What inspired 'Butterfly's Shadow'? Lee Langley

Writers are often asked where we get our ideas; a question not always possible to answer: an overheard phrase, a line in a newspaper, a childhood memory, a dream – anything can set a story ticking in your head. But this time it’s different: I can remember the precise moment Butterfly’s Shadow took hold of me, the idea catching in my mind like a fluff of sheep’s wool snagging on a barbed wire fence.

I came out of the opera house after a performance of “Madame Butterfly” and thought: there she is, bleeding to death on the floor, and her child is being carried off to America.

What will become of him? Half Japanese, half American, being wrenched away from all that is familiar and loved, to be a stranger in a strange land. Blond & blue-eyed like his father, but Japanese in his upbringing; speaking Japanese, knowing only his mother’s love. Pulled between two cultures – something I experienced myself as a child, being taken away from India where I was born, to a strange country when my Scottish mother took me “home” to England.

That night, after the opera, I began to wonder about what Puccini doesn’t tell us: for example, the American girl. In the opera she only appears at the end, Pinkerton’s new wife. But that’s just the beginning of the story for her. Stepmothers have had a bad press in literature, I thought: let’s look at it from her point of view. She has her plans her ideas of what she wants her life to be, and suddenly there’s this child, a stranger, that changes everything. Changes her future. Changes her.

Then there’s Pinkerton, in the opera, he’s callous, casual, unthinking. What will his future be? Could he change?

And of course, there’s Butterfly herself. The abandoned, loving woman. Do I let her bleed to death, or….could there be a different fate in store for her?

The more I thought about these people they became so real that I decided to see what they would make of life, not in the long-gone world of the nineteenth century, but in a grittier world, closer to us. I wanted to look at the intimate details of their lives against the chaos of the twentieth century

In the 1920s Japan was still rigid with tradition, a woman had no voice, no rights. In America, everything was bubbling with change; this was the New World.

 
I learned a lot about America while I was writing this book. About what it was like to be out of work and homeless in 1930, with people starving, living in shanties. And after Pearl Harbor, the paranoia that had 100,000 Japanese-Americans penned behind barbed wire – old women, children, totally innocent people.

So here was my chance to play God with these characters: to give them a second chance at life. I thought: what if? What if he…what if she…what if they…? And why….

I gave them the spring board, and they went into free fall.

Butterfly's Shadow is now available from Chatto & Windus - please click here for more information.

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