There’s a great, sad, beautiful place near the end of the first movement of Smile where Brian Wilson sings “You Are My Sunshine.” The song is usually interpreted as a smiley-face kind of tune, but Wilson sings it mournfully. The rhythm slows and the strings muddy down to a dirge. There’s a similar musical quotation in Madame Butterfly. As Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, lieutenant, US Navy, is about to launch into a solo about how, as a Yankee rover, he enjoys conquering not only foreign lands but foreign women, Giacomo Puccini repeats a few bars of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Here “the dawn’s early light” illuminates not a proudly “hailed” banner but a cad.
Whatever his professional obligations are in Nagasaki (the opera is set there at the turn of the last century, decades before we A-bombed the smithereens out of the place), Pinkerton is happiest about being there as a sex tourist. In his first solo, he addresses the broker who has procured for him a house and a teenage girl to go in it. Pinkerton—same name as the profoundly unloved agency of detectives, snoops, and private dicks formed half a century prior—sort of “play pretend” marries the girl; he knows that as a foreigner he can slip out of any local contract easily. Cio-Cio-San (“Butterfly” in English) falls for him. After she converts to Pinkerton’s nominal Christianity and abandons her Buddhist practice, her offended family abandons her. Soon enough, she gets pregnant. Before the baby is born, Pinkerton returns to the United States. Cio-Cio-San awaits his return. When he does come back, it’s with his white American wife and a plan to take away the child the Japanese girl has borne. No wonder she kills herself.
The story of Madame Butterfly* can be infuriating. Partly you just hate what a scumwad Pinkerton is, and partly you want to grab Cio-Cio-San by her kimono and scream, “Get over him!” Infuriating as these characters may be, though, we know too well the real world is full of poor miserable fuckers who can’t get over assholes they hope will “love” them again and assholes who not only don’t care if they break poor miserable fuckers’ hearts but even like to brag about doing so. Why do people stay with people who are so awful to them?
In the earliest iteration of this story, Pierre Loti’s 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème, the girl is seen counting her loot as soon as the guy leaves the house. Loti, like many unhappy Western men (such as his near contemporary Paul Gauguin), looked to the East to find himself. What Loti found in Japan were a lot of poor people, including females willing to have sex with him if he paid them. (See Felice Beato’s photographs.) Loti’s writings fit perfectly into “Orientalism,” the late-l9th-century
fad by which Europeans and Americans fetishized the East as—take your pick—exotic, mysterious, spiritual, inscrutable, elegant, feminine, backward, and cheap. You might be an average loser in the West, but if you knew how to play it, you could be a rich bigwig in the East. Orientalism has never really gone away. White guys can still get weird about Asian women. (See the Vapors’ “Turning Japanese,” David Bowie’s “China Girl,” Julian Cope’s “China Doll.” Thank god for Shonen Knife and their lively, hilarious Japan-translates-the-West pop songs like “The Luck of the Irish” and “Blue Oyster Cult.”)
When theater impresario David Belasco came across the story of the geisha and the white guy, he decided to adapt it for the stage. Belasco was more showman than wordsmith, more Barnum and Bailey than Beckett, and his stagecraft wowed audiences. His innovative lighting in Madame Butterfly made the stage appear to fade from daylight to sunset to moonlight and the Asianish costumes shine. Puccini saw Belasco’s show in London in 1900, and though the Italian didn’t understand the words, he fell for the spectacle the way a sex tourist falls for a pretty thing with whom he can’t exchange a word.
Some people stay with people who aren’t good for them for the money. In earlier versions of the story, the Cio-Cio-San character and her poor family are glad when she lands a wealthy foreigner. Puccini’s librettists, however, needed to make the story fit the composer’s lush romanticism, so they played down the centrality of commerce to the story.
But maybe Cio-Cio-San wanted to stay with Pinkerton for another reason. From the mid-17th to the mid-l9th centuries, the Tokugawa shogunate enforced a policy whereby no foreigner could enter Japan and no Japanese could leave. Japanese society was strictly stratified, and women had almost no freedom at all. In the 1850s, when the United States sent Commodore Matthew Perry to “open” Japan, he brought along not only the latest in Western technology, but also Western social customs, including the public visibility of women. When American officers brought their wives to official state functions in Japan and allowed them to speak openly with other males and females—as if females might actually have valuable things to say—Japanese men were shocked.
Were Japanese women, secretly, thrilled? Did Cio-Cio-San, secretly, hope that by marrying an American she could have a more active, engaged, and public life than if she had been taken into the home of a traditional Japanese man? Was part of why she couldn’t get over Pinkerton because she didn’t want to lose whatever misguided hope she might have had for a bit of Western-style women’s liberation? She doesn’t get that, of course. She doesn’t get to keep her man or the child she bore. The thing she gets is some great, sad, beautiful, amazing music to express her grief.
No wonder, after she sings her last song, she sticks a knife into her guts. 