Chrysanthemum and the Plum. Pierre Loti’s evolving view of Japan.
Separated by 15 years, Loti’s two novels set in Nagasaki strike a quite different chord.
French author and lifelong naval officer Pierre Loti visited Japan a total of five times. First in 1885 at the age of 35 and finally, after an interval of 16 years, in 1901. As was his custom throughout his life, he kept meticulous journals which he later reworked into novel format.
His first Japan novel “Madame Chrysanthème” was published in 1887. “La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune” based on his final visit to the country, appeared in 1905.
In both cases the events depicted take place in the port of Nagasaki. They even involve many of the same characters. But the tone of the two novels is quite different. Loti seems to have undergone a change of heart.
In June 1885, Pierre Loti arrives in Nagasaki aboard a French naval vessel due for a lengthy re-fit after active service in the South China Sea. Ample time for Loti to contract a short-term arranged marriage with Chrysanthemum, a teenager presented by her mother and a marriage broker for just such a venture.
It was standard practice in Nagasaki at the time. Although prostitution in all but name, the arrangement was treated by Loti with respect. He refers to his extended Japanese family in both novels with warmth and affection.
Nagasaki was historically the primary port of entry to Japan from East Asia. Even during the centuries of Japan’s tightly enforced self-isolation, the city maintained fragile links with the world beyond through the sole Dutch trading post on Dejima island in Nagasaki Bay.
Following the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854, when Japan was forced to open its borders to foreign powers, Nagasaki became a treaty port. This changed status gave foreign enterprises a free hand in organising their affairs, even operating under their own jurisdiction. With the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the country’s rapid espousal of European standards, Nagasaki and its citizens were well-placed to exploit the emerging opportunities.
As his ship sails into port in 1885, Loti’s excitement is palpable. "Yes—I shall choose a little, creamy-skinned woman with black hair and cat's eyes. She must be pretty and not much bigger than a doll. It will be a little paper house, in a green garden, deeply shaded. We shall live among flowers, everything around us shall blossom, and each morning our dwelling shall be filled with nosegays—nosegays such as you have never dreamed of."
He and his trusty shipmate Yves meet with the marriage broker. A girl is presented but Loti rejects her. Not at all what he had in mind. “Heavens! Why, I know her already! Long before setting foot in Japan, I had met her on every fan, on every teacup with her silly air, her puffy little face, her tiny eyes, mere gimlet-holes above those expanses of impossible pink and white cheeks.”
The impasse is resolved when Yves notices another girl standing apart from the group, seemingly disinterested in the proceedings. He points her out to Loti. The marriage broker negotiates with the girl’s mother and the contract is signed.
“Chrysanthemum is an exception, for she is melancholy. What thoughts are running through that little brain? My knowledge of her language is still too limited to enable me to find out. Moreover, it is a hundred to one that she has no thoughts whatever. And even if she had, what do I care? …. I have chosen her to amuse me, and I should really prefer that she should have one of those insignificant little thoughtless faces like all the others.”
Loti himself wrestles with melancholia and nostalgia throughout his life. His novels are overshadowed with an awareness of the dark abyss confronting him. There are no happy endings.
He sets up house away from the port. His landlady Madame Plum, the title character of the later novel, lives downstairs with her husband. She is a lady with a past. Her husband Monsieur Sugar was always supportive, sketching cranes in various postures to divert his wife’s gentleman callers as they waited.
From the outset, Loti describes Chrysanthemum in extremely pejorative terms. “I find her as exasperating as the cicadas on my roof; and when I am alone at home, side by side with this little creature twanging the strings of her long-necked guitar, facing this marvellous panorama of pagodas and mountains, I am overcome by sadness almost to tears.”
In a later passage, Chrysanthemum’s complaints about mice set off a train of memories in Loti of his former lover in Istanbul: “My dear little Turkish companion had said to me in her beloved language, "Setchan!" ("Mice!"). At that fond recollection, a thrill of sweet memories coursed through my veins. It was as if I had been startled out of ten long years' sleep. I looked down upon the doll beside me with a sort of hatred, wondering why I was there, and I arose, with almost a feeling of remorse, to escape from that blue gauze net.”
What can have been the catalyst for such vitriol? Loti rails not only about his wife but the Japanese in general. He writes: “Everything is uncouth, fantastical to excess, grotesquely lugubrious. Everywhere we are surprised by incomprehensible conceptions, which seem the work of distorted imaginations.” And prior to leaving Nagasaki, this scathing summary: “At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying people—laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable monkeyishness.”
Only the minimalist Japanese aesthetic pleases him. “What always strikes one on first entering a Japanese dwelling is the extreme cleanliness, the white and chilling bareness of the rooms. Over the most irreproachable mattings, without a crease, a line, or a stain, I was led upstairs to the first story and ushered into a large, empty room—absolutely empty!” Nevertheless, he struggles to attribute such finesse to the people responsible for creating it.
It is tempting to speculate on the source of his displeasure. Loti was an experienced traveller. He eschewed typical tourist travel – Cook’s tours receiving particular opprobrium – and always sought out the authentic. In Turkey he studied the language, adopted local dress and lived in a Turkish quarter. He felt he was one of them. It was the same in Senegal and Tahiti.
