Ghost Ship in the West and East：Madonna’s Pearl and Roi Rose

Abstract

This essay is an exploration of the influence on Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s short story Madonna’s Pearl of the French novelist Mac Orlan’s short story Roi Rose. Both novels tell the story of a baby who is boarded onto a ghost ship and grows into a teenager. Upon examination of the catalog of the Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Collection, it is evident that Shibusawa did not read the original French version of the novel Roi Rose, but drew on the Japanese translation included in the anthology of French novels published in Japan in 1927. Through a close reading and comparison of the two texts Madonna’s Pearl and Roi Rose, this paper identifies the common theme of the importance of The Flying Dutchman, as well as several similar scenes in both novels. But Shibusawa does not merely transfer the setting of the Western story to Japan; he also uses surrealist collage techniques to reinvent the novel in terms of both content and form. In this task Shibusawa took a lead from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Iseult in making Madonna’s Pearl an erotic novel with dramatic overtones.