Nagasaki early 1900, US captain Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton married a geisha named Cio Cio San, who called herself Madama Butterfly. Then Pinkerton went back to America. Three years has passed and Butterfly has raised their son on her own. She has been isolated by her people because she married an American.Just as things cannot seem worse, distant guns salute the new arrival of a man-of-war, the Abraham Lincoln, Pinkerton's ship (here portrayed by the arrival of an airplane). Butterfly and Suzuki, in great excitement, deck the house with flowers, and array themselves and the child in gala dress. All three peer through shoji doors to watch for Pinkerton's coming.Suzuki persuades the exhausted Butterfly to rest. Pinkerton and Sharpless arrive and tell Suzuki the terrible truth: Pinkerton has abandoned Butterfly for an American wife named KateButterfly receives the truth with apathetic calmness, politely congratulates her replacement, and asks Kate to tell her husband that he must come in half an hour, and then he may have Sorrow, whose name will then be changed to Joy. She herself will "find peace." She bows her visitors out, and is left alone with young Sorrow. She bids a pathetic farewell to her child (Finale, Butterfly: "You, O beloved idol!"), blindfolds him, and puts a doll and small American flag in his hands. She takes her father's dagger--the weapon with which he made his suicide--and reads its inscription: "To die with honor, when one can no longer live with honor." She takes the sword and a white scarf behind a screen, and emerges a moment later with the scarf wrapped round her throat. She embraces her child for the last time and sinks to the floor. Pinkerton and Sharpless rush in and discover the dying girl. The lieutenant cries out Butterfly's name in anguish as the curtain falls.

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