Jan van Rij's interest in the story behind Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly" began on a visit to Nagasaki when he was working here in the 1980s. "I visited Glover Garden with all its confusions -- the ugly escalator, music coming out of the bushes. I could see he had a Japanese wife, with mixed-blood children around, but nothing was clear. Was he the model for Pinkerton, who abandoned Cho-Cho-san?"
He found a link with Thomas Glover and wrote a book that wrapped up Glover's life with fictional stories connected to the "Butterfly" legend. "But apparently it's a no-no to mix fact and fiction like that." When a book about Glover was published (not his own), he began all over again.
The full title for Jan's book, as finally published in 2000, is "Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-san" (ISBN 1-880656-52-3). And this after much discussion with Stonebridge Press. "My original title was 'A Tragedy of Errors,' but my publisher thought it too negative, suggestive of a bad marriage between East and West."