Early Reviewers

Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème (1887) is the novel at the origin of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. It has never had an English translation equal to it.

A French naval officer arrives in Nagasaki in 1885. He arranges a temporary marriage to a young Japanese woman; he calls her Chrysanthème, after the flower. He will stay for three months, then leave for sea. The arrangement is practical: a house on the hillside above the harbor, a few household objects, a sum paid to the family. What he does not expect is the quality of his own perception.

Loti watches everything and renders everything with a precision that belongs to the observational sciences as much as to fiction: the harbor light, the paper screens, the small domestic ceremonies, the distance between his understanding and hers, all recorded with the unsentimental exactness of a man who knows he is a guest in a world he will never enter. The irony the novel earns is not cheap. Loti understands that the failure of comprehension may be mutual, and he does not flatter himself.

The novel was an international sensation. John Luther Long read it before writing his 1898 short story; David Belasco staged the story; Puccini saw the play and composed the opera. The literary genealogy runs directly from this book to one of the most performed operas in the repertoire.

The existing English translations are old; the most recent of note dates from the nineteenth century. None has given the novel the register it requires: dry, precise, often beautiful, never sentimental, with an irony that does not disappear even when the writing is at its most lyrical.

This Espresso Publishing House edition features a new translation by Clémence Aubert from the original Calmann Lévy text, an introduction tracing the novel's place in European literary Japonisme and its relationship to Puccini, historical notes, and a translator's glossary.

For readers of French literary classics, Japanese literature in translation, and the history of European encounter with Japan. The novel that started Butterfly, in an English translation worthy of it for the first time.