Espresso French Classics
Review by Linda Lappin
In 1890, the American writer Lafcadio Hearn stepped off a ship in Yokohama, ready to begin a new life in Japan as a journalist for Harper’s Magazine. A book by a writer he idolized, Pierre Loti, had inspired him to make the journey. Hearn longed to experience firsthand the exotic East romanticized in Loti’s fiction before these dreamed-of places became too Westernized. The book that beckoned him to Japan was Madame Chrysanthème, published in France in 1887, an autobiographical novel recounting the temporary marriage of a French naval officer to a young Japanese woman in Nagasaki.
Hearn’s literary pilgrimage would be life-changing. He settled in Japan, became a citizen through marriage, and took a Japanese name. For the rest of his life, he assumed the role of cross-cultural communicator, writing about traditional Japanese culture for his Western readers and lecturing on English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. During these years, he reread and reevaluated the works of his once-favorite author. While his admiration for Loti’s luscious prose never waned, he came to despise Loti’s condescending attitude toward Japanese culture, and particularly toward Japanese women. While Loti’s marriage to a Japanese girl lasted about a month, Hearn’s was a real marriage and intellectual partnership with a woman who collaborated on his research and whose surname he assumed when he was adopted by her family. In many published essays and private papers, Hearn strongly criticized Loti’s arrogance, superficiality, and profound misunderstanding of Japan as expressed in Madame Chrysanthème, the siren that had brought him to the country.
Today, Madame Chrysanthème is chiefly remembered as an inspiration for Puccini’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly, providing the characters, situation, and setting reworked by other authors before attaining final form in the libretto written by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. In Puccini’s opera, the romantic treatment of the story, the tragic ending, and the relationship between the naval officer and his young wife are remarkably different from Loti’s original. Yet both narratives have come under scrutiny over the last century for what some find a demeaning portrayal of Japanese characters and customs.
In its day, Madame Chrysanthème was a huge success and an enduring international bestseller, running through twenty-five printings in France in its first five years. The English translation by Laura Ensor, also published in 1887, has gone through more than fifty printings and, until this year, was the only translation available in English. Now Espresso Publishing House has brought out an elegant new translation by Clémence Aubert, which seeks to correct flaws, ambiguities, and omissions in the earlier translation. Those flaws and omissions have much to do with the supercilious tone assumed by the narrator toward the culture and people he describes, an attitude Lafcadio Hearn found deeply troubling.
Aubert has restored the immediacy and roughness of Loti’s original text, smoothed over in the earlier translation partly to soften its underlying racism. She has maintained Loti’s erratic transcriptions and romanizations of Japanese words, his use of the present tense, and, in particular, his epithets in addressing his temporary bride, “petite chose jaune”—his little yellow thing—with her “yellow brain,” something more akin to a cat or a doll than a human being with feelings. Aubert’s translation gives today’s readers a more authentic look at the man behind the story and the prejudices that shaped his worldview. The Japanese people who cross the narrator’s path– servants, landlords, bonzes, fishermen, laborers– are often depicted as comic characters in a stage play or operetta.
Pierre Loti—in real life Louis Marie-Julien Viaud, a French naval officer—is a key figure in the history of Orientalism, in which the unfamiliar East is aestheticized as an exotic banquet of the senses available to the Western traveler. His cultural influence in his own era was enormous. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1891. He inspired Marcel Proust’s experiments with unlocking memory through sensory experience. Among his many admirers were Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and even Willa Cather, who applied his approach to evoking landscapes in her own work. His voyages to Tahiti—and his temporary marriage there, recounted in his autobiographical novel The Marriage of Loti—were reimagined by Paul Gauguin in some of his greatest paintings. Madame Chrysanthème has been credited with helping to launch the worldwide craze for Japonisme, later culminating in the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910, which showcased Japan’s traditional arts, culture, and modern industries to the Western world.
One key aspect of Madame Chrysanthème underscored by Aubert’s translation is the young bride’s awareness of the limits and benefits of her marriage arrangement. Unlike Puccini’s romantic Madame Butterfly, who yearns for Pinkerton’s return and commits suicide when she understands that he has come back to take her child away, Madame Chrysanthème, eighteen years old, has no illusions. Her relationship with her temporary husband is professional and unsentimental. She has been rented for a time to provide comfort and make a home for a foreign naval officer, and to satisfy not only his erotic desires but also his aesthetic ones. Although some social stigma was attached to temporary marriage, the practice was sanctioned through contracts negotiated by marriage brokers and was a thriving industry in port areas. For many families, it offered a solution to devastating poverty.
In describing his search for a wife through an official broker, Loti insists on one with very yellow skin, rejecting those with paler complexions. He expresses a fondness for this funny foreign girl, as if she were an amusing pet. He finds her a suitably attractive accessory to bring along as he explores the foreign environment, which he describes in atmospheric prose: the teahouses, landscapes, music, architecture, food, flowers, clothing, and religious shrines that fascinate him. Like Proust’s Albertine, she embodies the spirit of place. One thing annoys him: a very real physical attraction and affection may have sprung up between his bride and his best friend from the ship, who occasionally sleeps in their room when ashore.
In real life, Viaud remained in Nagasaki for only thirty-six days, while in his fictional account, the narrator’s sojourn and marriage extend over an entire sultry summer of seventy-three days. When it’s time for his ship to sail, the narrator returns to their home surreptitiously, hoping perhaps to discover his wife in the arms of his friend, or to find her grieving. Instead, he finds her gleefully testing the silver coins she has earned to see if they are genuine. For Idara Crespi, author of the insightful critical introduction to this edition, this scene highlights the girl’s autonomy and detachment. She is no cast-off, submissive victim, but a woman who knows where she stands in the world.
Aubert’s translation gives us an unvarnished view of this late nineteenth-century blockbuster and the “influencer” author who created such an enduring myth of Japan. She admirably captures Loti’s impressionistic vignettes and evocative descriptions while bringing to the fore his jaunty tone, his swaggering superiority, and his irony, along with his nostalgia for a Japan already disappearing before his eyes—partly because of men like his narrator. Even though Loti claimed this book was autobiographical, a transcription of his diary, we cannot completely identify him with the unreliable narrator.
One of the final scenes catches the narrator and the reader quite off guard. Surprised in the act of counting her money, Chrysanthème reassumes an appropriate air of sadness. The temporary spouses say farewell—and the narrator writes: “I had taken you to amuse myself; perhaps you did not entirely succeed at it, but you gave what you could—your little self, your curtseys, your little music, all things considered, you have been charming in your Japanese way.”
Chrysanthème’s response is to prostrate herself on the threshold of the home they have shared, her forehead touching the earth, and to hold that posture until he disappears from sight. The narrator turns back “once or twice,” but only out of politeness, “in order to respond as is fitting to her magnificent final bow.” Having previously described the custom of Japanese bowing as “dropping on all fours,” almost like an animal, here the narrator lends dignity and theatricality to the gesture, seemingly unaware of its complex cultural meaning. Can Loti himself be so obtuse, or is the whole book the performance of a poseur?
We cannot know the emotions churning within her as Chrysanthème’s brow presses the ground in a prolonged salutation. The act of prostration may mean apology, deference, submission, profound respect, or simply the proper closure to their business transaction. Lafcadio Hearn wrote extensively about this Japanese custom as an expression of social duty, self-control, spiritual heritage, Buddhist ego-effacement, and even purification. Chrysanthème’s prostration is a poignant, powerful moment in the story. The narrator does not quite understand and yet somehow, darkly, the reader does. Within that gesture lies everything about Chrysanthème and her culture that the narrator will never penetrate and never own.
