When Japanese audiences encountered Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”—a sumptuous Italianate treatment of a geisha’s doomed love for an American naval officer—they found it implausible, insulting, and riotously funny. In 1925, two decades after the opera’s première, the Japan Times reported “screams of hearty laughter” as spectators took in the posturings of a touring foreign troupe. Puccini’s habit of citing popular Japanese songs did not help matters. As Arthur Groos points out in “Madama Butterfly/ Madamu Batafurai,” a new book about the opera’s Japanese sources and reception, the composer ignored advice about how to use his material appropriately. When Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid, prays at an alleged Buddhist shrine, she sings to the tune of “Takai Yama,” a song that extols cucumbers and eggplants. Furthermore, she garbles the names of Shinto gods, who don’t belong in a Buddhist setting to begin with. It’s similar, Groos writes, to “having a Catholic pray to Adam and Eve in front of a menorah.”
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 30, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 30, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
