Goodbye Madame Butterfly

I originally stumbled across the elegant products of Chin Press Music when I came across their collection about Japan entitled Kuhaku. I enjoyed that book and marveled at the beauty of the physical book itself. Another great find was the moving stories of Japanese women in “That Floating Feeling” by Sumie Kawakami. Chin Music Press has now brought out another gorgeous full-length book by Kawakami called Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage, and the Modern Japanese Woman. Kawakami is working against the stereotype that in Japan all of your sexual fantasies can come true. She has found that while Japan is a highly sexualized place, there is a paradox in that there are many people living sexless lives or at least sexless lives with their spouses. There are a number of cultural and individual circumstantial reasons why this so: a strong Madonna/whore complex, the inability of women to support themselves financially, staying together for the children, family obligations, and so on. Kawakami’s preface discusses many of these issues in detail. It has all the hallmarks of her initial essays and a lot more as she includes stories that include unusual subjects like the stigma of counseling vs. traditional fortune telling for advice in romantic matters, “The Winter Sonata phenomena,” the Yasuko Watanabe story (executive by day / prostitute by night), male sex volunteers as well as the clients who use their services, the Shinto priest’s wife along with illicit stories of affairs and joyless, sexless marriages. The first collection of essays was only about women who cheated on their husbands this collection takes on women’s sexuality through the personal stories of a variety of subjects. It is a compelling read that I found difficult to put down, since it puts a lot of what I hear and see into perspective.