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  • The Takarazuka Concise Madame Butterfly
  • Tsubouchi Shikō and
    Translated by Kyoko Selden with Lili Selden and introduced by Arthur Groos
    Translated by Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden (bio)

For more than two decades I had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Kyoko Selden on Japanese texts relating to the history of Italian opera in Japan. We started with translations involving the reception of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and then began working on Takarazuka musical adaptations of the opera.1 Although administrative duties made it difficult to realize a book project, Kyoko’s translation of the 1953 Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki (Three-Generation Chōchō-san) furnished me with the basis for a conference presentation,2 and we eventually collaborated on an English edition of its libretto.3 That edition was the result of an extensive and—for me—instructive series of revisions and discussions with Kyoko about the intricate relationships between source and target languages. We spent stimulating afternoons over coffee interrogating texts in Italian, Japanese, and English, ultimately working through several complete revisions. Lamentably, that kind of collaboration was less fully realized in the following translation, which we discussed only once. I have edited it here with the generous help of Lili Selden, and revised or added footnotes, in one case deliberately juxtaposing two viewpoints. I believe I also speak for Kyoko in hoping that readers will find it an invitation to continue and refine our dialogue on the transpositions of Italian and Japanese music-dramas into widely different cultural contexts.

In his preface to the Takarazuka Kageki Revue’s production booklet of Concise Madame Butterfly (Shukusatsu Chōchō-san),4 first performed by the Snow Troupe at the Takarazuka Grand Theater in August 1931, Tsubouchi Shikō (1887-1986) states that he wrote the play like “a concise dictionary” so that it could be performed in less than an hour.5 Tsubouchi, a playwright, critic, and professor at Waseda University, excuses the brevity by suggesting that he had only a vague memory of the opera from a performance seen abroad twenty years before, and—with no copy of the score available—was forced to fill in the plot outline using his own imagination and Nagasaki dialect.6 It therefore comes as [End Page 63] something of a surprise to find that several numbers of Puccini’s opera are also rendered with unusual fidelity, in particular “Un bel dì” (One Fine Day), Pinkerton’s “Addio, fiorito asil” (Farewell to the House), and the conclusion of Butterfly’s final aria “O a me, sceso dal trono” (Parting with This Life). Given the increasing Japanese access to performances of the opera by foreign opera companies, concerts, and adaptations in the 1920s and early 1930s, not to mention a full production by the Japan Opera Association at the Tokyo Theater from May 26-29, 1931,7 which used a translation by Horiuchi Keizō, the asserted lack of sources suggests that this humility formula is disingenuous at the very least.

Indeed, it seems probable that in imagining a version to “fit the character of the Takarazuka troupe,” Tsubouchi invites readers to consider his libretto not only as an accommodation to genre conventions of the musical but also to the tastes of the company’s largely female audience, changing the boy Trouble (Dolore) to an unnamed and sickly little girl (undoing the bias of the original story by deleting the child’s blonde hair and blue eyes), and having Kate apologize for Pinkerton’s sin: “As a member of the same gender, I sympathize with you deeply.” More interestingly, though, as Kate’s apology suggests, Tsubouchi also repatriates the opera’s East-West conflict by emphasizing the impact of domestic politics in the 1930s on Japanese women, caught between the extremes of ideological reaction, represented by Bōjō and his retinue’s xenophobic rejection of marriage to a Christian, and a corrosive free-reign capitalism, represented by Gorō’s reduction of all human values to money (“Money, it’s money, all money / be it social obligation, fidelity, or compassion”).

Moreover, Tsubouchi’s reconceptualization of the opera’s heroine may have been both reassuring and shocking to its 1931 audience. Kate’s instinctive...

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