But he struggles to solve the conundrum of Japan. The language, despite his efforts, is beyond him. He only manages to scratch the surface of Japanese life. He writes: “We have absolutely nothing in common with this people. We pass through the midst of their mirth and their laughter without understanding the wherefore, so totally do they differ from our own.” In short, we sense he feels short-changed by the experience.
And then there is Yves. He fears Yves has developed an attachment for Chrysanthemum. Loti blames Chrysanthemum for leading him astray. The Yves in the novel was actually Loti’s bosom-buddy Pierre le Cor, a native of Brittany, with whom Loti enjoyed a special relationship. The ménage à trois reaches a climax with Yves sharing the married couple’s bed to shield him from mosquitoes. Chrysanthemum conducts herself with great propriety, insisting Loti sleeps in the middle.
The denouement of the novel is bitter. Prior to his embarkation, Loti starts to mellow towards the Japanese. The discordant shamisen at the start of the novel starts to resonate with him. He describes Chrysanthemum’s final rendition: “Then by degrees, little by little, the music becomes more animated, and the mousmes begin to listen. Now, tremblingly, it grows into a feverish rapidity, and her gaze has no longer the vacant stare of a doll. Then the music changes again. In it, there is the sighing of the wind, the hideous laughter of ghouls, tears, heartrending plaints. Her dilated pupils seem to be directed inwardly in settled gaze on some indescribable Japanesery within her own soul. I listen, lying there with eyes half shut, looking out between my drooping eyelids, which are gradually lowering, in involuntary heaviness, upon the enormous red sun dying away over Nagasaki. I have a somewhat melancholy feeling that my past life and all other places in the world are receding from my view and fading away. At this moment of nightfall, I feel almost at home in this corner of Japan, amidst the gardens of this suburb. I never have had such an impression before.”
But these tender feelings are quickly crushed. On the day of his departure, he makes a surprise final visit to Chrysanthemum. He discovers her assaying the coins he has paid her as contracted. “On the floor are spread out all the fine silver dollars which, according to our agreement, I had given her the evening before. With the competent dexterity of an old money-changer she fingers them, turns them over, throws them on the floor, and, armed with a little mallet ad hoc, rings them vigorously against her ear, singing the while I know not what little pensive bird-like song which I daresay she improvises as she goes along. Well, after all, it is even more completely Japanese than I could possibly have imagined it—this last scene of my married life! I feel inclined to laugh. How simple I have been, to allow myself to be taken in by the few clever words she whispered yesterday, as she walked beside me, by a tolerably pretty little phrase embellished as it was by the silence of two o'clock in the morning, and all the wonderful enchantments of night. Ah! Not more for Yves than for me, not more for me than for Yves, has any feeling passed through that little brain, that little heart.”
What did he expect? Chrysanthemum has completed her side of the agreement. Seen from her point of view, it was doubtless an onerous task and one she did not welcome. Doubtless, she would have preferred the tall, handsome Yves to the stunted, moody Loti. Nonetheless, she had fulfilled her duty and received due recompense.
Perhaps this apparent rebuff tarnished Loti’s view of the Japanese, colouring the novel. He had believed the sweet nothings whispered in his ear and now saw them for the formulaic utterances they were.
All the more surprising then that 16 years later, on arriving in Nagasaki, he heads straight to Chrysanthemum’s family home to pay his respects. He learns his former wife is now married to a Japanese gentleman in a nearby town. He understands a visit would be inappropriate. Instead, he turns his attention to his mother-in-law: “I really made a mistake, fifteen years ago, in not marrying Madame Buttercup, my mother-in-law, sooner. Every day my regret increases for having ignored her in this way. She herself, if I am not mistaken, secretly deplores it, and, today as we cannot turn the clock back, never tires of treating me as a son-in-law, to maintain at least this bond, for lack of better.”
He spends more and more time in her company. A former highly-skilled geisha from Edo, she became pregnant and was forced to decamp to Nagasaki. Loti, himself an accomplished pianist, now delights in listening to the shamisen.
“At dusk, in front of the fine blue porcelain cups and the miniature trays, this little world remains seated on the ground, motionless because of the guitar which enchants it and hypnotized by the artificial landscape, more and more extinguished, on which often a little snow falls—real snow, the flakes of which appear too large for the trees which receive them. Madame Buttercup, the famous geisha of yesteryear, rediscovers her power and charm during these grey hours. As happened to Madame Chrysanthemum, her daughter, a change took place in her face which became ennobled; her eyes are no longer childish or slanted. They reflect unfathomable daydreams of the yellow race, where we sense fierce energy and which overturn your previous assessments of this laughing people.”
He is likewise more sensitised to the Japanese world around him. The descriptive passages are more luxurious, replete with Loti’s signature nostalgia and melancholy. He seems at pains to elaborate for his readers back home in France, eager to experience Japan through his eyes. Unlike the first novel replete with self-referential pique, in the latter novel he is more open-minded, generous and balanced.
