Sex is everywhere in Japan, but that doesn’t mean the average woman is getting any. This is the premise behind Sumie Kawakami’s absorbing and beautifully laid-out book of non-fiction stories, Goodbye Madame Butterfly. The title refers to Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, in which the woman waits loyally for the return of her husband, unwilling to acknowledge, despite mounting evidence, that he has betrayed her.
Kawakami lays bare the current reality for Japanese women: resignation in the face of sexless marriages, tolerance of a husband’s access to the pervasive sex industry, and forbearance of a wider variety of men: not only husbands, but lovers, fiancés, employers.
Goodbye Madame Butterfly is a loose compilation of women’s biographies: abused and heartbroken (“Washoi!”); betrayed but complacent (“Joint Venture”); betrayed and subservient (“Red Circles”); self-abusive and craving (“The Fix”); and rationalizing of her mistreatment by men (“The Mannequin”). How are we saying goodbye to Madame Butterfly? We are left vainly urging Kawakami’s heroines to stand up for themselves.
Nonetheless, I loved the stories atypical of the collection, such as “Synchronicity,” in which the heroine is jilted but fearless, and “The Shinto Priest’s Wife,” in which the suspense lies not in how much the heroine will withstand from the men in her life, but in how she will make peace with her mother-in- law and with her own body.
The back story that weaves its way through Goodbye Madame Butterflyis equally gripping. Kawakami casually dispenses cultural shocks as she threads her stories: fortune-telling, divination lore, and purification rites; a memorial service and tombstone for an aborted fetus; a phenomenological explanation for bulimia; the custom of men taking their wives’ last names to become heirs to the wives’ family fortunes; the practice of addressing people by their titles, rather than their names; and many more. Such cultural tidbits are mesmerizing for the non-Japanese reader.
Goodbye Madame Butterfly is a fascinating read, though it is discouraging as a new template in a new age. As a sequel to Puccini’s opera, it would seem no less tragic.
