by Rain, David
‘You’ll thank Isamu for me, won’t you?’ I said.
‘He’d rather be thanking you. He’s always been grateful to you, Sharpless. If there’s a hero of this story, he thinks it’s you. After all, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.’
‘Oh, you’d have found a way – a rascal like you!’
By the cab, Trouble hugged me, and I gripped him more tightly than perhaps I should have done. I never wanted to let him go; but all I could do, all I could ever do, was let him go.
‘You’ll be at the memorial service tomorrow, I suppose?’ he said.
I asked him, too eagerly, ‘Will I see you there?’
‘All those Americans? I’d better lie low.’
‘You flatter yourself, Mr Glover. Who’d know you now?’
‘You did. Has your life been happy, Sharpless?’
What a thing to ask! I thought of my books. My students. My travels. Of Wobblewood West, of Aunt Toolie and Le Vol, waiting for my return. What was my life? Our three dogs, our Sunday drives, our friendly squabbles over the dinner table. None of it could last. Aunt Toolie would die soon – glad, perhaps, to join Uncle Grover; Le Vol, for all I knew, would die before me. Once we had been young. Now we were old and our world was ending. Dear Trouble! Even now he was an enigma, an essence perpetually escaping me, as I looked at him and said, almost meaning it, ‘I’m happier than I ever believed I could be.’
‘Me too.’ His eyes held mine and I studied him intently, as if I might understand him, might understand myself, if only I could fix his image in my mind.
As I climbed back into the cab, he called after me, ‘Sharpless, wait! Where’s your ashplant?’
‘The walking stick? Oh, I lost it years ago,’ I said. ‘I always meant to get another. Then I learned to walk without it. That stick had just been keeping my leg weak, all those years.’
I waved from the window as the cab drove away.
The memorial service was early the next morning, but there was a final ceremony still to come. In the evening I gathered with many others by the river, where I lit a candle and set it drifting in a paper boat towards the harbour. Afterwards, I stepped back, anonymous in the crowd. There were thousands of candles, but not so many, not nearly so many, as the dead that they remembered.
Silently, I watched the little flaming pillar, tremulous in the wind, drifting away from me in its precarious vessel, until I could no longer be sure which one was mine. Darkness gathered; the waters, defiantly, were a sea of flame, but within a short time the paper boats were sinking, some taking on water, some burned through already by the candles that they carried.
Acknowledgements
Without Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), this book would not exist. As well as the opera and its libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, I have drawn on earlier incarnations of the story: David Belasco’s one-act play Madame Butterfly (1900), which inspired Puccini; John Luther Long’s short story ‘Madame Butterfly’ (1898), on which Belasco’s play was based; and Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1888), which appears to have furnished Long with many details and was itself the basis of an 1894 opera by André Messager. Jan van Rij’s Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San (2001) taught me much, and I recommend it to those wishing to explore further the origins, meanings, and permutations of the Butterfly story.
Many other sources leave traces in this novel. Several are of particular note: Ronald Takaki’s Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (1995) and J. Samuel Walker’s Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (1997) offer brief and compelling investigations of why the bombings happened; Gar Alperovtiz’s massive study The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1995) is, I suspect, the definitive account. David C. Cassidy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (2005) and Peter Goodchild’s J. Robert Oppenheimer: ‘Shatterer of Worlds’ (1980) depict in detail the development of the bomb. Doctor Atomic, the 2005 opera about Oppenheimer by John Adams, helped me imagine the Trinity test.
Accounts of the bombings from the point of view of the victims include that classic of reportage, John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946; rev. ed. 1985), Takashi Nagai’s memoir The Bells of Nagasaki (1949), and Masuji Ibuse’s novel Black Rain (1969). The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan, ed. S. L. Meyer (1976), proved of great value to me, not least because of the pictures. Ian Whitcomb’s After the Ball (1972), a favourite book of mine for years, fuelled my interest in old (very old) pop music. Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of ‘Fear No More...’ appears in Charles Vincent’s anthology Fifty Shakspere Songs (1906). Tartarin de Tarascon (1872) by Alphonse Daudet was a novel Puccini planned to adapt as an opera, before scrapping the project in favour of Madama Butterfly.
Antony Heaven gave me the idea for this book. Roz Kaveney read it at just the right time. The London Library was, as ever, my best resource. I am grateful to Ravi Mirchandani, Margaret Stead, Orlando Whitfield, Richard Evans, and all at Atlantic Books in London, and Steve Rubin, Barbara Jones, Kenn Russell, Kathleen Lord, Rebecca Seltzer, Joanna Levine, and all at Henry Holt in New York. Thanks to Ian Pindar, Charlotte Webb, and Colin Tate. Special thanks to my agent, Sara Menguc, for her patience, persistence, and belief.