Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [126]
The flash, when it came, in the instant that it consumed Cho-Cho, burned her shape onto the wall. In that second of dazzling light her body shielded the surface behind her and left a perfect silhouette, a shadow that had been a woman. The shadow of a woman with her arms raised above her head, almost as though caught in a dance. But Suzuki knows she would have been hanging up clothes: ‘there used to be a line just there’. Pausing, hands raised to the washing line, Cho-Cho had heard the plane and turned to look over her shoulder as the bomb exploded.
He steps closer to the silhouette, so small, the top of her head no higher than his heart. Here she was, his mother: he can see her, the slightness, the curved grace. A flutter at the corner of memory’s eye, become an enduring shadow. The sun hangs low in the sky, warming his back. Thrown against the wall his shadow stands next to Cho-Cho’s. He stretches out a hand, and his shadow hand moves towards her, but a cloud has inched across the sun and his silhouette vanishes before the shadows meet.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My interest in Japan began a long time ago when I visited the country on a writing assignment. I followed up that trip with wide, undisciplined reading – history, fiction, biography . . . Among the many books I am indebted to are works by Lafcadio Hearn, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Donald Richie, Ian Buruma and Meirrion and Susie Harries – all guided my meandering steps. For some years I had a Japanese daughter-in-law.
Outsiders who write about Japan are swimming in dangerous waters. All is nebulous; there are nuances so subtle that every noun, verb, adjective, action – even thought – can prove a hazard, the unwary soon lost and out of their depth. A European writer once described the Japanese language as ‘a tool more for withholding and eluding than expressing or stating’. As with the language, so with the culture. Despite taking every possible care, I can only beg indulgence for the sins of imprecision and misprision I will surely have committed.
Butterfly’s Shadow is a work of fiction that was inspired by another work of fiction, so I felt my story could be allowed to float free of some limiting narrative restrictions. I updated Pinkerton’s arrival in Nagasaki to 1922 – a fictional character stepping into an unknown but real world. Puccini’s opera was my springboard: in free-fall, I ventured the question: what if ? From there, the characters walked free.
I have not consciously distorted or misused known facts, and have striven to keep faith with historical events: the Depression; the plight of World War One veterans; the fate of Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor (87 per cent lived in California, Oregon and Washington); the part that volunteers from American internment camps played in the Italian and French campaigns; the immediate aftermath of the Nagasaki bomb – all are drawn from fact.
I am aware that Suzuki is not normally a female first name; but, thanks to Puccini, Cho-Cho and her maid Suzuki are such a familiar pair that I was reluctant to change her name.
I did change the name of Pinkerton’s American wife because her role in the opera is so slight that she barely exists, whereas in the novel the step-mother has become a central figure. She is my Nancy, not the opera’s fleetingly glimpsed Kate.
Puccini gave us the music, but the genesis of ‘Madame Butterfly’ was a process of literary accretion involving writers known and less known: the opera’s libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa was based partly on Pierre Loti’s 1887 novel, Madame Chrysanthème, and partly on a short story by John Luther Long, later dramatised by David Belasco. Some researchers have claimed the opera drew on events which actually occurred in Nagasaki in the 1890s.
Friends, family and others knowledgeable in the field have given their time to read the book in progress, and to criticise, contribute and question, among them Simon Richmond, Sarah Richmond, William Rademaekers, Mark Wyndham, Kyoko Tanno, Neil Vickers, Hiromi Dugdale,