Butterfly

Butterfly

Paul Loewen

For Marie

Editor's Preface

The unusual nature of the text that is being offered here to the public makes it incumbent on me to say a few words about its origins and my own relationship to the manuscripts upon which it is based.

In the spring of 1944, I was home in Heidelberg on furlough. The war was going badly for Germany, and there was little to be hopeful about, either by way of victory or defeat. In that dark time, the eight new Gramophone records I managed to procure seemed a windfall. It so happened that my mother, whom I had invited to listen with me, stepped out to fetch more coffee just as I put on the young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the aria “Un bel dì” from
Madame Butterfly.
When she returned a minute later, she seemed distraught and asked me to stop the record. She did not like it. I protested that the singing was good; besides, it would be over in a minute or two. Ignoring my arguments, she insisted. I was not used to such capriciousness from my levelheaded mother and tried to make a joke of it; to my amazement, she responded by slapping my face. I cannot recall Mother hitting me even when I was small; and she herself was, if anything, more shocked by her act than I. Her aggressiveness vanished instantly, and she broke down in sobs. But for this little incident, my mother would never have revealed her origins—so she has assured me more than once—and I would not have known of the manuscripts that were to dog me for three decades.

When Mother calmed down, she was ashamed and felt obliged to explain. Did I know who Butterfly was, she asked. Thinking that she was unfamiliar with the opera—which surprised me, because she had a vast musical culture—I began to recount the plot in a garbled manner. “No, no,” she stopped me. “I mean the
real Butterfly, the one in life.” I stared at her; I did not even know that there had been such a person. How should I know who it was?

“A friend of yours, perhaps?” I jested, my mother being half Japanese.

Mother did not smile. “No, no friend,” she said gravely. “She was my mother.”

I stared at her with incredulity. Was this her idea of a joke? But my mother was not in the habit of joking this way and the expression on her face excluded the possibility. For a moment I was afraid that she had become deranged over my father's prolonged absence—he was in fact never to return from the eastern front.

“I know it must sound farfetched,” she said gently, “but it is the truth.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Oma Sachiko is Madam Butterfly?” My alarm was rapidly rising.

“No, my real mother—not Sachiko. Butterfly.”

Half humoring her as one might a victim of hallucination, I attempted to ease the conversation to a more realistic plane. But once launched, my mother would not be stopped. Her story came out as it had to now, in halting, almost choked phrases that gained momentum and eloquence as they swept before them her recalcitrance and my disbelief. In the end I accepted her account, though it seemed stranger than any fiction I knew.

Sachiko, who until then had been the Japanese grandmother whom I had never seen, was the original Suzuki of Puccini's opera. As might be expected, the opera departs widely from the facts, though in this case history makes grand opera seem very tame and sober. My mother could tell me only what she had learned from Sachiko before emigrating to Germany. The real Butterfly did live in Nagasaki, she did marry an American who abandoned her, and she did commit suicide; she also left behind
a child, though not a boy. That child was my mother, Itako. Itako was brought up by Butterfly's maid Sachiko, who identified with her mistress to the extent of denigrating Itako's father—whom we shall call Pinkerton, since the world knows him as such—just as if she herself had been the one abandoned. Itako, who looked foreign and yet had no foreign parent to look to, suffered considerably from her anomaly and at an early age turned to her Occidental heritage. Her talent for music led her to study piano at Tokyo University.

In 1920, Itako met a German doctor who had been invited to Japan as consultant for a new clinic in Tokyo. When he returned to Germany, she accompanied him as his wife, thereby fulfilling her mother's aborted destiny. She was able to continue her studies in Berlin under Eugen d'Albert. In 1924, I was born, and eventually the family settled in Heidelberg, my father's hometown.

After the war I studied to become a civil engineer and in 1952 had the opportunity to go to Japan as part of an exchange program organized by the U.N. Although Mother had decided to bury her Japanese past—she never considered returning to Japan even for a visit—she relented somewhat and charged me to visit some “cousins” Sachiko herself had died during the war. Since I knew I would be going to Nagasaki, she suggested I might look for traces of my grandfather—"Pinkerton"—whose last known address (ca. 1914) was in that city. By this time she had mellowed and permitted herself to be curious about him.

In Nagasaki I was able to visit Madam Butterfly's house, but people were nonplused by my inquiries about Pinkerton, who they assured me could not have come back. The address I had was in the low hills to the west of the city, which had not been touched by the atomic explosion. My ever helpful interpreter, Miss Noriko Kanda, suggested we look about. Nobody had heard of Pinkerton, but some knew of a foreigner called Taizan, which
was the kind of name given to Buddhist acolytes. This Taizan was an eccentric old fellow, a sort of philanthropic recluse who had been around for as long as anybody could remember. Unlike other foreigners, he had not been interned during the war, but no one seemed to have seen him since. On the scent now, Miss Kanda and I spent the next day asking around and were finally directed to Midori, a woman who had been Taizan's housekeeper. She unfortunately was not able to tell us very much about Taizan—she had gone two or three times a week to his little house to clean, wash, and do a little cooking—though she clearly held him in great affection. After I had explained that Pinkerton—we were not yet sure that he and Taizan were the same person—was my grandfather, Midori went and brought me a large bundle of papers. They were manuscripts that Taizan had asked her to burn just before he died, but she had not had the heart and kept them without really knowing why. Perhaps I was the one they had been waiting for. She had once shown them to an American soldier who could make neither head nor tail of them. I understood why when I opened the packet. There were close to a thousand pages, covered mostly with a fairly illegible scrawl and chaotically thrown together. However, to my intense excitement, I immediately spotted the word
Butterfly.
There could be no doubt: Taizan was Pinkerton, and these were his writings.

