Well, I do have some experience. In fact, my cute little baby is graduating from high school tomorrow, already with a full life and career mapped out. I still remember the thrill I got when I told my father that I could celebrate Father's Day for the first time because I had a little one on the way. It was thrilling because for so many years of my youth he had sternly lectured me on staying straight and clean, focusing on school, and staying away from loose women who wanted nothing more than to trap me into a thankless marriage by allowing herself to get pregnant. His words. Bygones now....
Which brings me to Father's Day and the launching of my latest novel AIKO. It is about a man who finds he is a father. However, in order to celebrate Father's Day, he must overcome a lot of obstacles to claim his child. Perhaps it is a simple story. The details make it special. And yet, it is strangely similar to one of the grand opera stories of my youth: Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini. (Here is the Metropolitan Opera's synopsis.)
As a music student in college, I was not averse to attending an opera or two. Some were more interesting musically than others. My mother, who always promoted my musical interests, took me to my first opera in Kansas City when I was a boy: Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, about a ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever. (Why is there no movie version today? It would make a great paranormal film.) But it was Madama Butterfly that became my favorite, and the only opera I can enjoy just listening to without having to see the whole stage production.
In the opera, an American naval officer visits Japan and because he is staying there a while on business, he arranges to have a "temporary" wife. The inevitable happens: his business is concluded and he leaves, promising to return, and later she discovers a child will be born. He does eventually return, but with his American wife in tow. He is surprised to find his Japanese lover has a child but he is determined to bring the child home to America. The Japanese woman is so distraught over that verdict that she commits suicide in one of opera's most tragic scenes.
While I was living in Japan in the late 1980s, teaching English to the middle school students of a small city, I wrote a story of an American man who meets a Japanese woman. They have a relationship then must inevitably part. A child is born. Eventually the man learns of the child's existence and wants to do the right thing. Despite his American wife's objection, he goes to Japan to check things out. I'm skipping over a lot of details, of course, but you can see how the basic plot is similar to the Madama Butterfly story. That was purely unintentional--unless a deeply rooted remembrance of the opera I had last seen a decade before somehow wormed its way through my brain and down to my fingertips clicking at the keyboard....
Seeing that similarity, I decided to exploit it and revised my story to use some elements of Madama Butterfly in a more overt fashion. First, I wanted to tell the story from the man's point of view. The opera is all from her side. Before I knew much about Japanese history and customs, I had always wondered why Cho-Cho-san (literally "Madame Butterfly") decided to kill herself to solve the problem. She should have killed him for trying to take away her child! Not to say any killing was acceptable, of course. Being in my Western mindset, I could not understand her motivations. Now I do. So in telling the story from his side, I would need to show him as a rational, responsible, do-the-right thing kind of guy who has all the best intentions in dealing with a tragedy.
The next thing I wanted to change was the time period. The opera is set at the turn-of-the-century when American naval forces first begin to rule the Pacific. In changing the setting to the late 1980s and early 1990s, I could exploit the new "internationalization" focus of Japan. Because of a booming economy and other nations' criticism of Japan's unfair trade practices, the government initiated (among other acts) the importing of foreign English teachers from the four English-speaking nations: USA, UK, Canada, and Australia. I was part of that influx of teachers who went to Japan through the Japan Exchange Teaching Program. So I was there at the exact time period of the story, and I described the clash of generations: the older World War II seniors and the pop culture youth who knew little about the war. It was an interesting yet awkward time. And it fit perfectly for my version of the story.So there you have it: Art imitating a life which imitates art.
Being a guy, of course I wanted the guy in my story to not be a jerk, to do the right thing. But he is human and thus has flaws. He also faces the clash of customs, lost among people who think differently, where the acts that make no sense to him seem perfectly logical to the local folk. Japan in the 1990s is a modern place, but in inaka (the rural, "backwoods" regions), the old, traditional ways still hold sway. So our hero, Benjamin Pinkerton (yes, I borrowed the name from the character in the opera, just to make the connection more obvious), tries to do the right thing: save a child he never knew he had while risking everything in his life back home. It is another stranger in a strange land scenario I like to write.
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