I must talk to you today, Butterfly, as I’ve often done in the years since your death. Not that I've ever thought you can hear me. I never really believed in the religion to which you converted in your desperate attempt to be a perfect wife for me.

Today, though, is special. It is 2 September 1945. The war between your nation and mine is over. Japan has officially surrendered.

If life really imitated art – an opera, or an epic poem – I suppose I should have died in battle against your countrymen. But I was far too old for front line duty. I served uneventfully in the Coastguard. The war, like most of life, passed me by.

In fact all the passion, the joy, the tragedy I have ever known happened in our brief time together, in our house on the hill above Nagasaki. I remember most vividly the mornings there, all too few as they were: Waking to find you naked in my arms, your jet-black hair draped over my shoulder, the orange blossom scent of your skin, your delicate oval face, still serene in sleep, nestled into my chest. Don't ask me, Cio Cio San, what happened to Nagasaki.

If you could speak now, you might ask why I betrayed you. How feeble my answers would be! I was a coward, fearing the stigma, back at home, of being with a Japanese. I craved the social and career advancement that might come from marrying an American girl of good family.

Again, life fails to imitate art. I almost wish I could tell you that Kate was the wicked stepmother of the fairy tales, hating our son, plotting against him.. Instead, she loved the boy as if he were her own, and he in turn thought of Kate as his mother. Once more, I was a coward; I have never told him the truth about you and me. He is a man now; he has little of your looks. People often said (and the fools meant it as a compliment) that he could pass as white. And he did, avoiding the internment that many Japanese-Americans suffered after Pearl Harbour. He in his turn married an all-American girl, and your grandchild, Butterfly, is as old as you.

When I was on leave, towards the end of the war, I went to the movies. The newsreel showed footage of our battle fleet as it closed in on the Japanese homeland. I watched as a solitary kamikaze plane dived at a warship. Under the relentless hammering of the antiaircraft guns, the plane veered away, trailing smoke, and then disintegrated. As the shattered bits of wing and fuselage fell harmlessly into the sea, I had the odd thought that they no longer seemed things of metal, but insubstantial as the broken wings of a butterfly. And the pilot? Doubtless a mere boy, his life given to no avail whatsoever. But your self-sacrifice, Cio-Cio-San, achieved a terrible purpose. For from that day to this, I have known that in all my foolish wasted life there was only one true love, and that I rejected her, and that her name was Butterfly.