I stayed up half the night deciphering those untidy pages. What I read shocked me profoundly. Some of it was scabrous and perverse beyond anything I could have imagined; in spite of my deep loathing for Nazi rhetoric, I could not help thinking of the term they used for anything they disliked:
zersetzend
—"degenerate,” “pernicious.” I felt ashamed, both for the man capable of living and writing such perversities and for myself who descended from him and read of them. Indeed, I had doubts about the veracity of the account. At the time, I could not believe that
anyone could behave like the Pinkerton of the manuscripts. Had it been a novel, I would have condemned the author for lack of verisimilitude; as it was, I strongly suspected Pinkerton of mixing sick fantasies with some rather gruesome facts.

I did not mention the manuscripts to my mother or to anyone else. I was young then and in love with a girl with whom I intended to build the ideal marriage; for the illicit, not to mention the perverse, I had little interest or tolerance. And it must be remembered that I was living in a very different epoch as regards sexual morality.
Lady Chatterly's Lover,
for instance, was, if I remember correctly, still suppressed in America at that time.

Yet I did not forget Pinkerton's manuscript, though I would have liked to. My repulsion notwithstanding, I had read through all the pages (it took more than one night), and they had made an impression.”

More than three decades have gone by since. The world has changed. Today pornography of whatever description can be bought at every street corner, and there are facilities catering to any perversion. Our sense of what is obscene has been considerably modified; we have learned to be shocked at things more serious than kinky sex. And I myself have changed as well. My ideal marriage failed, and I have had to confront things in myself that at twenty-seven I would not admit existed. Thus when I took another look at the Nagasaki manuscripts a few years ago, they seemed less provocative and more interesting than they had in 1952; for all their faults, I found some parts moving, even beautiful. And Pinkerton himself no longer appeared so incredible; if his tale remained fantastic, it seemed in the main no longer impossible to believe.

The decision to edit the manuscripts, however, was again connected with my mother. At the very end of her life, she became suddenly preoccupied with the father she had tried all
her life to banish from her thoughts. When I visited her in the summer of 1976, two months before her death, she made me repeat again everything I had learned about him in Nagasaki. “All my life,” she said one day, “my mother has been a shining light for me; I associated everything that was good and beautiful with her, and I often felt her guiding me. My father, on the contrary, was obscure and threatening; he was the darkness that swallowed the light. I hated him, and I feared him like an evil ghost. But now I am no longer afraid. Now I can think of him, of what he became later in his life, and wonder what really happened between him and my mother. She must have meant more to him than just a woman he played with and abandoned, if he later returned to Nagasaki to live. There is a story there, and I wish I knew it.”

Her words made me uneasy. If there had existed a legible version of Pinkerton's manuscript, would I have had the courage to put it into her hands? The idea of editing and publishing the manuscripts, in any case, surely had its beginnings in a belated desire to satisfy my mother's wish. Butterfly and Pinkerton will remain in people's memory, Puccini has seen to that. It is time, however, that their true story be told, and not for curiosity's sake alone. Pinkerton felt he had something to say when he wrote his autobiographical account; there is ample evidence that he returned to it more than once, and that one version at least was written with a view toward publication, although the project was apparently abandoned. Perhaps the task was an impossible one, for I do not believe that we—prospective readers of whom I was the first—were ready then to hear what he had to say. Not in the 1920s, nor in the 1950s. Today it may be different; for myself, at least, it is. In the intervening years, there has been a sexual revolution, and more recently, a revival of interest in the spiritual side of life. If Pinkerton's experiences are explainable in terms of sexual pathology, his written confession takes on more meaning
in the spiritual context. I say this not in apology for the lurid contents of the manuscript or its occasionally garish style, but simply in the belief that the time is ripe for its dissemination. Ultimately, it is for the reader, not the editor, to evaluate and to judge.

Since 1976, I have made a sustained effort to gather documents and information that would supplement the Nagasaki manuscripts. In this I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate. It seems little short of a miracle to have found a number of private letters pertaining to one or another of the people who were associated with Pinkerton. Most useful of all is the essential information provided by the late Mrs. Milly Davenport, whose first husband was a grandson of George C. Sharpless, the American vice-consul at Nagasaki in Pinkerton's time. She also provided portions of Sharpless's diary, which unfortunately did not survive intact. Relevant passages, together with her testimony, have been incorporated almost integrally in the text, along with other documents and testimony that have come into my hands. My acquaintance with Mrs. Davenport came about unexpectedly. After my mother's death, I found the name Sharpless in my mothers address book. I sent a notice of her death, and received a note of sympathy from Mrs. Davenport that eventually led to a meeting.