The Heat of the Sun

must take him back to America and bring him up as their own.
    Butterfly takes this in. Of course: Pinkerton shall have the child, if he only comes back in... oh, half an hour. The Americans go. The calm, they know, is only on the surface: Butterfly’s
heart is broken. Pinkerton knows it, and knows he will always feel shame for what he has done. Kate Pinkerton knows it, but steels herself. Sharpless knows it, and for the rest of his life will
feel a sense of failure, exile, and loss. Perhaps he guesses what will happen next.
    Butterfly is alone. What has she done that she must pay this price? The Bonze has cursed her, and his curse has come to pass. She has abandoned her religion. She has betrayed her country. She
has trusted in love, and love has let her down. She takes up the dagger that her father used to commit ritual suicide. She unsheathes the blade and kisses it. She recites the words engraved on it: Die with honour when you can no longer live with honour .
    The time has come. But now Suzuki pushes back a screen to admit the boy called Trouble. He rushes to his mother. She sweeps him into a last embrace. She loves him: loves him. Oh, let him look
into her face – deeply, searchingly, never to forget her! It is for you, she tells him, that I do what I do. It is for you, little boy, that you may go across the sea. She breaks from him,
ties a blindfold around his eyes, then, with her gaze still fixed upon him, retreats behind a screen, where again she takes up the dagger. She plunges it into her bosom and emerges, tottering; she
falls, but just has strength enough to drag herself across to the boy and embrace him again, before she sinks down.
    Returning, Pinkerton and Sharpless find her lying dead.

 
    ACT THREE
After Tokugawa

 
    The world is webbed by imaginary lines: latitude, longitude, the lines are not there, but seem as real to us as mountains, rivers, coasts. Spin a globe
to the Pacific, and all the way down the watery hemisphere runs the International Date Line. As a boy I thought of it as a seam, as if planet earth had two halves, tacked jaggedly together. Travel
westwards, and at one moment it is the date in America, at the next (jump!), the date in Japan, a day later. We have passed through a barrier. We have entered another world.
    ‘Tell me again – temples and pagodas?’ I said, as our ship drew into a long, thin harbour.
    ‘Great Temples of Kyushu, that’s what the Geographic ’s paying for.’ There was an edge in Le Vol’s voice. This was the first of our commercial projects that
he, not I, had arranged. I had thought it odd when he suggested it, and wondered why it appealed to him. ‘Mysteries of the Orient. Buddhist chanting. Incense. Gongs. Think you can work up
something on that?’
    Gentle hills, blue in spring, rose over a clutter of port and town. As we lugged our suitcases down to the quay, I wondered if anything in Nagasaki would stir my memory. I supposed not: I had
been an infant, barely more than a baby, when my father was the consul.
    Le Vol had changed his shirt and shaved for our arrival. This surprised me, but I was not surprised at all when he discoursed knowingly about the Mitsubishi shipyards, which loomed, grey and
forbidding, on the other side of the harbour. Did I know, he demanded of me, how much Japan spent on ships, tanks, and airplanes? Without them, the war in China could barely have begun.
    I sighed; I was tired of the war in China. It had become Le Vol’s subject, his idée fixe . For six years, Japan had fought a war of conquest on the mainland; by now, much of
China lay under Japanese occupation. Western powers, imperial to the core, were outraged at Japan’s imperial expansion. But Japan would not listen, withdrawing indignantly from the League of
Nations.
    ‘Shouldn’t you be researching temples and pagodas?’ I said.
    ‘That’s your job. I just take the snaps.’
    ‘I suppose so.’ In my suitcase was a Baedeker and an illustrated book called Mysterious Japan .
    Evening gathered pinkly in the sky. Our ship, a merchant steamer, had deposited us at an inauspicious dock, all slithery timbers, tangled hawsers, and brown wiry wharfmen hurrying in every
direction. High above, cranes held crates suspended by spidery threads; shadows, black and boxy, slithered over pungent clutter, and I wondered if I should have entrusted the arrangements to Le
Vol. He was not the most reliable of business partners.
    We had just completed customs