Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Edvard Munch. A French naval officer takes a temporary wife in Nagasaki for the length of his ship's stay, furnishes a paper house on a hill, and is faintly bored by all of it — including her. Loti was Julien Viaud, a career officer who rose to captain and wrote from every port the navy sent him to; this 1887 book gave Puccini's Butterfly its situation, and it is far colder than anything the opera does with it. The narrator's condescension is on the page for the reader to judge. Fifty-nine plates, from Hiroshige's Shinano views to stormy seas and shipping in harbour, keep the salt water and the Japanese light of the story before the eye throughout.