winnifred Eaton Reeve (1875–1954) was a Canadian-born American novelist, journalist, playwright, and screenwriter best known by the pseudonym Onoto Watanna. Born in Montreal to an English father and a Chinese British mother, she was the younger sister of writer Edith Maude Eaton, who published as Sui Sin Far. Although of Chinese heritage, Eaton built her early literary career by presenting herself as Japanese, capitalizing on Western fascination with Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Writing under Onoto Watanna, she published popular romances and stories set in imagined versions of Japan, including A Japanese Nightingale (1901), which became a successful stage play. Her work often centered on cross-cultural romance, racial identity, women’s independence, and the constraints of marriage and family life. She later wrote under her own name and other pseudonyms, producing fiction, journalism, and screenplays in Hollywood. Eaton spent part of her later career in the American film industry and continued writing until late in life. She died in Butte, Montana, in 1954.
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