Raleigh writer Angela Davis-Gardner loves Japan. She went there to teach when she was a young woman fresh from her undergraduate studies at Duke University. The landscape and the people stayed in her imagination so profoundly that she has visited several times and set her most recent books there. “Plum Wine” examines the aftermath of World War II in Japan. And her new book, “Butterfly’s Child” (The Dial Press/2011) moves between Japan and America at the end of the 19th century.
It focuses on the life of a boy named Benji, the son of the characters at the heart of Puccini’s opera, “Madame Butterfly.” In the novel, Angela Davis-Gardner imagines what would have happened to that child after the curtain falls on his mother’s suicide.
