Surveys the history of contractual sexual arrangements between Westerners and Japanese women that emerged in the treaty ports of Japan after 1858, a practice that became known as “monthly,” “temporary,” or “Japanese” marriage. Contemporary accounts, diaries, and reminiscences suggest that the outlines of such liaisons and even their contractual terminology would eventually underlie Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton’s duplicitous relationship with Cio-Cio-san. Although this practice became widely known in the West largely through Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (1888), its connection to John Luther Long’s “Madame Butterfly,” and by extension to Puccini’s opera, is substantially more complicated than generally assumed.

Examines Luigi Illica’s draft libretto and its comic opposition of West and East. The opening scene occidentalizes the hero as Sir Francis Blummy Pinkerton, using details from Pierre Loti’s novel to express his unsympathetic views of Japan and his “marriage” as a joke, while a later scene/act, set at the American consulate, foregrounds the “comedy” of Butterfly’s failed acculturation, climaxing in her disillusioning encounter with Pinkerton’s New American Wife. Orientalizing Cio-Cio-san from a prevalently racist European perspective as naïve and inscrutable, however, prevented Illica from investing her with the interiority necessary for the emotional high points of a tragic opera. His concluding scenes rely on narrative intermezzi to evoke the heroine’s state of mind, using images from ukiyo-e artist Hokusai to create a bleak ambience for the almost wordless suicide of a culturally alienated subject.

Surveys the first decades of Madama Butterfly’s reception in Japan, which motivated de-orientalizing productions that changed or deleted passages considered comically inaccurate or insulting, often reimagining the heroine as an exemplar of pure-hearted Japanese womanhood. Discussion concentrates on three landmark productions. (1) A partial first staging (1914), featuring soprano Takaori Sumiko and her conductor husband Shuichi, who created a scandal with encores that included a celebration of strip-tease dances in treaty-port teahouses. (2) A “corrected” production (1930) by composer Yamada Kosaku and translator Horiuchi Keizo. The score and libretto were drastically emended by changing Puccini’s borrowings from Japanese music and deleting the entire wedding scene and other offensive passages, thus suppressing the opera’s location in late nineteenth-century treaty-port culture. (3) A 1936 production of the opera by Miura Tamaki, the most famous Japanese soprano of the period, celebrating her return to Japan from a career abroad. It legitimized the heroine’s marriage by adding a Shinto priest and emphasizing the tragedy of her maternal sacrifice.

Begins by contrasting representations of a “Japanese marriage” in Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème and John Luther Long’s “Madame Butterfly.” Loti’s fictitious autobiography imbeds a whimsical mènage within an evocative and exotic – but pervasively racist – representation of Japan and the Japanese. Long’s third-person narrative focuses on the private tragedy of an American naval officer’s capricious “westernization” of a naïve “temporary wife” and her ensuing cultural alienation. Although Long engages in an intertextual critique with Loti, his story is primarily based on a real-life incident in Nagasaki witnessed by his missionary sister, Jennie Long Correll. Reminiscences by her in 1931 make it possible to reconstruct elements of the original event and even suggest a probable model for the American protagonist.

Approaches the opera from a postcolonial perspective, using scores published before the elimination of “offensive” passages in later editions. Emphasizing the relationship between the libretto and its musical setting, it suggests how a temporary “marriage” leaves Cio-Cio-san trapped between her Japanese ethnicity and her desired identity as Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. The West–East hierarchy of act 1, with the hero’s “pseudo-wedding” dictating the action, followed by the heroine’s entrance and exchanges that ground her in a Japanese milieu, culminates in an extended seduction/love duet fraught with cultural difference. Act 2 foregrounds a dialogic construction of Cio-Cio-san’s dilemma: while Illica endowed her with infantilizing preconceptions of Japanese identity, Giacosa added the agency of a geisha and the interiority characteristic of an operatic heroine. As a result, the orientalizing “comedy” of Cio-Cio-san’s failed acculturation as “Madama B. F. Pinkerton” coexists with the intense emotion of arias performing her delusion and suicide, which is complicated by the unusual presence of a mixed-race child.

Chapter 6 focuses on Madama Butterfly into Japanese theatre genres: a Takarazuka Condensed Madama Butterfly (1931), which updates the opera’s bicultural tragedy in the increasingly xenophobic atmosphere of Showa cultural politics; a Bunraku puppet play recuperating the heroine in the tradition of a Japanese lovers’ tragedy (1956); and a haunting Takarazuka Three Generation Cho-Cho-san (1953), tracing the fates of Butterfly’s son (and US naval officer) Joey and his beloved Kiyo across three generations of Japanese-American history to their eventual happy reunion in post–A-bomb Nagasaki.

It’s difficult to stop here. The Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki immediately generated a spin-off Comedy of Miss Butterfly (Kigeki Chō-Chō san), which premiered in February 1954 at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo. Pinkerton’s son is among the first troops to land in occupied Japan and soon finds a second Butterfly. Fortunately, his fiancée – not incidentally named Kate – knows about the scandal of the young officer’s father and follows him to Japan to avert a second tragedy.1 There is a happy ending: Kate II weds Pinkerton II, and Butterfly II finds happiness with a character named – Yamadori. In that same year Takarazuka also furnished the setting for James A. Michener’s Sayonara, whose hero, a Korean war fighter pilot, falls in love with a Takarazuka otokoyaku performing Pinkerton in a musical revue called Swing Butterfly, thus presenting the affair from an American perspective.