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hardcover $20.00
Chin Music
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Todd Shimoda
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Goodbye Madame Butterfly by Sumie Kawakami
It's kind of a mystery why we are fascinated about the romantic lives of Japanese women. We don't see many books on, say, Peruvian women or Indonesian women. Yet countless articles and books have been written about Japanese women and their love lives beginning most famously with a 11898 short story by John Luther Long titled "Madame Butterfly," which inspired the David Belasco play and the Puccini opera. Ironically, Long never visited Japan and got his story idea through hearing experiences of those who had visited.
Perhaps our interest bloomed because of the geisha mystique -- women dedicating their lives to pleasing men. Or maybe it's some indefinable "Asian mystique". Whatever the reason, the women we meet in SUMIE KAWAKAMI's series of portraits illustrating modern Japan's mores firmly puts an end to many myths and misrepresentations. Indeed, goodbye, Madame Butterfly.
Kawakami is a Japanese journalist, a single mother, and marathon athlete. All three skills come into play in her book. As a journalist, she is highly skilled in getting her subjects to describe intimate and often painful events in their love lives. As a single mother she can relate to the difficulties of mothers trying to raise children on her own, as many of her subjects do. Divorce still carries a stigma in Japan and single mothers having to work also face the fact that most employment in Japan requires long hours in the office. Using her endurance and patience as a marathon runner and tri-athlete, she persisted in discovering the complexities of her subjects' lives. Her compelling pieces were not the result of one quick interview.
Most of the women in the book are not lucky in love. Most who get married end up in loveless and sexless unions. Husbands cheat, are caught, and are forgiven at least at first. Those who aren't married have trouble finding good lovers and holding onto the ones who are. One common thread is that they question their own abilities as a wife, as a lover. This introspection gives them pause as to what to do in their predicaments and what to do with their lives. And they all do something, they take action, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. But at least they do something.
In one telling story, a successful business woman falls unexpectedly for a younger man who has never been married, doesn't have a job, and has lived at home all his life. At first their lives together are blissful and they get married. Shortly after the wedding he gradually begins to spend more time back home with his mother. Finally she receives messages from him demanding a divorce. She theorizes that most Japanese men don't make good husbands because they can only relate to women as a lover or a son.
Only one of the pieces is directly about a man. A married IT worker in a stagnant marriage meets with women as a "sex volunteer." A therapist sets up the meetings for the women who are looking for sex without commitment and with their needs being primary, not secondary, to the man's. The volunteer is indeed that -- he is not paid either by the woman or the therapist. Apparently good at what he does, he's met with over one hundred clients. Strangely though, while he finds happiness fulfilling women's needs he is still unable to revitalize his own failing marriage.
GOODBYE MADAME BUTTERFLY is full of rich details of contemporary Japan. We find out about fortune telling, the inner workings of a Shinto shrine, how divorce works in Japan, therapy, and many others. Of course it's difficult to make any generalized statements from fewer than a dozen women's lives, but in the end readers should understand why Madame Butterfly no longer exists. Or perhaps never existed at all.
Todd Shimoda
25/11/2007
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