"Madame Chrysanthème" by Pierre Loti is a novel published in 1888. Inspired by the author's own experience, it tells the story of a young French naval officer who enters into a temporary marriage with a Japanese woman in Nagasaki. Drawing from Loti's 1885 journey to Japan, the novel captured French fascination with the Far East and achieved immense success. This practice of contractual marriages between foreigners and Japanese women was common in the Japanese empire at the time, despite its considerable cost. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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