"Madame Butterfly" is a short story by American lawyer and writer John Luther Long.

Her maid Suzuki helps prepare the house with flowers and arrange Pinkerton's things the way he remembered them.

Correll once told her brother about a "dear little teahouse girl" named "Cho-San" who was abandoned by the father of her child.

[2] Another author speculated that Thomas Blake Glover is the man who adopted Cho-Cho-San's son, but that evidence was dismissed as "flimsy".

[2] Appearing in October 1898, the book included several other Long stories, and began selling "like hot cakes".

[7] The story interested American playwright David Belasco who collaborated with Long on a one-act adaption.

Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan premiered in New York's Herald Square Theatre on March 5, 1900 with Blanche Bates in the title role.

Seven weeks later, Belasco took it to London's Duke of York's Theatre where it played to full houses and critical acclaim.

[8] In 1988, David Henry Hwang wrote a play entitled M. Butterfly based on the affair between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Peking opera singer Shi Pei Pu.

He mined the sexist and racist clichés of Puccini's opera to tell the story of a Westerner who fantasized about loving a Madame Butterfly.

[10][11] In the summer of 1900, while Giacomo Puccini was in London supervising the English premiere of Tosca, he saw David Belasco's play.

[14] In 1900, George Hobart and Alfred Aarons retold the story in their song "O Mona San: A Tokyo Tragedy" and dedicated their work to David Belasco.

[15] "Madame Butterfly" became the archetype for orientalist songs, and its core narrative was brutally summarized by L. Wolfe Gilbert in his lyrics for "Singapore": "He leaves, she grieves.

"[16] After Puccini's opera became a hit, "Madame Butterfly" songs were legion, including by composers as famous as Irving Berlin ("Hurry Back to My Bamboo Shack") and George Gershwin ("Yan-Kee", "In the Heart of a Geisha").

"Butterfly" songs often transferred the characters to other Asian locales, like Shanghai, and it was common to leave the heroine's fate ambiguous.

[14] Puccini's style was an intuitive fit for Tin Pan Alley songwriters and the jazz artists who cannibalized their work.