“The grass grows between the large flagstones of this courtyard, where the faithful rarely visit. Cycads stand in the middle, on giant stems, and the tree which shelters me extends surprisingly long horizontal branches, which would have broken a century ago if crutches did not support them in places. We are surrounded by terraces which support granite Buddhas and tombs: the entire mass of the mountain that dominates us is filled with tombs. Right in front of me, there is the old cedar temple, once coloured, gilded, lacquered, today all worm-eaten and the colour of dust. On each side of the closed door, the two guardians of the threshold, locked in cages like dangerous beasts, have been darting their big ferocious eyes for ages, and maintaining their furious gestures.”
In contrast to his first visit to Japan, Loti realises this will be his final voyage. He is unlikely ever to return. As the chasm of separation approaches, the realisation permeates his writing. Unsurprisingly, he finds solace among the dead, seeking refuge in an ancient cemetery overlooking the bay.
“The shady and calm veranda of the tea house run by Madame Stork, in front of the temple of the Fox, the ancient terraces of the city of the dead, with grey stones, under the hundred-year-old cedars, I will never find these hours again of silence and almost voluptuous melancholy, spent there in the green night of the trees.”
In the first novel, Loti describes Japanese daily life with supercilious derision. In the later novel, he is more observant, more nuanced. What before was seen as trivial, he now perceives as part of a complex cultural whole. The importance of bathing to the Japanese is one such example:
“As I went up to Madame Plum's, a sort of presentiment came to me of the very gallant spectacle that might await me there. It was time for bathing, which the Japanese practise without mystery on summer evenings. In this upper suburb, where morals remained simpler than in the city, both sexes unconcerned refreshed themselves together in wooden tubs or terracotta jars, placed outside the doors or in the gardens. Their faces, emerging from the clear water, testified to an innocent well-being. Perhaps Madame Plum too, I said to myself, might be in her bath!... And there she was!
“When I had turned the secret gate latch, I immediately saw the familiar tub from which a charming nape escaped, like a flower from a bouquet. And the bather, witty and cheerful even in the most prosaic occurrences of life, graciously amused herself by saying: “Blou, blou, blou, brrr!” by blowing loudly underwater.”
Loti’s relationship with the mature Madame Plum is complex. If the teenage Chrysanthemum was a blank page, the mature Madame Plum is a weighty tome to pore over. Only she at the end of the first novel seems genuinely distressed to see him leave. There is clearly unfinished business between them.
But Loti is nothing if not eclectic in his tastes. In the later novel, two much younger girls cast their spell over the 50-year-old Frenchman. First a young dancer:
“Then appears the strangest little being that I have ever seen in my travels around the world, half doll and half cat, one of those figures which, at first glance, are engraved, by the very excess of their strangeness, and which we no longer forget. She steps forward, smiling out of the corners of her slanted eyes; her head, as big as a fist, rises implausibly on a child's neck, a neck too long and too thin, and her little, nothing body is lost in the folds of an extravagant dress, with great rows, golden chrysanthemums. It is Mademoiselle April Showers, the dancer, who prostrates herself.
“She admits to being thirteen years old, but, as she is small, petite, slender, we would hardly give her eight, were it not sometimes for the expression of her cuddly and funny eyes which pass furtively, between two smiles, very childish, a little of precocious femininity, a little bitterness. As it is, delicious to look at in its Far Asian frills, disconcerting, resembling nothing, indefinable and sexless.
“I am no longer bored, I am no longer alone. I have met the toy that I have perhaps vaguely desired all my life: a little talking cat.”
But it is Inamoto, the other young girl he meets, who makes the most profound impression on Loti:
“And then I also have befriended a girl, for whom I would give Madame Buttercup and Madame Plum with Mademoiselle April Showers, and whom I meet, in the very heart of the upper necropolis, in a sort of enclosed bocage, surrounded of a people of tombs. And I believe it is she who now personifies for me Nagasaki and the delicious mountain of its dead. … Is it her that I will regret on the day of departure, or only this mountain with its mystery and its shadow, with its enclosures of old stones and its moss?”
They meet by chance. “We suddenly found ourselves face to face … She naturally started by laughing before asking me: ‘Who are you, where did you come from, who allowed you to jump this wall?’ She had barely slanted eyes, almost eyes like a little dark-haired girl from Provence or Spain, with a reddish amber complexion; she exuded health, fresh youth, and her look was so honest that I immediately left behind that tone of banter, always indicated in the salons of Madame Plum or Madame Buttercup.”
They form an immediate bond, a chaste one as Loti is swift to underscore.
“Little Miss Inamoto,” I asked, “it would be nice to see you again sometime. The day after tomorrow, if it doesn't rain or snow, I'll come back here, at this same time. And you, will you come?”
“I will come,” she replied. “I come every day without rain.”
One senses this is the Japan Loti has been searching for. The innocent child keeping him company on the “delicious mountain of the dead”.
This is the memory he will evoke later in his home in Rochefort, in his Japanese room filled with memorabilia from Nagasaki. There, dressed in a Japanese kimono, he will let his fingers drift over the various objects, casting his mind back to the mountainous country on the other side of the world, now beyond his reach for ever.
