deborah russell wrote:
> http://www.balletmet.org/Notes/ButterflyStory.html
>
I got most of it right from memory, but the aggregate of Butterfly
stories has captivated me for years because it's so incredibly sad.
Really it seems a prefiguration of the "Ugly American" syndrome that
seems out of place in jingoistic late 19th century America. In any
event, it fired me up a year or two ago to write my own plot for a sequel.
Butterfly: After the Tragedy
Suzuki: two years after Butterfly's suicide she marries a shopkeeper
in Nagasaki and lives out the rest of her life there. She is killed
when the second atomic bomb drops on the city on August 9, 1945.
Sharpless: He never quite gets over the disaster with Pinkerton and
Butterfly, and blames himself for not seeing the signs. After two
years more he resigns from the diplomatic corps and returns to
America, where he becomes a professor of foreign studies at an East
Coast university. He dies in 1940, filled with foreboding for the
catastrophe that will befall Japan--a nation he continues to love--if
it expands its territorial ambitions in the direction of the United
States.
Kate Pinkerton: Stops sleeping with her husband upon their return from
Japan. Perpetually polite and a perfect hostess for a US Navy
officer, she sometimes drinks heavily and is believed to take lovers
when her husband is at sea. She is rarely alone in the same room with
him. She is the longest-lived character after the curtain, and dies
in 1963. No one writes down her last words but someone in the room
thinks she hears Kate whisper "Thank you."
B. F. Pinkerton: Becomes profoundly silent and dark-dispositioned. He
volunteers for hazardous duty in the Atlantic during World War I. He
is caught more than once weeping uncontrollably and for no apparent
reason. He often leaves the room when his son comes in. He receives
a medical discharge from the Navy in 1921 and shoots himself a week
afterwards.
"Trouble" is renamed B. F. Pinkerton, Jr. After his family settles on
the West Coast he is mocked by schoolmates as "The Jap" and "The
Yellow Nigger" and is expelled from several private schools for savage
fighting bordering on bloodlust. He goes to court at his majority and
changes his last name to his adoptive mother's. He comes home and
punches his father in the mouth a week before Pinkerton takes his
life. Fitting nowhere, drifting from one job to the next, in and out
of trouble with the police, the former child descends into alcoholism
and drug addiction. A week before he is to be interned in Manzanar
for his ancestry and visibly Japanese appearance, he commits sepuku
with a ritual dagger he bought in a San Diego pawnshop.
--
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Ken Wolman
http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com
http://opensalon.com/blog/kenneth_wolman
http://wearethecure.org/friends/cids-memory-p-394.html
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