Japonisme

Like many renters, I have extravagant dreams of future home-ownership. There will be a library with lots of cherry-wood bookcases, and a sun room, and many bedrooms of various themes. Among them, I am convinced that one must be a "Nipponese Room", with bamboo floors and ukiyo-e prints and, prominently, posters of The Mikado and Madama Butterfly, two of my favorite things. I suppose there are several theses to be written about the influence of Japanese art and music on that of fin de siècle Europe. What interests me is not how accurately European artists translated Japanese forms, but rather how they idealized them. Japonisme tells us next to nothing about Japan: it reveals far more about the Europeans who reveled in it, dreaming of an exotic, venerable, ancient courtly culture quite removed from a Europe with its ethnic strife and dark satanic mills. (It requires a special sort of stupidity to think The Mikado is racist. The operetta is all terribly English.)

Here I shall mention that my absolute favorite recording of Madama Butterfly is the 1966 one directed by Barbirolli, with Renata Scotto in the title rôle. Aside from one clarinet lick that is almost comically off, I find the recording to be nearly perfect. And, fortunately, it has been remastered for posterity.

I will add, as well, that one of my favorite movies is Topsy-Turvy, which, besides being about the making of The Mikado, is one of the best depictions of the artistic process that I have seen on film.

If there is anything in actual Japanese culture that attracts me, it is perhaps the country's apparent obsession with cats, both in this modern age of the internets and in ages past. I should like to see, were I in New York, the current exhibition of cats in Japanese prints of the 17th-20th centuries.