Customer Reviews

Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San

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We were interested in seeing how historically accurate Puccini's opera, Madama Butterfly was, so we purchased Van Rij's book. However, in his section entitled "How Japanese is it" he speculates that "Surandasico" might be a garbled reading of "zurugashikoi" meaning cunning, an adjective. First of all, he misspelled "sarundasico" as it occurs in the opera librtetto and somehow never discovered that there is a Shinto kami named "sarudahiko" which we found via Google. If this one detail is so far off, how can the rest of the book be much better?

Additionally his assessment of the character, Butterfly, is unbelievably dismissive. It should not take a great deal of imagination to figure out why she would want to marry an American, considering her station and the lack of true and binding marriage rights for women of her station in Japan at that time. Nevertheless, the other parts of the book were interesting and the photographs from the Meiji Restoration Period were helpful in our research.

Regards - Adam and Tami

If you've ever seen Miss Saigon on Broadway, David Henry Hwang's postmodern play, M. Butterfly, or Puccini's original opera, Madame Butterfly, you'll love this book. This is a fascinating, thorough re-telling of the Madame Butterfly story... answering the age-old question, "Was there a real Madame Butterfly who inspired Puccini's opera?" A meticulous, nonfiction detective story of a book, the author goes back to Puccini's earliest historical and cultural sources, debunking old myths and identifying earlier incarnations of the story, and discovers the tragic, real-life love story behind the opera. A great read for any opera buff or anyone who's interested in Japanese culture! Great photos, too. Highly recommended.

This book is based on extensive and thorough research. It's analytical, yet not dry. I got much more out of seeing the opera on stage after reading this book. This book helped me a lot writing my college paper.

The book is a very interesting study of the whole Mme. Butterfly story written by a highly educated career diplomat who, like many of his profession, had a lot of the free time necessary to pursue his pet research topic. As an opera buff and linguist the author is able to gain many interesting insights into the Butterfly story. For example, he approaches the opera from the angles of Pierre Loti and Siebold and examines the phenomenon of Japonisme which swept 19th century Europe. Unfortunately, despite the author's meticulous research, the book is marred by spelling inconsistencies (for instance, the personal name and honorific O-Kiku is rendered correctly but Oine (sic) is not). The book also suffers from not having made full use of Japanese sources (including a book written by a descendant) as the author does not read or speak Japanese (this last point was confirmed by the author himself).