JAPAN: Madame O-Yuki

He was a scion of a wealthy U.S. family —a young Yaleman, adept at billiards, girdling the globe in search of a cure for a broken heart. She was a second-class geisha in old Kyoto. But from the moment he first spied her picture outside the Ono-Tei teahouse, George D. Morgan (son of J. P. Sr.’s sister Sarah and a distant cousin, George Hale Morgan) thought more & more of fragile, fragrant O-Yuki and less & less of a frosty Miss Meta Mackay, who had broken her engagement to him back in the States.

Soon he was calling regularly at the teahouse. For long evenings he sat cross-legged and entranced while Yuki taught him the ritual of tea-drinking and a fascinating game in which two players vie for a paper hoop by trying to catch it on paper hooks held under the lower lip. In no time the young American was begging O-Yuki to marry him.

But little O-Yuki was no Cio-Cio-San, to tear the heart off her sleeve for the first foreigner to come along. In love with a Japanese law student, who squandered her money and betrayed her constantly, O-Yuki told her friends that she would never marry the foreigner, “even if I should get a million yen.”

A Self-Addressed Envelope. Crestfallen George Morgan returned to the U.S. But in a year he was back, pleading again for 0-Yuki’s hand. Once more she refused, and once more George left Japan, leaving behind this time a self-addressed envelope in case O-Yuki should change her mind. Then, without notice, 0-Yuki’s law student quit school to marry a rich man’s daughter; O-Yuki promptly mailed the envelope. Within 20 days, which was very good time in 1903, George was at her side.

He bought O-Yuki from the teahouse for 40,000 yen (then $20,000), settled an allowance of 150 yen a month on her parents, and sailed off with his new bride to the U.S. “Friends of the family,” reported the New York Times later, “said that [George’s father] disapproved the union.” Whatever the reason, the newlyweds cut short their visit to Newport, and after a brief spell in New York, divided their lives between Yokohama and Europe’s capitals. Twelve years later, in 1915, George Morgan dropped dead in Seville, leaving his widow an estimated $400,000.

Mrs. Morgan spent most of the next 23 years on the Riviera. When she returned to her native Japan in 1938, the nationalist press greeted her return with scorn. “Mme. Yuki,” one paper snorted, “the Japanese who doesn’t speak Japanese.” Last week, however, all Japan was mooning over the tale of the little geisha who years ago had first snubbed and then snared the rich American. 0-Yuki’s story had run an unprecedented 260 installments in three newspapers. The text was supported by pictorial tearjerkers, such as George and O-Yuki sleeping on Japanese-style mats in Paris while she dreams of far-off Japan.

A Happy Ending. O-Yuki herself refused to read it. Silver-haired and unwrinkled at 66, she was living in retirement at Kyoto. She has steadfastly refused to see the book’s author or to give him any information. But, outside of a few invented romantic incidents, 60-year-old Novelist Mikihiko Nagata is pretty confident of his accuracy. In any case, he says, 0-Yuki’s is a truly beautiful love story “because, unlike Madame Butterfly, the ending is not tragic.”