Butterfly's Shadow (40 page)

‘What is it with you people . . .’ He stopped. ‘What is it with us, and old sayings?’

‘You could call it another form of ancestor worship.’

‘And the old saying?’

‘Umi-no-oya-yori sodate no oya.’

‘The ones who care for you are your real parents,’ he repeated.

He studied her square, heavy face, not beautiful but pleasing, reassuring. He felt her quietness.

‘You and Henry were together a long time.’

‘A good, kind man. He was devoted to your mother.’ She said no more and Joe was aware of much left unsaid here.

‘Thank you.’

Did she know he was thanking her for the years, the caring for Cho-Cho? For peopling the empty places of his past.

‘For the spinning top,’ he said.

*

He took the train back to Tokyo, watching the less damaged outskirts give way to rubble as he approached the centre. Everywhere people were at work, rebuilding. Slowly Tokyo would rise from the ashes.

He had thought once that he was American. Later, old, frail ties tugged him in another direction and he saw himself, as though in the last shot of a movie, riding off into the Land of the Rising Sun. But it was too late to put down roots. Here, or anywhere else.

Overhead the birds swept in a dark filigree patterning the sky. When the swallows nest again, Pinkerton told Butterfly, I will return. Suzuki had repeated the words to him with sad amusement.

Wave upon wave, the lacy arrows headed into emptiness. Perhaps the birds could provide his answer: like them he would take off, crossing land and sea, and settle in the chosen place, for a while. And when some inner solstice gave the signal, he would head east – or west, depending on the season.

Yasuko would be busy, ruthlessly organising her fragmented family into shape; goading them back to life, like an irritable sheepdog snapping at their heels. Because they were important. And for once there was something he wanted to hold on to; a need for attachment.

‘I’ll be back,’ he told her as they lay curled together on the shabby futon. She gave him her cool, distanced look, one eyebrow raised:

‘I won’t count on it.’

‘Do,’ he said.

There was much he wanted to do here: walk the spine of this broken bracelet of islands from Okinawa to Hokkaido; rebuild Cho-Cho’s house – it was his, Suzuki told him; Cho-Cho had made her arrangements with typical efficiency. Before he left they had surveyed the small strip of blasted wasteland between house and road.

‘Maybe if I try very hard I might make a Zen garden.’

She murmured a phrase and he laughed ruefully. ‘Not appropriate?’

‘She always wanted an American garden.’

‘I can’t do that.’ Mimicking her: ‘Not appropriate. D’you think she’d forgive me?’

‘It is not question of forgiving. She would see your point of view.’

When they said goodbye she gave him a small metal box, once decorated with elaborate moulding and enamel. It was blackened, the surface rough, like a rash of Braille beneath his fingers; an emblem of enigmatic messages.

‘She placed her letters in it, written to you, year after year.’

‘Never posted.’

‘She hoped one day you would read them and understand maybe a little more.’

Heat had warped the lid. He managed to prise it open and looked into the box: the pages, carbonised in the heat of the explosion curled black and brittle, rustling silkily, like burnt onion skins.

When he had first seen the house from afar, approaching from the path that curved up the hill, it had seemed almost untouched. But close up, it was revealed as a ruined shell. He had stared at this absence of a house, feeling cheated: no trace remained of his mother.

And then Suzuki’s fingertips touched his arm, she showed him where to look.

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.

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, my peerless agent, Clare Alexander, and long-cherished editor at Chatto, Penelope Hoare.

I also want to thank the British Library, the London Library and my local library in Richmond upon Thames.

In America, Mari Watanabe, Kiyo Endecott and Becky Patchett of the Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Legacy Center helped with research enquiries, as did Scott Daniels, Research Librarian at the Oregon Historical Society, Mary Gallagher, archivist at the Benton County Historical Society and George
Edmonton Jr of Oregon State University. Dick Sakurai generously agreed to revisit painful memories to make sure I had kept faith with the facts of Japanese American internment. Any faults that have found their way into the finished book are, of course, my own.

Above all, I want to thank my husband, Theo Richmond. Without his keen eye, patience, challenging scepticism and unflagging encouragement the book would probably never have made it to completion.

Lee Langley
London
January 2010