by Lee Langley
He looked across the desk at Joe, searching for words that were safe to use.
‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘At the beginning she was fujin, an old-fashioned girl, she followed tradition. Later the traditionalists called her a troublemaker, one of those modern women, trying to be a man, as they put it, attending meetings, marching. But then she changed. Became a businesswoman. She was quite a figure.’
‘Did you like her?’ It was a loaded question.
The doctor frowned. ‘I do not like my patients. I offer them my skills.’
‘Suzuki tells me she died in the explosion.’
‘The blast, yes. It would have been instant.’
‘I keep hearing that. But how can you know?’
More shifting of papers on desktop. There were no right words here. The doctor gave Joe one of the long, steady looks his patients were familiar with.
‘I will avoid euphemism. The blast victims were extinguished. Literally consumed by the heat. Vaporised. As we have no verifiable evidence of an afterlife we cannot know their feelings but, scientifically, there would have been no time to suffer. She will have passed from life to nothingness faster than the human physiology can register.’
Outside the doctor’s surgery Suzuki waited in the rickshaw, her face closed. The day was not going as she had planned. After the debacle of her daughter’s revelation she had attempted not only an apology but an explanation: the Americans had been the enemy, the Americans had dropped the bomb, killed her friends and families of friends. Joe’s father was American.
‘Mayu decided to punish you. I am sorry.’
‘But she was telling the truth.’
‘Truth is shapeless. Like water, it can be different things to different people, it can bring life if you drink it or death if you drown. One truth will tell how a tea-house girl took an American sailor into her bed. There’s a truth in which an orphan child was sold by one man to another. There’s a truth in which a girl saw a golden man walking up the hill towards her and loved him for the whole of her life.’
He climbs the winding road from the harbour. In the brilliant sunlight his blond hair is almost white. Even from afar he looks American. He pauses, turns and waits.
Hobbling to catch up with him, Suzuki calls breathlessly, ‘It was easier before they rebuilt this as a proper road; I find the surface painful to my feet.’ She adds, ‘I remember watching your father walk up this hill to the house in his white uniform. He was so handsome.’
What Joe recalls is a tired man, with big hands, hair dulled to a dusty non-colour, who sang along with Bing on the radio.
Listening to her describe the events of that day, dim, blurred like a landscape seen through rain, twisted into so many puzzling shapes in his mind, Joe takes from his pocket the battered spinning top, its paint long ago rubbed off, flakes of red and yellow clinging to the surface. Suzuki glances at the top and exclaims, ‘You still have that! The top! I ran down the hill and bought it for your father to give you!’
And here it is again, the unreliable truth. Whose version will it be this time? Are all his memories to be stolen from him, one by one? Surely the top was a present from his mother? How can he remember that so wrong? Is nothing to be trusted?
They are approaching a cluster of buildings when Suzuki says, ‘I shall rest here for a few minutes. Please go ahead.’
She points out the remains of the house, and then the path is at his feet – just a few steps to the door with the stone lintel step where he sat. Didn’t he? He can recall the cool, hard feel of it beneath his small buttocks. While voices came from the room behind him, he sat here, leaning forward to pick up a snail. He had brought the snail up close, the gleaming slime sticky on his fingers. The waving horns twitched in response to his warm breath. Then someone knocked the snail from his hand, startling him. That must have been his father; he recalls a white sleeve, a tanned wrist with fine gold hairs. What happened next is a jumble. Was that when they took the child’s hands and walked him down the hill? When he remembered his spinning top and pulled his hands free, ran back—
The child screaming, tugging, tugging at the woman’s white sleeve, so that her hand fell away from her throat, the knife dropped to the floor, the blood flowing . . .
The breath is sucked from his body, and he groans – Suzuki’s head twitches as she hears the sound and then she has covered the ground between them and is holding him, the small woman soothing, rocking the muscular young body that is shaking with a grief for so long blanked out.
The roof and wooden walls are gone, door blown away. To the right of the doorway one wall survives, damaged by the blast but still standing.
He stares into the shell of the house, into what had been a room, and Suzuki, resting her hand on his arm, fills in the blank places: Henry, who had come running from town, who had rushed his mother to the doctor. How the two of them watched over her. How angry she had been, afterwards.
‘Henry used to say she never forgave him for saving her life.’
They have spent hours picking their way through the maze of the distant past; the three years of the waiting, when Cho-Cho endlessly repeated, as though invoking a spell, that one fine day Pinkerton would return, sail into the harbour, walk up the hill. Until the long-awaited day arrived, with all that followed.
As Suzuki talked and talked, the silent one, the servant, the observer who had enabled the others to lead their chosen lives, who knew everything and now had someone who was listening, she found herself for the first time playing a central role. And as the words flowed, an unsuspected bitterness went too, leaving her emptied, serene within, as she had always outwardly appeared to be.
When she paused, he had questions and more questions; he mined her for the gold of information.
They walked back together down the hill towards the harbour. He told her he would be departing for America when he could get leave, to attend to a couple of things. He tried to explain to Suzuki how much Nancy had suffered, conscience-stricken, for what she did; he recalled something he had learned in his lessons with Mr Murakami: the concept of honshin – original truth of heart.
‘She has listened often to her original heart. I’d like to set her mind at rest.’
She took his arm, allowing him to guide her steps.
‘You have your own giri. You are a good American son.’
‘She’s not my mother, but she did everything—’
‘We have an old saying.’
‘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.
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, 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
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
By the Same Author
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Four
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Part Five
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements