Shakespeare In Japan

Shakespeare in Japan TETSUO KISHI GRAHAM BRADSHAW Continuum Shakespeare in Japan Also available from Continuum: Sh...

82 downloads 1685 Views 378KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Shakespeare in Japan

TETSUO KISHI GRAHAM BRADSHAW

Continuum

Shakespeare in Japan

Also available from Continuum: Shakespeare in China, Murray J. Levith Shakespeare, Reception and Translation, Friederike von Schwerin-High

Shakespeare in Japan TETSUO KISHI AND GRAHAM BRADSHAW

Continuum The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

15 East 26th Street New York NY 10010

© Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0–8264–7533–7 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kishi, Tetsuo, 1935– Shakespeare in Japan / Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0–8264–7533–7 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Translations into Japanese— History and criticism. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Stage history—Japan. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Appreciation— Japan. 4. Translating and interpreting —Japan—History. 5. English language—Translating into Japanese. 6. Japanese literature—English inﬂuences. 7. English drama—Appreciation—Japan. 8. Theater— Japan—History. I. Bradshaw, Graham. II. Title. PR2881.5.J371C57 2005 822.3′3—dc22 Typeset by ReﬁneCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain

2004061829

Contents

Preface

vii

Part 1: Adaptations and Translations

1

1

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre: Tsubouchi Shoyo

1

2

Shakespeare in Japanese (I): Fukuda Tsuneari

29

3

Shakespeare in Japanese (II): Kinoshita Junji

53

Part 2: Productions and Creative Critiques

73

4

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

73

5

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

98

6 Shakespeare and Japanese Film: Kurosawa Akira

126

Further Reading

146

Index

149

v

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

This book does not attempt to provide a history of ‘Shakespeare in Japan’. It would require a book at least ten times as long fully to trace how Shakespeare has been received by the Japanese: how his works have been appreciated by specialists as well as the general reading public and the general theatre-going public, how they have been translated into Japanese, how they have been studied by scholars and students, how they have been taught at universities and high schools and how they have inﬂuenced and inspired writers, theatre artists and ﬁlm-makers in Japan. Neither is this book a survey of the contemporary scene. Instead it addresses what we think is an excruciatingly complicated and yet exceptionally enticing question: what happened when Shakespeare’s works which belong to a long and sophisticated tradition met another tradition which was no less long and sophisticated but almost totally different, both culturally and linguistically? In trying to answer this question we regularly found ourselves challenging widely accepted views. It is now generally known, it seems, that Shakespeare is extremely popular in Japan, but we suspect that the true nature of this ‘popularity’ is not so generally understood. In Japanese terms, Part 1 of this short study may seem provocative, since it reappraises the achievement of the ﬁrst major Japanese translator of Shakespeare, Tsubouchi Shoyo, and his successors, Fukuda Tsuneari and Kinoshita Junji. As we ﬁrmly believe that one of the most important aspects – possibly the most important aspect – of Shakespeare’s artistry has to do with the way he used the English language, we felt any discussion of Shakespeare in Japan (or Shakespeare in any non-English culture) needs to consider the process of translating Shakespeare into the vii

Preface

target language and culture, and the various problems which occur during this process. We chose the three translators we discuss in Part 1 mainly because they were so self-conscious and selfcritical about their own works and clearly realized what their problems were. Nowadays, their translations are usually and, in our view, rather glibly dismissed as ‘unactable’. Yet Tsubouchi and Fukuda were both drawn to produce or direct, as well as translate, Shakespeare, and Kinoshita has always kept a close tie with the productions of his own works. In different ways the productions they were involved with conﬁrmed what common sense also suggests: whatever counts as ‘actable’ or ‘unactable’ always depends on whatever the available actors can or cannot manage and whatever the audiences in question can or cannot appreciate. Moreover, these earlier translators had to confront very complex linguistic and cultural problems. Some reappraisal of their achievements seems to us timely, or even overdue. For the last few decades so-called ‘Japanese Shakespeare’ has been a subject of widespread interest (see ‘Further Reading’). However, the studies in question have tended to concentrate on stage productions of Shakespeare in Japan, and have then been primarily concerned with the visual aspects – with what Dennis Kennedy calls ‘Looking at Shakespeare’. We have tried to address and even rectify the situation. In Western terms, Part 2 might seem more provocative. Here we are chieﬂy concerned with later Japanese productions, adaptations and creative critiques of Shakespearean poetic drama, and we enter some currently unfashionable reservations about the achievement of modern Japanese directors such as Ninagawa Yukio, who have achieved international success by serving up what might be described as exotic cultural cocktails. We realize of course that this may not have been what Ninagawa and his fellow directors intended, but the sobering fact is that they are appreciated as such concocters outside Japan, partly because of the extremely ambiguous relationship they have maintained with traditional Japanese theatre. We also argue that admiring Western views of the more impressive achievement of Kurosawa Akira, in his so-called Shakespearean ﬁlms, are often distorted by Western preoccupations that Kurosawa never shared. Certainly we want to question (and dismiss) the continuing assumption that whatever viii

Preface

Western view of Shakespeare prevails at different times is somehow ‘authentic’ and the correspondingly condescending idea that non-Western views are at best stimulatingly ‘exotic’ or visually pleasing, but inauthentic. Unfortunately, Japanese ideas of what counts as distinctively and uniquely ‘Japanese’ have too often been shaped, as if in some hall of crazy mirrors, by Japanese perceptions of Western perceptions of what is distinctly ‘Japanese’. The various Japanese novels and short stories by Japanese writers inspired by Shakespeare’s works are not so well known outside Japan as Kurosawa’s ﬁlms. However they provide fascinating examples of how Japanese writers responded to and tried to reinterpret a playwright who belongs to a different culture. We chose several works based on Hamlet to examine what happened when two cultures met. They are by no means the only works Japanese authors have produced using Shakespeare as the raw material, but we think they provide sufﬁcient information to consider this particular phenomenon. In theoretical terms, we subscribe to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view that our responses to works of art from other cultures and periods are always, and inevitably, culturally and historically bounded. This, as Gadamer went on to argue, is not simply a sign of ‘bias’ or of some reprehensible and escapable limitation: rather, it is a condition of our responding at all. According to this view, it might even be argued that any and every Shakespearean production, reading or interpretation inevitably begins as one or another kind of mental staging, and then, no less inevitably, issues as a kind of translation. Although that last claim might seem to prompt despair, we do not support the view promulgated by Terence Hawkes among others that a Shakespearean play or poetic drama is an endlessly ‘chaotic site’ for endlessly proliferating interpretations, none of which can be regarded as more authentic or authoritative than others. Indeed, we could not have written this book if we did not persist in thinking that some interpretations, productions and translations are demonstrably better than others. In Shakespearean and critical terms, we think the Gadamerian argument most valuable in providing positive directions and redirections once we ask who ‘we’ are. Of course, every age’s and every culture’s ‘Shakespeare’ is different. But, in considering this ix

Preface

not very surprising or alarming state of affairs – which is just, in Beckett’s phrase, How It Is – we can begin to see or make out how, as some different things are emphasized or valued, other things are blocked out. Although evolution should not be confused with progress, the study of different ‘Shakespeares’ has a reﬂexive value, since it can alert us to whatever ‘we’ ourselves might otherwise block out. To take an example that strikingly illustrates one difference between English and European as well as Russian responses to Shakespeare, Fortinbras was regularly excluded from English productions of Hamlet from 1660 to 1897, when George Bernard Shaw persuaded Forbes Robertson to restore Fortinbras in his famous production. To omit Fortinbras is to eliminate an important part of the play’s political dimension. But Fortinbras disappeared again in many later English productions, and in the modern ﬁlms by Laurence Olivier and Tony Richardson. Olivier described his ﬁlm as an ‘essay’, and the essay’s main theme, which is also famously or notoriously expounded before the play or ﬁlm begins, is that Hamlet is a study of ‘a man who could not make up his mind’ – since, in Olivier’s quasi-Freudian view, Hamlet’s mind was made up long before he was a man. This view, and the idea that in-depth psychological analyses take precedence over or exclude political concerns, would have been almost inconceivable in modern Polish productions or – for different reasons, which not surprisingly made Fortinbras seem signiﬁcant in different ways – productions in Stalin’s Russia. Yet Fortinbras’ presence in Shakespeare’s play and, we may assume, in the Globe stagings would have engaged the very pressing English anxieties about what would happen in and to England when Queen Elizabeth I died. From this point of view, the Polish and even the Soviet interest in Fortinbras was not merely foreign, still less exotic: it was almost certainly closer to Elizabethan preoccupations. This in itself would still not determine whether Fortinbras’ dramatic signiﬁcance (which shifts between the two Quarto texts and the First Folio text) was primarily political or ﬁlial: Fortinbras is one of three sons and a daughter who respond very differently to the death of a father. But weighing what later English audiences, productions and critics blocked out against whatever Polish, Russian and Elizabethan audiences ﬁlled in is a good starting point for x

Preface

thinking about Fortinbras, and Hamlet. Considering and comparing German, Russian and Japanese responses to Prince Hamlet is a no less valuable, sometimes corrective, stimulus to thinking about Hamlet and Hamlet. This is not least because Prince Hamlet is seldom concerned to discover or establish what those he loves think and feel – like the demurring Horatio, when he says, ‘Half a share’, or the apparently uncomprehending Gertrude, when she exclaims, ‘As kill a King?’ – whereas the play Hamlet is so extraordinarily and even (if this unexpected word brings out the relevant contrast) promiscuously interested in how differently different characters think or feel about their respective situations. In general terms, we dare to hope that our study of ‘Shakespeare in Japan’ might be useful in ways that look beyond its immediate, richly fascinating but local subject. Our excuse for this hope is that, even as we try to question and oppose different conceptions of the ‘authentic’ and ‘exotic’, we are starting from a fundamental fact and a no less fundamental question. The fact is that Shakespeare is now, after four centuries and in different, though not all, cultures, the world’s most performed dramatist. The question is: why? Of course that basic question can be broken down: we might ask why Shakespeare never appealed in Portugal as much as he has in modern Japan or modern China, where one recent translation of the Complete Works had a print run of one million. The question of what, as we sometimes argue in Part 1, could not get through in Japanese translations of Shakespeare needs to be weighed against the consideration that something very large did come through, in Japan before Tsubouchi Shoyo’s translations, or in Germany before the Schlegel–Tieck translations, or in Russia long before Boris Pasternak’s translations. A note about Japanese names is necessary. For the Japanese it is customary for a surname to come ﬁrst to be followed by a given name. Throughout the book we have followed this custom. The three translators we discuss in Part 1, for example, are called ‘Tsubouchi Shoyo’, ‘Fukuda Tsuneari’ and ‘Kinoshita Junji’ respectively rather than ‘Shoyo Tsubouchi’, ‘Tsuneari Fukuda’ and ‘Junji Kinoshita’, which might sound more natural to Englishspeaking readers. (The only exception is the name of the Japanese co-author. The ‘Japanese’ order has been reversed to avoid possible confusion.) xi

Preface

This book originated with an idea of Brian Southam, Chairman of the Athlone Press. A short article by Tetsuo Kishi on Shakespeare in Japan caught his eye, and he suggested that Kishi write a full-length book on the subject. He agreed to do so, but as he felt it would hardly be possible to tackle it without working together with a Shakespearean scholar from an English-speaking country, he invited Graham Bradshaw to join him. Unfortunately it took much longer to complete the book than we anticipated, partly because of the complexity of the topic but mainly because of the administrative duties the Japanese co-author had to carry out for several years. While we wish we had ﬁnished the book before the Athlone Press was incorporated by Continuum, we still cherish the memory of the kindness and encouragement we received from Brian Southam whom we think of as ‘the only begetter’ of the book. Without him it would never have been written. Over the years, several editors from Athlone as well as Continuum were involved in the project, all of whom were unusually understanding and encouraging, but the book ﬁnally came into existence with the help of Sarah Douglas and Anna Sandeman of Continuum, two of the most efﬁcient editors we know. Part of the cost of the publication has been covered by a generous grant from the Saison Foundation in Tokyo. We would like to thank all the above most heartily.

xii

PART 1: ADAPTATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

1 Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre: Tsubouchi Shoyo

The most important person in the history of the reception and appreciation of Shakespeare in Japan is and will no doubt remain Tsubouchi Yuzo (1859–1935). Like many Japanese men of letters of his time he assumed an elegant pseudo-Chinese nom de plume and called himself Shoyo (meaning ‘strolling’), so that he is better known as Tsubouchi Shoyo or simply as Shoyo. This literary giant studied at the University of Tokyo, which was the ﬁrst university established by the central government and was then called the Imperial University of Tokyo. Shoyo majored in economics and political science, which were part of the curriculum of the Faculty of Letters in the 1870s, but he avidly read works of English literature and went on to translate some of them. Later he joined the faculty of Waseda University in Tokyo, one of the oldest and most distinguished private universities in Japan, and for many years he worked there as a professor of English literature. He was also active as a novelist and playwright as well as an inﬂuential literary critic, and he introduced various European literary theories to the Japanese reading public. In 1906 he organized the Bungei Kyokai (Literary Society) and recruited amateurs in the hope of training them to be actors adept enough to appear in Japanese language productions of Western plays. The society produced plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen among other writers, before it was disbanded in 1913. Thus, Shoyo functioned as one of the pioneers of the new theatre movement which aimed at starting a new genre corresponding to

1

Shakespeare in Japan

contemporary Western drama. The new genre was called Shingeki (literally ‘new theatre’ or ‘new drama’, in contrast to the old theatre which was primarily Kabuki) and Shoyo’s contribution to this movement is never to be ignored. But it is as a translator of Shakespeare that he is mainly remembered today. He was the ﬁrst of two writers who translated all of Shakespeare’s plays into Japanese (the other is Odashima Yushi (1930 –), who will be mentioned in Chapter 3), and his translations are remarkable not only for their literary quality but also for their lexical accuracy. Clearly his command of the English language and his understanding of Shakespeare were exceptional, and even by today’s standard he can be regarded as a very formidable Shakespearean scholar. Thus Tsubouchi Shoyo was one of the most Westernized Japanese intellectuals of the time. Since to many Japanese of the day Westernization was, rightly or wrongly, almost synonymous with modernization, we can also safely regard him as one of the most modernized writers of the time. But the same man was also thoroughly immersed in the still dominant culture of old Japan. He inherited a love of literature and theatre from his mother and, even as a teenager, he regularly attended performances of Kabuki, which was then the most popular form of drama. Eventually Shoyo became a proliﬁc playwright in his own right, and many of his plays became part of the permanent Kabuki repertoire. This apparently curious and not always comfortable coexistence of the old and the new, the indigenous and the foreign, within Shoyo’s complex sensibility is also more generally representative of the way Shakespeare was ﬁrst received in Japan, which had been a closed society for more than two centuries. Shakespeare ﬁrst arrived in Japan with Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky, George Bernard Shaw and trams. Of course Shakespearean poetic drama belongs to the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries and is not, in any historical sense, modern. Shakespeare was certainly not new in the way that Ibsen was new and blisteringly contemporary. The result was a very complex irony, with many aspects and consequences that need to be considered in some detail. In general terms one might say that the moment when Shakespeare arrived in Japan was culturally right but linguistically wrong. As we shall see, there are various technical respects in which 2

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

Shakespearean poetic drama is closer to traditional Japanese drama like Noh or Kabuki than it is to modern Western realistic or naturalistic drama like that of Ibsen or Shaw. Also, as Shoyo himself liked to point out, the Japanese were politically and socially far closer to feudalism than contemporary British or American readers and audiences. Indeed, the moment of Shakespeare’s arrival was culturally timely because Shakespearean drama so often projects the no less momentous Western conﬂict between the old and the new, or between declining late medieval and emergent Renaissance values, even when the dramatic and historical setting is ostensibly medieval or classical: recall the Shakespearean contrasts between, say, King Hamlet’s reliance on single combat and King Claudius’s preference for diplomacy and Realpolitik, or between Richard II and Bolingbroke, or Hector and Ulysses, or Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar. In the latter part of the Meiji period (1867–1912), Japan itself was changing in culturally momentous ways, after being a closed society for more than two centuries. Ironically, some Japanese intellectuals who opposed modernization for nationalist reasons, as a threat to traditional culture, and some Japanese intellectuals who opposed modernization for anti-nationalist reasons, because they feared the rise of nationalist imperialism, found themselves identifying with Hamlet. Or, as Coleridge would say, Hamlet found them. In these and other ways, the cultural moment for this ﬁrst Japanese encounter with Shakespeare was remarkably rich and timely. Nonetheless, when the Japanese ﬁrst encountered Shakespeare, the very fact that he was one of the greatest Western dramatists made him qualify, almost automatically, as a modern writer. His poetic dramas were studied alongside and produced in much the same ways as the plays of Ibsen. This basic confusion and the fatal lack of any proper historical perspective were characteristic of the whole process of the so-called modernization of Japan, and of modern Japanese culture and civilization in general. Another crucial fact that is sometimes disregarded or given insufﬁcient weight is that Shakespeare was being introduced to a country with an already highly developed civilization, an exceptionally high literacy rate and extremely sophisticated theatrical traditions of its own. Kabuki began during Shakespeare’s lifetime, in the years that separate Hamlet and Othello. Noh drama was much older: Zeami wrote or composed some of his classic 3

Shakespeare in Japan

Noh dramas and treatises before Chaucer had written a word. In a way, accepting Shakespeare would have been much simpler for the late nineteenth-century Japanese if the situation had been otherwise, but from the very beginning Japanese theatre artists had to try somehow to ﬁll the gap between and connect the two independent traditions. It seems likely that many Japanese supposed or took for granted, at what in retrospect seems the worst possible time, that the contemporary Western productions of Shakespeare were as authentic as Japanese productions of traditional forms of Japanese theatre like Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku. In fact, we still know much less about how Richard Burbage performed Shakespeare than we know about fourteenth-century Noh performances of Zeami’s plays. Japanese theatre had a continuous tradition, and the emergence of a new form like Kabuki did not mean it replaced an older form like Noh, whereas the English tradition was broken or lost ﬁrst during the Interregnum, when the theatres were closed, and then after the Restoration, when the theatres opened again but were very unlike Shakespeare’s Globe and played to very different audiences. A few Meiji Japanese who were able to travel to England or the United States saw and sometimes reported on what actors and actor-managers like Henry Irving or Edwin Booth made of Hamlet. But they, like almost all of their Western contemporaries, could not but be unaware of how remote the performances and productions of actor-managers like Booth or Irving were from whatever Burbage did and from Elizabethan stagings. In these circumstances it is not at all strange that so many attempts have been made to assimilate or ﬂirt with conventions of Noh and Kabuki when Shakespeare is produced in Japan. This is true of Shoyo’s ﬁrst major Shakespeare-related work, a translation/adaptation of Julius Caesar, which was published in 1884 under the title of Shiizaru Kidan: Jiyu no Tachi Nagori no Kireaji1 (the English version of this title would be something like ‘The Strange Tale of Caesar’, or ‘The Remains of the Sharpness of the Sword of Freedom’). Shoyo’s version reads like a script for Bunraku puppet theatre. It follows each scene of Shakespeare’s original meticulously and many speeches are translated almost verbatim, although they tend to be longer and more verbose. It lacks the speed of the original version but it is far more 4

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

musical as it makes full use of a Japanese metrical system which depends on a combination of seven-syllable and ﬁve-syllable phrases. Since this combination is essential to any form of traditional Japanese verse, translating Shakespeare’s verse into Japanese verse, which might sound eminently sensible, actually involves translating one kind of verse into another, utterly different and arguably alien kind of verse; we discuss these profound differences in Chapters 2 and 3. In spite of these different characteristics, Shiizaru Kidan as a work of literature is fundamentally faithful to Shakespeare’s play. However, one crucial dramatic difference has to do with the basic premises of a Bunraku script. Let us take as our ﬁrst example the scene of Caesar’s assassination. In Shakespeare these few lines lead to Caesar’s death: CINNA O Caesar . . . CAESAR Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus? DECIUS Great Caesar . . . CAESAR Doth not Brutus bootless kneel? CASCA Speak hands for me! They stab Caesar CAESAR Et tu, Brute? – Then fall, Caesar!

Dies

Shoyo’s version,2 if it is translated back into English, would read like this: (Cinna) ‘But Caesar.’ (Caesar) ‘Oh, leave me. I say it cannot be done. Will you still try to move Olympus? Oh, you idiot.’ (Decius) ‘Oh great Caesar.’ (Caesar) ‘Oh no. I say it cannot be done. Oh, Decius, will you want to kneel in vain and beg in vain? You fool.’ (Decius) ‘Then even if we’ (Cinna) ‘– beg you so’ (Caesar) ‘Oh shut up.’ ‘If it comes to this’, they exchange glances, and as they planned in advance, Casca cries loudly from behind Caesar, ‘But great Caesar.’ (Caesar) ‘Oh, don’t be tedious’, and he turns back. Casca, trying to give him a deadly blow, grasps a dagger with the point downward and attacks him. Caesar dodges but he is wounded in the shoulder, and red blood begins to fall. ‘How dare you?’ cries the astonished Caesar and twists Casca’s arm. The pain makes him cry, ‘Help me everybody.’ ‘Ready’, they say, and everyone takes out a dagger which was hidden from sight, and attacks Caesar from all directions, ﬂashing the daggers like wind-blown leaves in the moonlight or lightning in the dark. The desperate Caesar avoids them and kicks and stamps over the attackers as if he were a wounded

5

Shakespeare in Japan

lion. ‘This is horrible’, says everyone in the Capitol and it is thrown into a great confusion like a great mountain assaulted by an enormous wave. Marcus Brutus who has been watching all this now runs towards Caesar and thrusts his dagger deep into his side. ‘Oh Brutus, you too’, says Caesar and after he uttered these last words he covered his face with a mantle, and with more than twenty wounds over his body fell under the statue of Pompey, conspicuous among many statues, and drew his last breath.

It is impossible to reproduce the music and elaborate wordplay of Shoyo’s translation, but the crucial difference will be clear enough. Shoyo’s version contains far more detailed stage directions. This is true of his translation as a whole since he observes the basic principle of a Bunraku script, which is either recited or chanted by a narrator, with a musical accompaniment. In this respect a script for Bunraku, being narrative literature, is closer to a novel than a play. So it is hardly surprising that each scene in Shoyo’s version begins and ends with a descriptive passage which is not a translation of Shakespeare but Shoyo’s own addition. This has one extremely interesting consequence. Shakespeare’s dramatic method is perspectival: instead of revealing his own point of view in the manner of modern dramatists such as Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neill or Brecht, he shows how differently his characters see and feel their own situations or understand values like honour or revenge. This produces and in a sense organizes or orchestrates mixed responses in the audience: so, when we watch or read Julius Caesar we are never quite certain whether or not Caesar is to be regarded as a tyrant and whether or not the conspirators act for freedom. In sharp contrast, a Bunraku script does in a sense keep telling the audience what to think and feel. However, although the Shakespearean ambivalence is less prevalent in Shoyo’s version, Shoyo follows the original so faithfully that the narrator’s attitude seems to shift subtly from scene to scene. To some extent this is true of many Bunraku scripts in which the narrator does not necessarily maintain a consistent attitude. Sometimes the narrator refrains from making any conclusive judgement, and sometimes he may show sympathy towards both of the opposing parties. Similarly, in Shoyo’s version the ambivalence is usually located more in the narration itself than in the dramatic exchanges between various characters. For instance, the concluding passage of the translation, which is totally Shoyo’s addition, both 6

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

welcomes the establishment of the Roman Empire and laments the failure of the sword of freedom. The ambivalence which is only implied or hinted at in the original version is now clearly stated in the translation. Yet no narrator in a Bunraku script goes this far. The conclusion is that Shoyo was both following and working against the Bunraku narrative tradition. Although Shoyo’s ampliﬁed stage directions in the assassination scene include a number of lengthy, almost Homeric similes, they are chieﬂy concerned with the physical movements of Caesar, the conspirators and the people in the Capitol. But Shoyo’s translation often contains both descriptions of what is not necessarily visible, like the characters’ inner feelings, and rather coercive comments on the dramatic signiﬁcance of a particular situation. For instance, in Act V, scene v Brutus realizes that there is really no hope of survival. When Clitus says to him, ‘Fly, my lord, ﬂy!’, Brutus answers, ‘Hence! I will follow.’ After this Shoyo adds, ‘Thus he says what he does not mean, but since they have no way to know the truth, they ﬂash their swords and ﬂy eastward.’3 An even more intriguing addition appears in Act III, scene ii of the translation. After he speaks to the plebeians, Brutus tells them to stay and listen to Antony’s speech and leaves the Capitol. Then Shoyo adds, ‘These words he is to regret later, but being no god he does not know this.’4 Similarly, in Shoyo’s version of Shakespeare’s second scene, the soothsayer’s warning to Caesar is followed by this sentence: ‘Its meaning he will later understand, but without paying any attention to this valuable warning Caesar exits together with his followers.’5 Thus the basic premises of a Bunraku script allowed Shoyo to depart from Shakespeare in many interesting ways. He was able to incorporate very elaborate stage directions. He was also able to describe the characters’ thought more freely and extensively. This was a very real advantage in Japanese terms because Shoyo was able to include in his narrative what Shakespeare had to express by means of soliloquies. Although soliloquies occur in traditional Japanese drama, they are usually functional, introducing a character or explaining a situation. They are not inward in the manner of the soliloquizing Hamlet, or indeed Brutus, and Japanese actors, as well as audiences, were ill at ease with this unfamiliar and artiﬁcial convention. However astonishing this may be to Western actors, several of the thirteen adaptations of Hamlet that 7

Shakespeare in Japan

preceded Shoyo’s own 1907 Bungei Kyokai production actually omitted Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. In this important sense, Shoyo’s Bunraku-style adaptation allowed him to consider, as any good translator must consider, the target culture as well as the target language. So, in Shoyo’s pioneering version of Julius Caesar, Antony’s lament after the death of Caesar in Act III, scene i could be interpreted either as the words Antony actually utters (as in Shakespeare) or simply as the narrator’s description of what Antony was thinking and feeling. Most intriguingly the narrative could include, as in Shoyo’s rendering of the soothsayer scene, comments on what has not yet happened, thus treating time and proleptic ironies in ways that were unthinkable or unavailable to Shakespeare. Whether or not we are prepared to consider them as potential advantages, some of these changes must have been almost instinctive for the young Shoyo and followed from his commitment to the narrative or novelistic element in traditional Japanese drama. From this point of view the Shakespearean procedure could only seem incomplete or rough, and in his preface to Shiizaru Kidan Shoyo observes that ‘The original version of the present work is rather like a rough prompt book and consists only of speeches. Hence it cannot be properly called a play and is quite different from full texts we are accustomed to. I have translated it using the style of such full texts for the sake of readers in this country.’ To the Japanese of the 1880s (and before) a script consisting only of speeches would not have qualiﬁed as a play. Here we confront a fundamental difference between Western drama and traditional Japanese drama. To understand the characteristic of traditional Japanese drama involves studying the nature of its language, which is unique and even peculiar by Western standards. In his essay ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, T.S. Eliot deﬁned three kinds of voices a poet uses in writing poetry: The ﬁrst is the voice of the poet talking to himself – or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.6

8

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

Of course drama is not always written in verse, but Eliot’s distinction between the three voices is perfectly valid so far as Western drama is concerned. But, as we have seen, the language of traditional Japanese theatre has a prominently narrative and choric quality, so that it tends to be the second rather than the third voice that an audience of traditional Japanese theatre hears. Take Noh. When a Noh play is performed, a group of actors take their seats on the left (or, from the audience’s point of view, right) side of the stage and function as the chorus. They not only provide scenic descriptions and describe movements and emotions of the characters in the play (thus giving the audience the equivalent of stage directions), they often chant the kind of passages which in Western drama would be spoken by the play’s characters. This chanting would have a musical accompaniment that becomes more intricately complex and intense in the drama’s climax. The greatest author, theoretician and reformer of Noh drama was undoubtedly Zeami (1363?–1443?) who, like Shakespeare, was both a poetic dramatist and an actor. Indeed, and no bardolater has claimed as much for Shakespeare, he was a great actor and a great dancer too. But Zeami’s achievements, which were as momentous in Japanese terms as those of Chaucer in fourteenth-century England, also depended on his being a great Noh composer: his own new and visionary dramas involved an extraordinarily complex interplay between poetic and musical measures. When the great age of Western poetic drama ﬁnished in England, France and Spain, it was succeeded by a great age of music drama, so that it hardly seems controversial to suggest that the greatest eighteenth-century Western dramatist was Mozart. Realistic prose drama was a far more recent and, in the view of Western champions of Noh drama such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenellosa and Arthur Waley, a more impoverished development. After Zeami’s visionary reforms, which had involved a rejection of sarugaku, the popular and more mimetic or realistic dramatic entertainments of his own time, Noh drama was both poetic drama and music drama. The Western distinction does not apply, and of course that is why some modern Western dramatists such as W.B. Yeats and Benjamin Britten found Noh drama so compelling. However, our immediate concern is with the interplay between narrative and dramatic elements in Noh drama. Toward the end of Zeami’s Atsumori there is a moving passage 9

Shakespeare in Japan

in which the ghost of a young warrior/courtier Atsumori, one of whose relatives used to be an emperor, tells Rensho, a priest who used to be the samurai warrior Kumagai no Jiro Naozane, how the two men fought against each other and how the former was killed by the latter. This passage is worth quoting at some length because it shows so well one typical way the Noh chorus functions: ATSUMORI Then, in time, His Majesty’s ship sailed, CHORUS with the whole clan behind him in their own. Anxious to be abroad, I sought the shore, but all the warships and the imperial barge stood already far, far out to sea. ATSUMORI I was stranded. Reining in my horse, I halted, at a loss for what to do. CHORUS There came then, galloping behind me, Kumagai no Jiro Naozane, shouting, You will not escape my arm! At this Atsumori wheeled his mount and swiftly, all undaunted, drew his sword. We ﬁrst exchanged a few rapid blows, then, still on horseback, closed to grapple, fell, and wrestled on, upon the wave-washed strand. But you had bested me, and I was slain. Now karma brings us face to face again. You are my foe! Atsumori shouts, lifting his sword to strike; but Kumagai with kindness has repaid old enmity, calling the Name to give the spirit peace. They at last shall be reborn together upon one lotus throne in paradise. Rensho, you were no enemy of mine. Pray for me, O pray for my release! Pray for me, O pray for my release!7

Immediately before this passage Royall Tyler, whose intelligent translation we are quoting, provides a stage direction to explain something that educated Japanese would take for granted: ‘Atsumori continues dancing and miming in consonance with the text’, while the text is chanted by the chorus and sometimes by Atsumori himself. Atsumori’s ghost re-enacts or, so to speak, relives his last battle, and in the original version the distinction between the past and the present is much less clear because of the nature of Japanese syntax. But the more interesting and signiﬁ10

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

cant linguistic fact is that the chorus uses not only I, We and You, as if representing and speaking for Atsumori, but Atsumori and They as well, maintaining a detached position and stance more like that of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Thus the chorus in Noh drama is both providing a choric commentary and functioning as a surrogate voice of a particular dramatic character. From a Western point of view this may be confusing enough, but something even more confusing happens in some Noh plays. In Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), for example, one of the characters, a court lady named Rokujo, haunts her lover’s wife and describes her own violent action: Say what you will, I must strike. I must strike now. And as she said this, she went over to the pillow and struck at it.8

Again the distinction between the past and the present is not very clear, and a more faithful translation of the second half of the quotation would be ‘And as she says this, she goes over to the pillow and strikes at it.’ In any case here Rokujo (or rather an actor playing Rokujo) delivers the kind of speech which normally would belong to the chorus. The nature of the language of Noh is hopelessly intricate. This is the kind of linguistic convention Shoyo and his contemporaries were accustomed to when they were in a theatre. The situation is not at all different in Bunraku and Kabuki, with which Shoyo was more familiar. Joruri, a text of Bunraku puppet theatre, is meant to be recited (or chanted) usually by one narrator to the accompaniment of shamisen, a three-stringed musical instrument. Sometimes more than one narrator takes part, and since the narrator or narrators are not on stage but sit to the audience’s right, with the musicians, the spectator will sometimes be looking to the front and sometimes to the right. When Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), by far the greatest author of Bunraku scripts, was active, each puppet was manipulated by one puppeteer. But during the 1730s it became more common for as many as three puppeteers to handle one puppet. Today all of the puppets, except those representing very minor characters, are manipulated by three puppeteers. The master puppeteer is responsible for the head and the right arm, the second puppeteer for the left arm, and the third, least experienced, puppeteer for the puppet’s legs. Unlike their Western 11

Shakespeare in Japan

counterparts, the puppeteers are almost always silent, and are usually fully visible. Sometimes all the puppeteers cover their bodies in black clothing, which is supposed to signify that they are invisible, although they are not. On some occasions the heads and faces of all three puppeteers are uncovered and fully visible. On some occasions it is only the head and face of the master puppeteer that is visible. The excited spectator will sometimes forget the puppeteers’ presence altogether. At other times the spectator will be concentrating on what the master puppeteer is doing or conveying through his eloquently (if unconsciously) involved facial expressions, and sometimes the spectator’s eye will swivel to the right, in order to concentrate not only on the narrative but on the narrator’s dramatic performance. This division of attention is crucial. In narrative terms, Bunraku would offer an ideal way to stage Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where our attention is sometimes concentrated on the teller, sometimes on the tale. In dramatic terms, one remarkably rich and seemingly modern consequence which might have fascinated both Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht is that the audience is sometimes lost in and sometimes bounced out of illusion. This is the genre Shoyo made use of when he translated or adapted Julius Caesar. His mastery of its idioms, linguistic and otherwise, is quite striking, and his version shows the ease of a literary work written in the style of a highly conventionalized art form. Two quotations from the works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon will show the background Shoyo was able to work with, or from. The ﬁrst quotation comes from The Love Suicides at Amijima, and is the passage which describes how Jihei, a married but desperately besotted merchant, tries to visit his courtesan-mistress Koharu. Notice how the descriptive passages are juxtaposed with the speeches of Jihei himself: NARRATOR: For long years there has lived in Temma, the seat of the mighty god, though not a god himself, Kamiji, a name often bruited by the gongs of worldly gossip, so deeply, hopelessly, is he tied to Koharu by the ropes of an ill-starred love. Now is the tenth moon, the month when no gods will unite them; they are thwarted in their love, unable to meet. They swore in the last letters they exchanged that if only they could meet, that day would be their last. Night after night Jihei, ready for death, trudges to the Quarter, distractedly, as though his soul had left a body consumed by the ﬁres of love.

12

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

At a roadside eating stand he hears people gossiping about Koharu. She’s at Kawasho with a samurai customer, someone says, and immediately Jihei decides, ‘It will be tonight!’ He peers through the latticework window and sees a guest in the inside room, his face obscured by a hood. Only the moving chin is visible, and Jihei cannot hear what is said. JIHEI: Poor Koharu! How thin her face is! She keeps it averted from the lamp. In her heart she’s thinking only of me. I’ll signal her that I’m here, and we’ll run off together. Then which will it be – Umeda or Kitano? Oh – I want to tell her I’m here. I want to call her. NARRATOR: He beckons with his heart, his spirit ﬂies to her, but his body, like a cicada’s cast-off shell, clings to the latticework. He weeps with impatience.9

It is not clear and it does not really matter whether or not Jihei’s words (‘Poor Koharu’, etc.) are actually uttered by him, because they are recited, just like the descriptive passages, by the narrator. In the actual performance the puppet would be enacting what the text describes in much the same way that Atsumori performs the last climactic dance in the Noh play. Shoyo’s Shiizaru Kidan is full of dramatically similar passages. The second quotation from Chikamatsu comes from The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. At one point in the play, Tokubei, the central character, is assaulted and humiliated, and after this incident he says to the bystanders who have watched it, ‘I feel humiliated and ashamed that you’ve seen me this way.’ We should never forget that this is part of the whole narrative. Tokubei concludes his speech by saying, ‘It would’ve been better if I had died while smashing and biting him!’, referring to the man who humiliated him, and the scene ends with the following passage: NARRATOR: He strikes the ground and gnashes his teeth, clenches his ﬁsts and moans, a sight to stir compassion. TOKUBEI: There’s no point in my talking this way. Before three days have passed I, Tokubei, will make amends by showing all Osaka the purity at the bottom of my heart. NARRATOR: The meaning of these words is later known. TOKUBEI: I’m sorry to have bothered you all. Please forgive me. NARRATOR: He speaks his apologies, picks up his battered hat and puts it on. His face, downcast in the sinking rays of the sun, is clouded by tears that engulf him. Dejectedly he leaves, a sight too pitiful to behold.10

13

Shakespeare in Japan

When the narrator (or rather the playwright) says, ‘The meaning of these words is later known’, he is imparting knowledge to which the audience could not otherwise have access in normal and realistic circumstances. It is fascinating to see how often Shoyo allows this technique of intrusion to his own narrator, who of course has no counterpart in Julius Caesar. In his preface Shoyo says, ‘I tried to make the meaning as clear as possible, and so I have translated some parts as joruri and others as serifu, depending on which form is easier to understand.’ Serifu means speech, and joruri in this case refers to descriptive passages rather than a whole script. Although the analogy would be misleading if pressed too far, this difference between serifu and joruri could be compared with the difference between prose and verse in Shakespearean drama. Of course we are not suggesting any direct equivalence between serifu and verse or joruri and prose, which would be absurd. Rather, the analogy has to do with the ways in which a Japanese shift from serifu to joruri or a Shakespearean shift from verse to prose belong to the dramatic representation, not to the dramatic character. When King Lear speaks of unaccommodated man in prose, or when Othello is so shamingly conﬁned to prose throughout the eavesdropping scene, these characters are not choosing to speak prose. Shakespeare’s characters can never do that, because they never know that they are or were speaking verse. Some Shakespearean characters are conﬁned to verse, like Richard II, and others to prose, like Thersites. This too belongs to the representation. Some very powerful or dangerous characters, like Hamlet or Iago or Prince Hal, seem able to move between verse and prose with great virtuosity, but that virtuosity is not a cause but an effect or representational measure of their power. The Japanese shifts between serifu and joruri (which tends to interrupt serifu) may seem strange and unnatural from a Western point of view, but from a Japanese point of view representational conventions that have been long accepted in the West, like the soliloquy, were both unfamiliar and unnatural. Of course Shoyo’s version could be used as a script for Kabuki as well, just as Chikamatsu’s Bunraku scripts provided the basis for numerous Kabuki classics. In many Kabuki plays, especially those adapted from Bunraku, a small dais is placed on the left side (that is, the right side from the viewpoint of the audience) of the 14

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

forestage on which a narrator (sometimes more than one narrator) and a shamisen player take their seats. The narrator comments on the action of the play, describes the emotion and inner feeling of the characters, and sometimes, like the Noh chorus in Atsumori, speaks for the character. In Kabuki both this device and the narrator himself are called chobo, and whether or not chobo should be abolished became one of the central topics of discussion among critics of Shoyo’s time. Thus Kabuki, like Noh and Bunraku, is essentially a narrative and choric type of theatre. The only major genre of traditional Japanese theatre that does not depend on the use of a narrator is Kyogen, a short farce. But even Kyogen is not devoid of narrative elements. It is true that a Kyogen play consists only of dialogue and soliloquies, but the latter are usually spoken directly to the audience. Many characters after their ﬁrst entrance identify themselves and tell the audience who they are and what they intend to do. This is usually true of characters in Noh plays as well. In short, Shakespearean drama, in which drama is drama in the Western sense of the word, was transplanted to a climate where drama was essentially narrative. It is not surprising then that the ﬁrst productions of Shakespeare in Japan were primarily adaptations of Shakespeare as Kabuki plays. Doubtless, another reason was that Kabuki actors were at that time the only performers with professionally adequate competence, but the fact that narrative drama was so congenial to the Japanese audience certainly mattered. On the other hand there were a number of reformers who were so eager to accept Western drama that they wanted to abolish some of the essential conventions of traditional Japanese theatre. In 1886 a group of Japanese intellectuals and politicians organized the Engeki Kairyo Kai (Society for the Reformation of Theatre). In the same year two of its leading members, Toyama Masakazu (1848 –1900), who had studied in Great Britain and later became the president of the University of Tokyo and the Minister of Education, and Suematsu Kencho (1855–1920), who had also studied in Great Britain and eventually became a very inﬂuential politician, published their opinions11 about the reformation of Japanese theatre, especially Kabuki which was then the most popular dramatic form. While most of their opinions now sound rather innocent and naïve to us, it is of course 15

Shakespeare in Japan

wrong to assume that everything they said was pointless. For instance, they maintained that a theatre should be cleaner and more hygienic, which certainly made sense. But to them cleanliness of theatre had to do not only with physical conditions of buildings. They were troubled by the obscenity and cruelty of Kabuki and claimed that European theatre, which is far more respectable, simply does not portray prostitutes the way Kabuki does. As we all know, this is not really true, and sometimes Toyama and Suematsu sound amusingly like Jeremy Collier in Restoration England or the antitheatrical Puritans in Elizabethan England. The fundamental problem about their argument, however, is their naïve idealization of Western civilization, more precisely, nineteenth-century Western civilization, and their lack of any proper historical perspective. For Suematsu and Toyama, a theatre without realistic scenery and artiﬁcial lighting seems to have been unthinkable. Suematsu lovingly recalls the moonlight in the last scene of a production of The Merchant of Venice which he saw in Europe and tries to describe how impressive this was and how superior its representation of moonlight was to that in an average Kabuki production. It is not clear whether he realized that both realistic scenery and artiﬁcial lighting were relatively new and did not exist in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Both critics insisted that female roles could only be properly played by women, rejecting the idea of female impersonation by male actors or onnagata. In this case they were rejecting one of the essential conventions of traditional Japanese theatre that had its counterpart in Shakespearean drama. Toyama even maintained that Noh should be reformed too: ‘We should stop the use of masks and the exclusive dependence on male performers, which is the way Noh is produced now. We should use both male and female performers whose faces are not covered. In short, Noh should be something like a Western opera.’ Again it is not clear how much these exceptionally well-educated gentlemen knew about Elizabethan acting. Yet it would be dangerous to treat their opinions too patronizingly. After all, the Western Shakespearean productions they were familiar with belonged to the late nineteenth century, and were not faithful to the original texts. Shakespeare had been improved for more than two centuries, and it seems likely that Toyama at 16

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

any rate was not only aware of this but approved of it. He says that there are expressions which were proper in Shakespeare’s time but are not proper any more, and that Shakespearean acting is supposed to have changed considerably over the years, that of modern ages being more natural, more reﬁned and more human. This unconditional belief in human progress was typical of the period, and shaped or distorted the attitude of many or most Japanese intellectuals to Western culture. When their argument about theatre turns to the more technical aspects of the productions, we are more annoyed than amused. Toyama wants to get rid of kurogo (which he calls ‘kuronbo’, a rather derogatory word meaning ‘a black man’), a stagehand wearing black clothing, because, according to him, no reﬁned theatre should use such a hideous device. Suematsu, on the other hand, is suspicious about the use of a trapdoor. This, he allows, did exist in Europe as well, but he says they were used mainly in farces: legitimate theatre should not depend on such a petty device to pamper the audience. This argument might have seemed plausibly knowing to Japanese who had never set foot outside Japan but, although Hamlet is usually regarded as legitimate theatre not farce, Toyama never considers the use of the trapdoor and cellarage in the Globe Theatre. But perhaps in the production of Hamlet Toyama attended no such stage machinery was used, and perhaps this obvious historical objection to Toyama’s argument about the trapdoor should be regarded as minor or as yet another consequence of the historical accident that what the few Japanese who were able to see contemporary English productions of Shakespeare took to be authentic were, in the late nineteenth century, about as inauthentic as any Shakespearean productions could be. However, what is certainly not a minor point about these wannabe Western, reformist attacks on Japanese theatrical conventions has to do with mawari-butai, the revolving stage, and hanamichi, the long elevated passageway that runs from the main stage to the rear of the auditorium and provides an acting space on which some of Kabuki’s most impressive scenes are played. In virtually any production of a Kabuki play these two structures are indispensable. Both Toyama and Suematsu were more cautious in discussing these devices, and Toyama’s analysis is worth quoting at some length: 17

Shakespeare in Japan

Perhaps two of the devices which are indigenous to our theatre and which we cannot ﬁnd in a Western theatre are hanamichi and mawaributai. There may be people who understand them to be indigenous to a theatre in a barbarous country, because Western theatres are devoid of them, and eagerly want to abolish them, but in truth they are not indigenous to a barbarous theatre. When our country was even more barbarous, our theatre had neither hanamichi nor mawari-butai. Then our society made a great progress, and it was only after this that these devices came into use.12

Toyama then emphasizes the convenience of mawari-butai and advocates its preservation no matter how much theatre is going to be reformed. As for hanamichi, his opinion is as follows: Some plays may require a larger stage, but the space of a stage is ﬁxed and we cannot change it for the occasion. On such an occasion using hanamichi as a supplementary space is a very clever idea indeed.13

For Toyama the only signiﬁcance of hanamichi was that it provided an extra space. The fact that it crosses the auditorium and divides it into two sections did not catch his attention. In other words, his examination of an acting space does not involve the relationship between a performance and the audience. His comments would have been more fruitful if he had realized that both Kabuki and Elizabethan drama were performed on an open stage. Suematsu is more outspoken in his criticism of the indigenous conventions. He does not oppose the preservation of mawaributai because it does not require any extra space. Of course this is not strictly true because it does require complicated machinery under the stage which unfortunately is not visible to the audience. But Suematsu regards hanamichi as simply superﬂuous. An actor, he says, can just as well make his entrance from one of the wings as from the rear of the auditorium. By far the most important technical point has to do with the use of chobo, the narrator or narration in a production of Kabuki. Again Toyama is less radical than Suematsu. According to him, narration is necessary in puppet theatre but in human theatre it is not only unnecessary but an obstacle. The aural information, he says, is redundant when the visual information (namely actors’ movement) is amply supplied. He does not seem to understand the intricate and fascinating relationship between the aural and the visual. The dramatically intriguing result is a kind of dialogue 18

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

or interplay between the actors’ speeches and the narration that was spoken or sometimes chanted with musical accompaniment. Suematsu’s argument is more precise: It is true to the spirit of drama that acting should come from a real feeling of an actor and an actor himself should play every single action of the character he portrays. As it is, there tend to be fewer words in Japanese drama than in Western drama, and if actors do not utter them all but depend on chobo and mime the meaning of the words or supplement them with gestures, then they are so to speak cheating. These mimicries and gestures often look almost like a dance, and so cannot express a true feeling. The audience would be more moved if actors utter all the words and play the role to the full. Therefore the less chobo there is, the better.14

Suematsu maintains that Japanese drama, like Western drama, should rid itself of superﬂuous elements (by which he means narration) and consist only of speeches. He is very critical of what he feels is an artiﬁcial convention of Kabuki, according to which an actor expresses the feeling of the character he plays with dancelike gestures while a narrator chants the relevant passages. Suematsu says that people do not dance when they are really sad, without considering the corresponding convention in many Noh plays, where a character’s deepest feeling is expressed with a dance. Of course we are not commending these reformist arguments, which now seem very naïve. But what now seem to be comparably naïve assumptions and comparisons between contemporary ‘progress’ and earlier barbarism can be found in Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy or in Giorgio Vasari’s account of Italian painting. In all these cases, English, Italian and Japanese, a too impatiently conﬁdent and disapproving response is likely to be misplaced, and even disabling. The emergence of such Japanese debates is historically signiﬁcant, not least because it helps us to understand how many obstacles Shoyo encountered. Although the reformers’ opinions were enthusiastically received by some Japanese, others were well aware of their ignorance and lack of sophistication. Takada Sanae (1860 –1938), who was a close friend of Shoyo’s and who later became the Minister of Education as well as the president of Waseda University (where Shoyo taught for many years), refuted the reformers and 19

Shakespeare in Japan

rightly pointed out the dramatic importance of hanamichi. He also observed, with characteristic shrewdness, that it is absurd to try to free drama from obscenity while the society itself is full of it. But the most convincing refutation came, not surprisingly, from Shoyo himself. Suematsu wanted the actors themselves to express the inner feelings of the characters they play. But, as Shoyo observed, to put this into practice without any recourse to the use of a narrator would lead to an extensive use of soliloquies and asides. As dramatic devices these are just as unnatural as chobo, and in some cases using a narrator is not a bad idea at all. Shoyo goes on to say, ‘I suppose the main reason why the reformers are against the use of narration is that it reduces actors to puppets and deprives them of a chance fully to show their skill.’ And then Shoyo says something absolutely illuminating: The foremost question is: which should come ﬁrst, drama or actors? I think actors should serve drama as a literary art, not vice versa.

Unfortunately it is not clear how far Shoyo was aware of the full implications of his own remark, but it was almost revolutionary in the context of the late nineteenth-century Japanese theatre where the supremacy of actors had long been taken for granted. In insisting that the drama should come ﬁrst Shoyo was perhaps more ahead of his time than the so-called reformers, whose superﬁcial understanding of Western civilization and naïve attempt to imitate and reproduce it Shoyo categorically rejected. Once again, Shoyo managed to be conservative and radical at the same time. This ambivalence continues to make Shoyo’s achievement both interesting and puzzling. Even in his defence of chobo he admitted there was room for improvement, and tried to explore the possibility of a new kind of narrative device. By this he meant chobo without musical accompaniment, that is, a simple recitation instead of chanting. In the end he accepted some of the proposals made by the reformers, having women’s parts played by actresses, for instance. In 1906 Shoyo established his Literary Society or Bungei Kyokai, which in many ways represented his own attempt, as a man of the theatre, to reform Japanese theatre. The aim of the Society was artistic as well as educational and instructive, and the scope of its activity, initially at least, covered not simply art but 20

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

also religion and philosophy. But the centre of its activity was of course drama. Shoyo and his colleagues emphasized the social signiﬁcance of drama, and tried to elevate the status of theatre and theatre artists. They themselves recognized that traditional Japanese theatre had little relevance to the contemporary Japanese society. As Shoyo told his students in 1911: ‘Art should reﬂect the essence of the ideals of its age, but theatre does not.’15 The Literary Society had one section which was a kind of conservatoire dedicated to the academic study of drama, and amateurs were trained there so that they could properly produce new drama. In short, Shoyo’s Literary Society was also one of the earliest Shingeki companies, dedicated to pioneering new drama, which is what Shingeki means. But what did ‘new’ mean? The old problem resurfaced: because Ibsen and Shakespeare were considered to be the artists new Japanese theatre should be modelled upon, their plays became the core of the curriculum in Shoyo’s conservatoire. But although these dramatists were new to Japan, Shakespeare was certainly not new in the way that Ibsen was new. According to Shoyo, Shakespeare represented Western romantic drama, and Ibsen represented modern realistic drama. Such a view might just be defended, and its conception of Shakespeare’s signiﬁcance had precedents in nineteenth-century European criticism. Yet Shoyo’s account of Shakespeare’s and Ibsen’s allegedly complementary, instructive value still blurs crucial historical differences. In bluntly general terms, the continuing tragedy of the pioneers of Shingeki was that they were all the more inclined to ignore historical perspectives because they studied these two great dramatists simultaneously. Indeed, it would have been a miracle if such an attempt had not led to serious confusion. The Society’s ﬁrst production in 1906 was a kind of test run – an all-male staging of Shoyo’s translation of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice. The part of Portia was played by one of Shoyo’s most active students and disciples, Doi Shunsho, who would play Hamlet in Shoyo’s two productions of that play, and in several other versions of Hamlet which he himself sometimes adapted or directed. Shoyo’s ﬁrst Hamlet was staged in November 1907, as the Society’s second production, but seems to have been cobbled together too hastily. The translation was initially prepared by Sugitani Daisui, a young playwright who was another 21

Shakespeare in Japan

student of Shoyo’s, although Shoyo had to ﬁnish it, and Shoyo only took part in rehearsals at a late stage. Although Gertrude was played by a male actor, Ophelia was played by an actress, very badly, it seems. In April 1909 the Society was reorganized and began to concentrate in a more purposeful and effective way on the production of new drama and the reform of Japanese theatre. Five months later, another rival company, Jiyu Gekijo or the Free Theatre Company (named after André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre) was founded by the playwright and director Osanai Kaoru and the Kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II, and staged the Japanese premiere of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. Before its dissolution in 1913, the Literary Society had produced Shoyo’s original work as well as works by such modern playwrights as G.B. Shaw, Hermann Sudermann, Wilhelm Meyer-Forster and, of course, Ibsen (A Doll’s House) and Shakespeare. Perhaps the most important difference between Jiyu Gekijo and Bungei Kyokai was that the pioneering rival company used progressively minded Kabuki actors, who were of course professional, whereas Shoyo stuck to his plan of training his own company of amateurs, whose dedication usually failed to compensate for their theatrical inexperience. The reformed Bungei Kyokai’s ﬁrst production, in March 1910, was another trial performance of a Shakespearean fragment, Act III of Hamlet, in Shoyo’s new (1908) translation, which was privately staged in its Shienjo, or Studio. Their ﬁnal Shakespeare production, in June 1913, was of Julius Caesar, again in Shoyo’s new translation, but directed by Matsui Shoyo, who was the ﬁrst Japanese director to have studied Shakespeare directing abroad. (Three months earlier, Ichikawa Sadanji’s company had attempted a similar ﬁrst in terms of acting styles: in their staging of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice Sadanji undertook to play Shylock in the manner of Sir Henry Irving.) (A Kabuki actor is seldom referred to with his surname mainly because so many share the same surname.) However, it is unquestionable that Bungei Kyokai’s and Shoyo’s greatest theatrical triumph was their 1911 production of Hamlet in the recently completed Teikoku Gekijo (Imperial Theatre), which was modelled on the Comédie Française and could seat as many as 1700 people. And yet, although this production was in so many ways a remarkable success, its reception provided another measure of the obstacles that confronted Shoyo both as a translator and as a man of the theatre. 22

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

Certainly, the production was a commercial success, and the talk of Tokyo. The large theatre was almost full, on each night of its seven-day run. Many members of the audience would have known, from the extensive newspaper coverage, that this was the ﬁrst complete translation and staging of Shakespeare’s most famous play. The newspapers remarked on the seriousness of the audience as well as the production itself: geishas, who were usually important members of the audience at a regular performance of Kabuki, rather like courtesans in theatres of Restoration England, were conspicuously absent. The production even inspired the novelist Shiga Naoya to write his very important story, Claudius’s Diary (Kurodiasu no Nikki), which we discuss in Chapter 4. However, it also prompted another novelist, Natsume Soseki, to attack Shoyo with unexpected and uncharacteristic violence. Soseki is now usually regarded as the most distinguished Japanese novelist of the time. He had lived in England for two painfully traumatic years, and since his own knowledge of English literature and drama was at least equal to Shoyo’s, his basic charge was therefore all the more discouraging. He was one of the invited guests and refrained from openly criticizing the production while it was still on, but he later published a short article, ‘Dr Tsubouchi and Hamlet’, in a daily newspaper. Soseki maintained that Shakespeare was fundamentally untranslatable into Japanese and that Shoyo should have decided in advance whether the translation was destined for the page or for the stage, since what was suited to the one would be unsuited to the other: ‘Dr Tsubouchi should have chosen to become a faithful translator of Shakespeare without thinking of staging a performance, or to become an unfaithful adaptor in order to put Shakespeare on the stage’.16 Some parts of Soseki’s attack on Shoyo have a universal aspect, with parallels that recur in different periods and cultures because they point to a major problem that confronts anybody who is trying to translate a classic from a different, markedly alien, culture. Should a translator struggle to preserve and keep faith with linguistic and cultural differences in the original work, or should the translator be trying, in Ezra Pound’s famous phrase, to ‘make it new’ by adapting the original work to the target culture as well as the target language? Consider one momentous eighteenth-century English response to this question. Dr Johnson’s 23

Shakespeare in Japan

greatest poem, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, is an imitation rather than a would-be literal translation of Juvenal’s tenth and greatest satire. Towards the end of Juvenal’s devastating poem there is a positively profound shift of emphasis, when the poem suddenly admits a religious but all too speciﬁcally Roman view of the human situation. In the Loeb edition of Juvenal, which presents the Latin original on the left-hand page and a literal translation on the right, and of course sets out to provide an instructive crib rather than an enabling commentary or creative reworking, the right-hand page discusses ‘presaging sausages’. Of course this literal translation of Juvenal’s words would mean little or nothing to an eighteenth- (or twenty-ﬁrst-) century reader who knows little or nothing of Roman religion. Dr Johnson was far too passionately and creatively involved with Juvenal on the one hand, and, on the other hand, far too conﬁdently and positively involved with his own culture, to want to prattle about presaging sausages in some literal or culturally arcane fashion. The equivalent, deeply moving but Christian prayer in Johnson’s poem translates the religious and human signiﬁcance of Juvenal’s sausages, not the Latin words. Johnson was imitating and adapting, rather than attempting to provide a literal translation of Juvenal’s poem. By the time Johnson wrote his own poem, the distinction between (creative) Imitation and (so-called literal) Translation was very well understood. It had empowered Alexander Pope’s ‘Imitations of Horace’ which, in something very like Ezra Pound’s sense, set out to make it new. By the time Pope and Johnson wrote their great imitations, any complaint that they were not literal translations would have seemed laughably naïve. Shoyo, with his profound understanding of Shakespeare’s language and his no less profound love of Japanese theatrical traditions, was keenly aware of the respective gains and losses involved in trying to translate Shakespeare into his own target culture as well as his target language. Soseki’s own grasp of English (and Chinese) literature was arguably no less profound or inward, but Soseki was not concerned with drama. This relative indifference to drama underlies his argument that any translation that sets out to meet or keep faith with the conditions of a faithful literary translation cannot be suitable for the stage, and vice versa. Soseki’s argument might seem prescient, since it obviously anticipates the current Japanese conviction that early translators 24

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

like Shoyo or more recent translators like Fukuda Tsuneari and Kinoshita Junji produced translations of Shakespeare that are by today’s standard unactable. Unfortunately, for the reasons we have tried to describe and for other linguistic and cultural reasons that we have yet to consider, Shoyo was and of course still is terribly vulnerable to any such attack. Many reviews of the 1911 Hamlet complained that Shoyo’s translation was too difﬁcult to follow, and that one would need to read the translation before attending the performance. Shoyo’s response to this charge, which he elaborated with remarkable energy in a series of articles and interviews, was to argue that reading the play ﬁrst was no bad thing if the Japanese wanted to understand why Shakespeare was one of the world’s supreme artists, instead of expecting an easy or undemanding night out. Of course this exposed him to further attacks, notably from writers on the left who charged him with elitism. So-called good theatre – as represented by great directors like Ninagawa Yukio – frequently betrays great drama like Judas, with a kiss. Shoyo’s mistake, or achievement, was that he kept aiming so high. If we are to be fair to Shoyo, we should at least admit that his understanding of Shakespeare was amazingly accurate, while some of his critical insights are still arresting. For example, he thought that Japanese audiences would ﬁnd Shakespeare congenial because their society was so much closer than contemporary England to the feudalism of Shakespeare’s England. A Western reader who scoffs at this suggestion might consider the following test case. When Hamlet tells Ophelia, ‘I loved you not’, and she replies, ‘I was the more deceived’, how many Western readers or spectators would now notice the lapse that (if they do notice it) so movingly measures Ophelia’s distress? On this exceptional occasion she is so upset that she forgets to add, ‘my lord’. Any Japanese would notice an equivalent lapse in Japanese, just as an Elizabethan would have been more likely to feel the unnerving force of the shift from ‘you’ to ‘thee’ in Hamlet’s response: ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ Shoyo also felt that Japanese Shakespeare could contribute something to the understanding of Shakespeare in the world, because the standard of the current Shakespearean productions in the West was not very high. The fact that Shoyo never went abroad, unlike Toyama or Suematsu, makes his suspicious sense of what late nineteenth-century 25

Shakespeare in Japan

Western productions were doing to or with Shakespeare all the more impressive. Another measure of Shoyo’s formidable character was that his assessment of his own achievements in translating Shakespeare was so dispassionately self-critical. Late in his career he observed that his Shakespeare translations went through ﬁve phases. His remarkable translation or adaptation of Julius Caesar represented the ﬁrst phase but was, in his own later, sternly retrospective view, an extremely loose and free translation; he added, as if to explain rather than excuse its shortcomings, that Japanese translation of foreign literature in general was then still in its ﬁrst phase. He was no less disparaging about what he described as his second phase, from 1895 to 1896, when he published a series of lectures in Waseda Bungaku, a literary journal published by Waseda University, primarily for educational purposes. Some of his Shakespearean translations appeared there but, in his own punishingly self-critical estimation, his chief concern had been to provide annotations for readers who wanted to read the works in the original English. His translations in this second stage were not too loose but too tight, and in his own view void of literary merit. His account of the third phase then jumps a decade to 1908 and 1909, when he was translating Shakespeare with members of his Literary Society in mind, and when Japanese theatre was still dominated by Kabuki. As he says, his sense of connection with the traditional theatre was then very strong, so that his translations tended to make use, consciously or unconsciously, of the delivery and other verbal characteristics of the old forms. In the fourth phase he was gradually shifting towards a more extensive adoption of colloquial Japanese, but still depended on oldfashioned poetic diction. At this time, he recalls, he hoped that this mixture would successfully reproduce the mixture of elegance and vulgarity in Shakespeare, but in the end he was not happy about the result. So, in the ﬁfth and ﬁnal phase he had ﬁnally settled on the use of contemporary colloquial Japanese. But, and this cannot be emphasized too much, he was not still nor at all content to use the kind of colloquial language spoken by the Japanese people of the day. On the one hand he felt that the vocabulary of contemporary Japanese was too meagre to cope with Shakespeare’s vast vocabulary. On the other hand he remained keenly aware of the afﬁnities between Shakespeare and 26

Shakespeare and Traditional Japanese Theatre

Kabuki and Joruri, which could not be reproduced in modern, colloquial Japanese. So, even in this ﬁnal period, Shoyo sometimes anticipated Kinoshita Junji (see Chapter 3) by exploring the possibility of using somewhat archaic Japanese, which he thought might work effectively, since Shakespeare so often departed from the colloquial English of his time. In spite of all this, the career of this gifted translator, who knew and loved traditional Japanese theatre so much, can best be summarized as a process of moving away from the tradition he belonged to. In doing so, he encountered virtually every problem a Japanese translator of Shakespeare has to contend with. More than anything else he felt that translating Shakespeare into Japanese is an impossible task. The same awareness was to be inherited by many of his successors, most notably Fukuda Tsuneari and Kinoshita Junji. Following Goethe, nineteenthcentury German critics would often regard Shakespeare in a conﬁdently possessive way as unser Shakespeare, or our Shakespeare. Later, when Shakespeare had also been assimilated into the Russian literary tradition, writers like Turgenev would sound similarly possessive. However, although the Japanese are so obviously fascinated by Shakespeare, they never show that kind of conﬁdence. Their Shakespeare is always foreign.

Notes 1. Originally published by Toyokan-shoten, Tokyo, it was reprinted by Oozora-sha, Tokyo, in 1999. This is the edition we used. 2. Shiizaru Kidan, pp. 134–36. 3. Ibid., p. 297. 4. Ibid., p. 170. 5. Ibid., p. 40. 6. T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 89. 7. Japanese Nô Dramas, edited and translated by Royall Tyler (London: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 47–48. 8. Arthur Waley, The Nô Plays of Japan (New York: Grove Press, no date), p. 185. 9. Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, translated by Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 178 –79. 10. Ibid., p. 47. 11. Toyama, Personal Opinions about the Reformation of Theatre (Engeki Kairyoron Shiko) and Suematsu, Opinions about the Reformation of Theatre (Engeki Kairyo Iken). They were reprinted in Vol. 12 of A Collection of Meiji Culture (Meiji Bunnka Zenshu) (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoron-sha, 1928). This is the edition we used.

27

Shakespeare in Japan A Collection of Meiji Culture, p. 206. Ibid. Ibid., p. 229. Quoted by Brian Powell in his essay, ‘One Man’s Hamlet in 1911 Japan: The Bungei Kyokai Production in the Imperial Theatre’, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, edited by Takashi Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16. Quoted in Takeshi Murakami, ‘Shakespeare and Hamlet in Japan, A Chronological Overview’, Hamlet and Japan, edited by Yoshiko Uéno (New York: AMS Press, 1995), p. 258.

12. 13. 14. 15.

28

2 Shakespeare in Japanese (I): Fukuda Tsuneari

1955 was a very signiﬁcant year in the history of Shakespearean productions in Japan. In this year the Bungaku-za, one of the leading Shingeki troupes, mounted Hamlet, which was the ﬁrst Japanese production of the play after the end of the Second World War. The production used a new translation by an active playwright and critic in his early forties, Fukuda Tsuneari (1912– 94), who directed the production himself. It was his ﬁrst work as a translator and director of Shakespeare. To understand the historical signiﬁcance of this production requires some knowledge of Shingeki and its peculiarities. Shingeki (literally, ‘new theatre’ or ‘new drama’) began as an attempt to produce a Japanese equivalent of contemporary Western theatre. As we have seen, one of the pioneers of the Shingeki movement was Tsubouchi Shoyo. Shoyo himself retained a tie with traditional Japanese theatre but many Shingeki artists became more and more antagonistic to the Japanese traditions. Their efforts to imitate Western theatre and produce what they thought looked authentically Western often tended to be rather simplistic and superﬁcial. To mention a very obvious example, it was quite customary for Shingeki actors to wear false noses and blue eyeshadow when they appeared in productions of Western plays, so that they looked more Caucasian. This was ridiculous because, even if they did look Caucasian (which was highly unlikely), they spoke Japanese throughout the production, as the play in question was not the original version but a Japanese translation. This ludicrous custom survived into the 1960s. 29

Shakespeare in Japan

Perhaps there is nothing unusual about this preoccupation with the visual aspects of an alien culture, since such aspects often seem to be the easiest to appreciate and imitate. Indeed, it is sobering to realize that this can work in both directions. Even today it is not at all uncommon for non-Japanese audiences to be concerned only with visual elements when they discuss the ‘style’ of traditional Japanese theatre. Similarly, Shingeki was not entirely free from a certain degree of superﬁciality and naïvety. Another characteristic of Shingeki was its political inclination. In the 1920s and 1930s socialism was extremely popular among intellectuals in industrialized countries, and Japan was no exception. Since Shingeki catered almost exclusively for intellectuals, it was only natural that it became more and more socialistorientated. While it would be absurd to assume that every single Shingeki artist was a socialist, many of them were, and the more active or militant were frequently imprisoned by the militaristic government before and during the war. This, together with the grim overall situation in wartime Japan, made it virtually impossible for Shingeki troupes to continue their work. When the war was over Shingeki regained its energy. At that time the movement was led by three major troupes: Mingei (People’s Company), Haiyu-za (Actor’s Company), and Bungakuza (Literary Company). Mingei was fundamentally left wing. Although Haiyu-za was less politically orientated, many members of this troupe were socialists and communists. Bungaku-za was the least political of the three. It was established in 1937 and became one of the very few Shingeki companies which managed to mount new productions during the hard times. However, although Bungaku-za was less political than the other two troupes, it shared their rather naïvely respectful understanding of modern realism. For many Shingeki artists, who were discovering Shakespeare alongside Chekhov and Gorky and were not equipped to consider crucial historical differences, consistency of characterization and an ‘inside-out’ conception of motivation were fundamental. They believed that the relation between each and every action of a particular dramatic character and an underlying psychological motivation should and can be logically explained. Such Stanislavskian or Meyerholdian beliefs and ideas, that worked well in a Moscow Arts Theatre production of Chekhov, were not so helpful in Shakespeare’s case. 30

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

It was in such a climate that Fukuda presented his 1955 production of Hamlet. The most striking point about this production was that it was almost totally free from the preoccupation with modern realism – which was then so frequently combined with socialist commitments. Unlike the ponderous productions to which Japanese audiences had become accustomed, this was lively and fast-moving. Prince Hamlet was played by Akutagawa Hiroshi, who was the son of the noted novelist Akutagawa Ryunosuke and by far the most intellectually accomplished Shingeki actor of his generation. This prince was a man actively coping with his own situation rather than the melancholic and indecisive sceptic the audience no doubt expected to see. When Yamamoto Shuji, a professor of English at Kyoto University who was also a distinguished drama critic, reviewed the production, he praised Akutagawa’s performance very highly while entering one signiﬁcant reservation: ‘This Hamlet lacks a power which explodes from within. We may call this power insanity or indiscretion, but probably it is this power that uniﬁes his apparently inconsistent characterization.’1 For others in the audience this inability to iron out ‘inconsistent characterization’ may have made Akutagawa’s performance seem even more attractive and profound. Still, it is clear from Yamamoto’s reservation that neither the director nor the leading actor was bothered with the pseudo-scientiﬁc approach to a dramatic character, the approach which had been indispensable to Shingeki. Consider this example of ‘apparent inconsistency’: at the end of the second act of Hamlet the prince is actively resolved, energetic and even elated, but when we next see and hear him he is deeply depressed and introspective. It is true that the play does not explain this intriguing change as a novel might. Shakespeare could be ambiguous, brusque or inconsistent where psychological motivation is concerned, but he was also a master of dramatic effects, and few would deny that these two scenes in Hamlet are powerfully effective. Instead of trying to probe a character’s psychological motivation, which may be futile, Fukuda preferred to examine or work from whatever part the character was expected to play in a particular scene. Fukuda himself discusses his own approach to Shakespeare as a director and translator in a number of important essays. His 1957 essay on ‘Directing Shakespeare’2 begins with a warning against egocentric and power-hungry directors who satisfy 31

Shakespeare in Japan

themselves more than anyone else by using Shakespearean plays as an arena for self-expression. Fukuda observes that such directors often aim to achieve a certain unity and consistency which is apparently lacking in Shakespeare by distorting the play to make it ﬁt their own concept. Even when such directors do not change or cut Shakespeare’s speeches, they still can produce a work which is absolutely alien to Shakespeare. Anyone who is familiar with the way Shakespeare has been directed for the past few decades both in and outside Japan will have seen numerous productions where the director’s concept is imposed on the play by way of visual elements such as scenery and costume, and also imposed on the actors when the director insists on expressions and inﬂections that turn the characters they play into caricatures. However, Fukuda was writing in 1957, that is, before directordominated productions became extremely fashionable. Just which productions Fukuda had in mind is not clear. What is clear and indeed very striking in Fukuda’s protesting essay is his timely conviction that a play like Hamlet cannot and should not be tackled or treated like a play by Ibsen or Chekhov. Ibsen once remarked that he only began writing when he had worked everything out, ‘down to the last button’. It is hard to imagine Shakespeare saying that. In Fukuda’s view, contradictions and oppositions are as essential to Shakespeare as to life itself, and the effect of trying to iron them out is deadly, even when the production looks impressive. Interestingly, Fukuda suggests three reasons why egocentric directors are so drawn to Shakespearean drama. First, the author is no longer alive and therefore cannot complain, no matter what is being done to his work. The second reason is closely connected with the ﬁrst: the original audiences are also dead. In other words, the sensibility of the Elizabethan audience now seems so remote and foreign, even in the West, that the director can readily present what the original audiences would have found difﬁcult or impossible to accept. A modern director who wants to present (and explain) the appearances of the ghost in Hamlet or the witches in Macbeth as hallucinatory reﬂections of the protagonists’ psychological disturbances need not worry too much about how the original audiences might have responded to any such boldly explicatory move. There is an inevitable distance between a classic and today’s audience, which means there is more room for us to 32

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

take liberties with it than with a modern work. Directors can shorten or simplify that distance and feel that they have achieved something signiﬁcant – in the name of ‘relevance’, or whatever. But this, for Fukuda, is wrong. In his view we should treat the ghost in Hamlet and the witches in Macbeth as objective existences, as the Elizabethans no doubt did. Any sense that they reﬂect or answer to the protagonists’ inner feelings should be left to work in the unconsciousness of the audience (which Fukuda supposes was not essentially different from the unconsciousness of the Elizabethan audience), not imposed on the audience and play by an all too conscious director. In other words, Fukuda is extremely wary of a director who is prone to ‘overdirecting’. The third reason why Shakespeare attracts egocentric directors is that his plays seem more full of incongruities than modern drama. There is no clear authorial message and the characters’ psychology cannot always be logically explained. This makes it easier for the director to kidnap the play by imposing some more explicit sense of the play’s ‘theme’, or by making the characters psychologically more consistent than they were intended to be. Fukuda does not try to forbid or outlaw such attempts, but he feels very strongly that there ought to be limits and constraints. All this will no doubt make this absorbingly intelligent writer and director sound rather conservative and modest, which indeed he was. However, Fukuda was not advocating ‘authentic’ productions of the museum sort, that treat Shakespeare’s plays as belonging exclusively to the Elizabethan age. He was far more arrestingly concerned with the differences between Shakespearean and modern drama, and he understood how the Shakespearean actor’s different relation to his audience had answered to the physical conditions of Elizabethan theatres. There were no lavish sets, no folding curtains, and, until the construction of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1606, there was no artiﬁcial lighting. The much later idea of an invisible fourth wall would have seemed absurd in a theatre where actors played in daylight on a deep apron stage that was almost entirely encircled by the audience. In modern realistic theatre with its proscenium arch stage the spectators become more like Peeping Toms watching something that is not their business, while the actors concentrate on the characters they play as though the audience were not there. Indeed, in such a theatre the actors are often unable to see the audience across the 33

Shakespeare in Japan

footlights. Fukuda argued that Shakespearean actors were far more conscious of and involved with the audience throughout the performance. This helps us to understand what was happening in the 1955 Hamlet, and why it seemed so radically different or (to Yamamoto Shuji) disconcerting. Any such approach may well transform the familiar, passively sceptical Prince Hamlet into a person actively playing a sceptic. When Hamlet insists that he has ‘that within which passes show’, it makes a very great difference if the audience is drawn in and is aware that an actor is speaking and trying to convey what it would be like to be driven – as the actor playing Hamlet patently is not – by ‘that within’. In his production, as in his essays, Fukuda was challenging the Shingeki preoccupation with consistent characterization and psychological motivation. As a director, Fukuda clearly wanted his Shakespeare to be lively and dynamic more than anything else. This same attitude is manifest in his approach to the task of translating Shakespeare. While there is every reason to believe that he thoroughly enjoyed translating Shakespeare, he was soberly aware of what made that task so daunting. He understood, perhaps better than Tsubouchi Shoyo, that he was struggling with a number of very serious and even intractable problems. One such problem, which is fundamental but is not very often discussed, is that it is possible but almost pointless to translate Shakespeare into Japanese verse. But why? Translating verse into verse sounds eminently sensible, not least because Shakespeare’s shifts between verse and prose are often constituents of dramatic meaning. In Germany, earlier translators like Wieland had turned Shakespeare’s plays into prose, but the famous Schlegel–Tieck translations made what was quickly recognized as a signiﬁcant advance by translating verse into verse and preserving the distinction between verse and prose. Yet modern Japanese translations have proceeded in the opposite direction. Again, why? Spoken English, like German or Russian but unlike French or Japanese, is a strongly stressed language. For this reason it was natural that the ﬁrst of the two main traditions in English verse was accentual. In accentual verse, like that of medieval poems such as Piers Plowman or nursery rhymes such as ‘Three Blind Mice’, the verse line has a ﬁxed number of stresses and an unﬁxed number of syllables. The logical opposite is syllabic verse, in which the line has 34

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

a ﬁxed number of syllables and an unﬁxed number of stresses. But although syllabic verse is perfectly suited to French or Japanese it is not suited to a strongly stressed language like English. In time, and thanks largely to Chaucer’s genius, English poetry established its own alternative tradition, which recombined the different elements that structure accentual or syllabic verse: the accentualsyllabic verse line has a ﬁxed number of syllables and a ﬁxed number of stresses – or rather, metrical accents. In this case it is important to understand why modern linguists carefully distinguish between lexical stress and metrical accent (or ictus). What matters is the distinction between lexical stress as a feature of spoken English – a dictionary tells you how to say ‘dictionary’ – and metrical accents, which occur only in metrical verse. In accentual-syllabic verse, which so rapidly became the dominant tradition in English poetry, the lexical stress will often or usually coincide with the metrical accent, and many sixteenth and eighteenth-century discussions of prosody insisted, more dogmatically, that stress and accent should always coincide. The Tudor poet George Gascoigne was one such dogmatic theorist, but if we compare the ﬁrst line of one of his poems – When I recorde within my musing minde

with the ﬁrst line of a justly famous Shakespeare sonnet – When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

the distinction between stress and accent is already important. Gascoigne’s line seems plodding, rather than arresting: we fear that he will go on like this, as indeed he does. Shakespeare’s line compels attention because of the quiet, subtle interplay between the stresses of spoken English and our metrical expectations. Although the word ‘sweet’ is metrically unaccented, both the sense and the speech rhythms clearly require that it receives more emphasis than the preceding, metrically supported word ‘of ’. The distinction between stress and accent is even more important if we consider another deliberately provocative and witty example. One of Christopher Marlowe’s most popular and charming poems begins: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove.

35

Shakespeare in Japan

John Donne’s poem ‘The Bait’ begins with this gleeful parody: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove.

Although Donne changes only two words in Marlowe’s couplet, the change mocks or subverts the sound of Marlowe’s second line as well as its sense (and innocence). Donne’s provocative, sexually streetwise emphasis on ‘new’ is secured by a peculiar metrical effect – peculiar, because the effect depends upon a nonmetrical element that can only work as it does in metrical verse: the sense clearly requires that the word ‘new’ be vigorously stressed, even though it is in a metrically unaccented position. These two comparisons should at least be enough to suggest how Shakespeare and Donne both grasped, in their respectively more quiet or more aggressive ways, that the distinction between lexical stress and metrical accent could be used or exploited in expressive ways. For that very reason accentual-syllabic verse offered the English poet the greatest possible control over intonation. Moreover, the distinction between accentual, syllabic and accentual-syllabic verse is very much more exact and helpful than historically familiar but vague references to Shakespeare’s ‘blank verse’ or ‘iambic pentameters’. The expression ‘blank verse’ merely informs us that the verse in question is not rhymed. The classically derived notion of the ‘iambic pentameter’ is more imposing, historically, because so many English poets thought in these terms. Nonetheless, as the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen observed in his revolutionary ‘Notes on Metre’ (1900), such classically derived notions, and chatter about ‘iambs’, ‘dactyls’, ‘spondees’ and the like, are all linguistically misleading, because English is not like Latin. As Jespersen showed, what counts in English verse is not quantity – the length or duration of syllables – but ‘intensity’. But how could any Japanese translator translate such effects into his target language and target culture? The most elementary rule of Japanese prosody has to do with the number of syllables in a phrase. This is because classical Japanese poetry is syllabic. In other words, what matters is not the number of stresses or accents, but the number of syllables. This may not sound particularly strange, because accentual-syllabic verse is also regulated, in part, by a number of syllables: the verse line usually consists of ten syllables. The most fundamental 36

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

numbers of syllables in Japanese verse are ﬁve and seven, and traditional Japanese poetry depends on the combination of the two, as in haiku (5–7–5) and tanka (5–7–5–7–7). This combination might look useful when Shakespeare is translated into Japanese, and indeed Tsubouchi Shoyo used it extensively in his translation/adaptation of Julius Caesar. But the truth is more complicated. A syllable in Japanese almost always consists of a consonant followed by a vowel. There is one exception, ‘n’, which is regarded as an independent syllable: thus ‘yen’, the basic monetary unit (which the Japanese now pronounce ‘en’ rather than ‘yen’), is supposed to consist of two syllables (e–n). The Japanese used to differentiate between ‘i’ and ‘wi’, ‘e’ and ‘ye’ and ‘o’ and ‘wo’, but the distinction has almost totally disappeared. We can safely say that in spoken Japanese today, as in English, there are only ﬁve vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Each of these vowels can be treated as a syllable. Nonetheless, the vast majority of syllables in Japanese consists of one consonant followed by a vowel. There is also always – without exception – a difference of pitch between the ﬁrst and second syllables of any Japanese word. The interval in question may not be large: in musical terms it will often be no more than a fourth, but in Japanese this difference in pitch – not stress – is often crucial in determining meaning. So, for example, the Japanese word ‘sake’ may mean either ‘rice-wine’ or ‘salmon’, depending on whether the second syllable rises or falls in relation to the ﬁrst. Similarly, ‘hashi’ may mean ‘chopsticks’ or ‘bridge’. Foreigners listening to the phrasing of a vigorously animated or quarrelsome Japanese conversation might well mistake the excited emphases for stresses, but the emphatic or excited variations in question still involve pitch, not stress. In its own way, this difference between pitch and stress is as fundamental as the difference, in accentual-syllabic verse, between lexical stress and metrical accent. Like French, and unlike English, German or Russian, Japanese is unstressed. Of course, one obvious or inevitable result is that the Japanese are extremely sensitive to pitch differences. (This may be why Japanese music teachers both insist and demonstrate that ‘absolute’ pitch is not inborn, but can be taught.) Some recent research conﬁrms that, until they have reached an advanced stage in their study of English, most Japanese students of English would not 37

Shakespeare in Japan

hear the differences between Gascoigne’s line and Shakespeare’s, or between Marlowe’s couplet and John Donne’s, or – one could of course go on, and on – between the verse movement in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Any native English speaker who can hear these differences will be responding – intuitively or consciously – to the distinction between lexical stress and metrical accent. But such a response demonstrably involves hearing not just differences in pitch, but differences in intensity, volume or duration. At this point, to be sure, the theoretical, linguistic and historical going gets more difﬁcult, because many native English-speakers (especially Americans) can no longer hear such differences. As George T. Wright (who is American) observes in his still unsurpassed Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, the English accentual-syllabic tradition now seems ‘foreign’ to most Americans. This is one reason why most contemporary Shakespeare criticism, which is of course dominated by American criticism, discusses Shakespeare’s poetic dramas as though they were or might as well have been written in prose: a very Japanese view, nowadays. Yet we miss a great deal if we do not notice how, in the ﬁrst part of Henry IV, Hotspur sounds utterly unlike his namesake in Richard II. Since he sounds more like Donne, his quarrel with his fellow rebel Glendauer is about what he calls ‘mincing’ poetry as well as politics. We are of course suggesting that these linguistic differences between Japanese and English have important and sometimes dismaying consequences. So far as ‘Shakespeare in Japan’ – rather than Shakespeare in Germany or Russia – is concerned, the idea of translating Shakespeare’s verse into Japanese verse might seem sensible, but only in superﬁcial terms. What is in question is the relative advantages – which must of course be weighed against concomitant losses – of trying to translate English accentualsyllabic poetry into Japanese syllabic poetry. For example, although our immediate concern is with Shakespearean poetic drama, the task of translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into the target culture as well as the target language is sufﬁciently, and obviously, terrifying. The so-called native or ‘English’ sonnet form, as developed by Surrey and Shakespeare, consists of three differently rhymed quatrains and a concluding couplet, e.g., abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Rhyming in English is far more difﬁcult than rhyming in 38

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

Italian, and in the Italian sonnet-form, which some English poets like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins preferred to follow, the basic form relates an eight-line ‘octave’ to a six-line ‘sestet’, e.g., abbaabba/cdecde. In this intricately demanding form a concluding summary or quasi-syllogistic ‘gg’ couplet would sound intolerably pat. In Japanese, where the variety of word-endings is so much more limited, rhyming is of course technically possible but almost always uninteresting. The translator then faces a problem like that Yuasa Nobuyuki had to confront, when translating the great Japanese Basho’s haiku into English. Quite simply, Basho’s syllabic haiku-form – 5–7–5 – makes little or no sense in English prosodic and emotional terms. Yuasa’s very bold, graspthe-nettle solution was to translate Basho’s syllabic verse into English quatrains. When we turn to Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, another serious and potentially crippling result of these linguistic differences is that translating Shakespearean poetic drama into Japanese verse will produce a work which is very long or, in performance terms, very time-consuming. The result, over long stretches, would be both tedious and (to use the word we are elsewhere wanting to inspect rather critically) ‘unactable’. To take a very simple example, the name ‘Macbeth’ which consists of two syllables becomes in Japanese ‘Ma-ku-be-su’, which has four syllables. ‘Ha-mu-re-t-to’, Hamlet’s name in Japanese, would use up a whole ﬁve-syllable phrase: in literary and poetic as well as dramatic terms, translating Shakespeare into Japanese verse is totally unfeasible except in a few speciﬁc and exceptional instances. As we shall see, Fukuda was remarkably alert to linguistic differences. In this respect, he understood why his task as translator was far more daunting than that of August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Of course any good Japanese translator will want to turn Ariel’s songs into Japanese, preserving their difference from the surrounding accentual-syllabic verse. But translating accentualsyllabic verse into syllabic verse is generally pointless. On the other hand, translating Shakespeare’s richly complex poetry into contemporary, colloquially mundane Japanese involves other losses. Actually Fukuda does use ﬁve-syllable and seven-syllable phrases (and their variations, four-, six- and eight-syllable phrases) in his translations fairly regularly, but he knew this usually meant sacriﬁcing something else in the original. A prime example would 39

Shakespeare in Japan

be his translation of the third soliloquy of Hamlet. Fukuda’s rendition begins: Sei ka shi ka, sore ga gimon da.

If it is translated back into English, this would mean something like ‘Life or death, that is the question’. It is true that this Japanese version is brisk and eminently ‘actable’ but whatever ambiguity the audience may notice in ‘To be or not to be’ has almost completely disappeared. Another problem has to do with Japanese syntax, and here the crucial fact is that a sentence in Japanese usually ends with a verb. In a long essay ‘On Translation’ (1960),3 Fukuda discusses the difﬁculties this causes to Japanese translators of Shakespeare by comparing his own translations of several Shakespearean passages with those of his predecessors. But one example he does not mention is perhaps still more pertinent, and occurs in Othello’s ﬁnal speech: And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him thus.

If a Japanese translator of Othello wants his or her version to sound natural enough and follows the principles of Japanese syntax meticulously, then the word order of the translation of the last line would have to be ‘and him thus smote’ rather than ‘and smote him thus’. Dramatically, however, it could be damaging. It is vitally necessary that Othello’s suicide should come as a surprise to the audience as well as to the other characters, because as Cassio says, they ‘thought he had no weapon’. It is also important that Lodovico’s speech ‘O bloody period!’ should be spoken immediately after Othello’s act of stabbing himself. A pause, no matter how short, is likely to break the tension. To avoid this, a Japanese actor playing Othello can do one of two things. He can either postpone the act of stabbing himself until he has ﬁnished the whole speech, or he can synchronize the act with the word ‘thus’ and mumble the rest of the speech, which requires more than one syllable in Japanese, very quickly and if possible almost inaudibly. Either way, the effect is not what Shakespeare intended. 40

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

The situation is actually even more complicated. ‘And smote him thus’ is part of a long sentence which is a subordinate clause beginning with the conjunction ‘that’, and if the translator wants to be absolutely faithful to the principles of Japanese syntax, according to which a sentence is concluded with a verb, it is desirable that the whole speech should end with the verb of the main clause, ‘say’, which of course has to be spoken after Othello has stabbed himself. Tsubouchi Shoyo’s version does exactly that. To be more precise, Shoyo makes his Othello say ‘say besides’ before the subordinate clause and repeat the phrase after it, by which time the Moor has of course already stabbed himself. In this version the poor Lodovico will have to wait at least a few seconds before he can open his mouth, which would make him positively unresponsive and rather dim-witted. More importantly, the change in word order alters the impression the audience will get from Othello. The word order of a dramatic speech reﬂects the ﬂow of the speaker’s thought and is inseparable from that character’s bodily movement. If Othello is still at this stage conscious of the fact that his statement is meant to be conveyed by Lodovico to the Venetian authorities, then it makes him somewhat cool, remote and detached. It would be normal to expect him to concentrate on the act of killing himself. Adding ‘say besides’ after the act is, to say the least, anticlimactic. Fukuda’s version of the passage is more successful than Shoyo’s because his Othello does not say ‘say besides’ after stabbing himself. But ‘thus’ precedes ‘smote’ even in his version so that dramatically it is not quite satisfactory. Fortunately Fukuda is usually convincing when he discusses the passages he has chosen in the essay, ‘On Translation’. One of them is Mark Antony’s speech in Act III, scene ii of Julius Caesar. When he has succeeded in agitating the plebeians, he discloses the contents of the late Caesar’s will: Here is the will, and under Caesar’s seal. To every Roman citizen he gives, To every several man, seventy-ﬁve drachmas.

According to Fukuda, the crucial point about this speech is the order of ‘he gives’ and ‘seventy-ﬁve drachmas’. There is nothing extraordinary about the fact that ‘he gives’ precedes ‘seventy-ﬁve drachmas’ in English, but since a sentence in Japanese usually 41

Shakespeare in Japan

ends with a verb, the word order may be reversed. That is what happens in the translations by Tsubouchi Shoyo and Nakano Yoshio, a distinguished scholar and translator of English literature, and not surprisingly Fukuda is critical of them. Even if it sounds somewhat unnatural in Japanese, he thinks, the amount of money each Roman citizen is supposed to receive should be announced as late as possible. ‘To every several man’, which is little more than a repetition of ‘To every Roman citizen’, shows the posture of the speaker who is up to raising the expectation of the listeners. If ‘seventy-drachmas’ is mentioned too early, the whole dramatic effect deriving from the speaker’s posture will be destroyed. Of course Antony refers to Caesar’s will earlier in the scene and says to the plebeians, ‘ ’Tis good you know not that you are his heirs’. Again Fukuda is critical of Nakano whose version reads (if it is translated back into English) ‘That you yourselves are his heirs you had better not know’ and prepared a version which reads ‘It is best you don’t know that you are named as Caesar’s heirs’. Nakano’s version, which interestingly enough sounds like an inversion when it is translated back into English, certainly sounds more natural as a Japanese sentence, but Fukuda reversed the normal order of words in Japanese because he thought (rightly) that ‘his heirs’ is by far the most impressive part of the line and should come last. Similarly Fukuda is extremely fastidious about the word order in Antony’s eulogy to Brutus in the ﬁnal scene of the play. It reads: His life was gentle, and the elements So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’

Again in Tsubouchi Shoyo’s version as well as in Nakano Yoshio’s version ‘This was a man!’ precedes the verb ‘say’. Here Antony is playing the part of ‘Nature’ so to speak and the obvious climax of this play-acting is the cry ‘This was a man!’ But if it is followed by ‘say to all the world’ (as in Nakano’s version) or by ‘say’ (as in Shoyo’s version), the actor playing Antony will be expected to become less excited and somewhat more sober after ‘This was a man!’, and the result will be rather anticlimactic. Fukuda is not simply concerned with word order. He mentions 42

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

three different translations of Casca’s speech ‘Speak hands for me!’ when he assaults Caesar in Act III, scene i which were prepared by Nakano Yoshio, Tsubouchi Shoyo and himself, and discusses them in detail. What follows is the three versions in the original Japanese translation (and literal English translations of them): 1. Ko nareba, ude ni mono o iwaserunoda! (If it comes to this, I will make my arm speak!) (Nakano) 2. Mo . . . kono ue wa . . . udezuku da! (Then . . . oh then . . . my arm will speak!) (Shoyo) 3. Kono te ni kike! (To this hand listen!) (Fukuda)

Fukuda wonders exactly when the actor playing Casca is supposed to draw his sword. He thinks it is not clear in Nakano’s version, which is both too long and lacking in the necessary tension. The passage, ‘I will make my arm speak’, cannot properly sustain the movement and inner feeling of Casca who is about to attack Caesar. Shoyo’s version, Fukuda feels, is better because it is shorter and more compact, but still it would be difﬁcult for the actor to refrain from attacking Caesar while he says, ‘Then . . . oh then’. Fukuda’s version may not be a very faithful translation of the original, but it is clear that the actor can synchronize the action with the words. It must be admitted that Fukuda was not always successful to such an extent as this. His rendition of ‘and smote him thus’ in Othello’s ﬁnal speech, for instance, leaves something to be desired. In spite of this, he was a very meticulous translator who paid a lot of attention to what can happen when Japanese translations of Shakespeare are used for actual performances. It made him regularly deviate and depart from normal requirements of the Japanese language. He often inverted word order so that a sentence does not end with a verb. His sentences and clauses frequently end with a noun instead of a verb. It is as if a sentence or a clause is not completed but interrupted, which might make the audience somewhat uneasy even though they are never uncertain about what is meant to be conveyed. In Japanese there are numerous verbs which consist of a noun and a verb ‘suru’ (meaning ‘do’). For example, there are the verbs ‘fukushu suru’, consisting of a noun ‘fukushu’ (literally, ‘revenge’) and the verb 43

Shakespeare in Japan

‘suru’, thus meaning ‘do revenge’, or ‘tochaku suru’ consisting of a noun ‘tochaku’ (‘arrival’) and the verb ‘suru’, meaning ‘do arrival’. One can omit ‘suru’ or its variants and still make the phrase or the sentence clear enough. There are other ways to ﬁnish a sentence or a phrase with a noun rather than with a verb. The result is that the translation gains in speed and dynamism while it sounds somewhat different from the kind of Japanese the audience is used to. Another point where Fukuda departs from normal requirements of Japanese has to do with the use of personal pronouns. Personal pronoun selection (and more generally, code-switching) in Japanese is far more complicated than that in European languages. One can readily count several dozens of different ﬁrstperson and second-person pronouns. Some of them are formal and polite, some archaic, some very intimate and some clearly derogatory. Some are used only by men and some only by women. In other words, the Japanese are required to select appropriate personal pronouns depending on gender, age, social rank, etc., and perhaps most importantly, depending on the relationship between the speaker and the person spoken to. In his translation of Hamlet Fukuda achieved something quite remarkable. He almost completely did without personal pronouns. The stylistic difference between speeches by men and those by women is also less conspicuous than that in the ‘natural’ kind of Japanese. Fukuda’s Japanese certainly sounds more neutral than the Japanese of other translators and so in a way it is closer to Shakespeare’s English. On the whole, Fukuda’s translations of Shakespeare have been well received, but some people have been rather critical of them. Probably the most severe criticism came from Kinoshita Junji, another playwright and translator of Shakespeare, who will be discussed in the next chapter. Fukuda Tsuneari was perhaps most comfortable as an astute writer, but rather like Tsubouchi Shoyo, he became more and more involved with ‘live’ theatre. In 1963 he started a new Shingeki troupe, Kumo (Clouds), together with some of the former members of the Bungaku-za and directed its ﬁrst production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which used his own translation. Now he was extremely busy not only as the artistic leader but as the chief administrator of the group, and no doubt there are 44

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

people who wish he had devoted more time to artistic endeavours. Perhaps two of the Shakespeare-related achievements he worked upon for the newly formed company are especially signiﬁcant. In 1965 he invited Michael Benthall (1919–74), who had been the director of the Old Vic from 1953 to 1958, to Japan and asked him to direct Romeo and Juliet for the company. Today nobody will count Benthall among the most innovative Shakespearean directors of the twentieth century, but the reason why Fukuda brought him to Japan was that he had been impressed by the speed and liveliness of Benthall’s production of Hamlet at the Old Vic which had Richard Burton as the prince. Fukuda wanted his actors as well as the Japanese audience to be familiar with the way Shakespeare is produced in his native England. The production itself was not particularly original, but it was certainly elegant and decent. It is not clear whether Fukuda realized it when he planned to bring Benthall to Japan, but he started a trend which became more and more prevalent over the years. Benthall was virtually the ﬁrst professional non-Japanese director who visited Japan in order to direct a Shakespearean production in a language he did not understand. Some people have always been sceptical about the feasibility of such a production. They tend to ask, ‘How can someone with no knowledge of Japanese properly direct a play in Japanese even with help from competent interpreters?’ The scepticism is no doubt justiﬁable, but today it is quite common for British as well as American directors to work in Japanese theatre. In any case, one cannot deny Fukuda’s pioneering status in this respect. The other signiﬁcant work was the production of Richard III (1964). Again Fukuda was both the translator and the director, but the most interesting point about the production was that a noted Kabuki actor, Nakamura Kanzaburo XVII, played the eponymous character while the other roles were played by Shingeki actors, many of them members of Kumo. It was not the ﬁrst time Fukuda worked with a Kabuki actor for a production of Shakespeare. In 1960 he directed Othello in which another distinguished Kabuki actor, Matsumoto Koshiro VIII, played the noble Moor. Of course many of the earliest productions of Shakespeare in Japan were performed by Kabuki actors, and quite a few used 45

Shakespeare in Japan

versions which were Kabuki adaptations rather than more faithful translations of Shakespeare, but during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century the relation between Kabuki and Shingeki was on the whole cold and remote, if not exactly hostile. It seems Fukuda wanted to reunite them. His 1960 production of Othello was not totally successful mainly because the acting styles of the major performers did not fuse very well. The actor who played Iago had trained himself in Shingeki but by then he was working almost exclusively in ﬁlms. Desdemona was played by a popular ﬁlm actress who originated in the all-female Takarazuka revue company and was not particularly familiar with Shakespeare. In many ways it was a ‘commercial’ production which was mounted by an independent and adventurous producer, and Fukuda was not in full command of the affair. He was in full command, however, of the production of Richard III, which turned out to be a far greater success than Othello. Casting a Kabuki actor as a character who delivers soliloquies all the time was no doubt crucial to the success. Shingeki actors, with their concern for modern realism, tend to conﬁne their acting within the imaginary fourth wall, and so are not comfortable about speaking directly to the audience. On the other hand Kabuki actors are quite used to this kind of acting, and indeed Nakamura Kanzaburo showed no self-consciousness when he delivered the soliloquies. He was entirely free from the restrictions of modern realism, and he no doubt shared this freedom with Fukuda, who was more classically orientated than most Shingeki artists. Fukuda’s attempt to reunite Kabuki and Shingeki started even earlier. In 1957 he directed his own play Akechi Mitsuhide, and Matsumoto Koshiro, who was to work with Fukuda again three years later for the production of Othello, played the central character. Several Kabuki actors including his two sons also appeared in the production. The other roles were played by Shingeki actors belonging to Bungaku-za. Akechi Mitsuhide (1528?–82) was a feudal lord who served a more powerful feudal lord, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82). Probably Akechi Mitsuhide harboured a personal grudge against his master. Probably he was eager to seize a political power. In any case he attacked a temple in Kyoto where his master was staying tempor46

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

arily, and Oda Nobunaga, realizing that there was no escape, killed himself. Thus Akechi Mitsuhide succeeded in gaining the political power he probably wanted, but he could not retain it for even a couple of weeks. Hashiba Hideyoshi (1536– 98), another feudal lord who also served Oda Nobunaga and who was to become better known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was ﬁghting against still another feudal lord in the Western part of Japan at the time of his master’s death, but when he learned of his master’s plight, he managed to achieve a truce, returned to Kyoto, and beat the army of Akechi Mitsuhide. The rebel was murdered by a lowly farmer while he was seeking for a haven. All this is a well-known historical event, and it provided materials for numerous Kabuki and Bunraku plays, which of course mixed facts with ﬁction. Fukuda’s play is based on historical facts as well as later dramatizations of them, but the most signiﬁcant source of the work is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, another play about a feudal lord who assassinates his master. Fukuda’s Akechi Mitsuhide begins with an encounter between Chobei, an ex-samurai now living as a farmer, and a mysterious old woman who seems to know every secret of the farmer. Chobei has been planning to murder Hashiba Hideyoshi who he thinks is responsible for the death of his own brother. Then he meets Akechi Mitsuhide who he believes, possibly because he is beguiled by the mysterious old woman, is Hashiba Hideyoshi, and tries to kill him. The real Hashiba Hideyoshi appears and recognizing the situation tries to kill Chobei, but Akechi Mitsuhide prevents Hashiba Hideyoshi from killing the farmer. Then the two feudal lords are encountered by the mysterious old woman who prophesies that both of them will eventually be a shogun. (Before the Meiji Restoration a shogun was a virtual ruler of the country, and the supremacy of an emperor was tacitly accepted but only nominal.) By now the afﬁnity with Macbeth should be clear enough. Akechi Mitsuhide is Macbeth, his companion (and rival) Hashiba Hideyoshi is Banquo, and Oda Nobunaga is Duncan. We are given one witch instead of three, but Fukuda cleverly made the same actress play both the witch and Akechi Mitsuhide’s wife, Satsuki, who is slightly reminiscent of Lady Macbeth. This Lady Macbeth does not openly drive her husband to regicide, as Shakespeare’s original does, but her words are so 47

Shakespeare in Japan

enigmatic that neither her husband nor the audience is quite certain exactly what she has in mind. Nor is it clear whether the witch in Akechi Mitsuhide is or is not an objective being. It is true that she is recognized both by Akechi Mitsuhide and Hashiba Hideyoshi in the opening scene of the play, but that would not necessarily mean she really exists. Later in the play she is recognized only by the central character, rather like the ghost in Hamlet when he appears in Gertrude’s chamber, and so she may simply be an illusion of the feudal lord. When he expects his wife to appear, the witch sometimes appears instead. The actress is required to shift from one role to the other very quickly. Are they really one person? They might be. Fukuda’s device makes the characterization of Satsuki more complex (and more interesting) than that of Lady Macbeth. In one scene the witch says to Akechi Mitsuhide that no sword (or no blade, to be more precise) can hurt his body. The feudal lord is made to believe that he is immortal and invincible. There is of course an echo of the witches’ words to Macbeth here, and the audience who is familiar with Shakespeare would start suspecting almost immediately that some sort of equivocation is involved. True enough, in the ﬁnal scene of the play Akechi Mitsuhide is mortally wounded by Chobei, the farmer who tried to kill him in the opening scene believing (wrongly) he is attacking Hashiba Hideyoshi. The weapon Chobei uses, however, is not a metal sword but a spear made of bamboo. The ultimate irony of the play is that Chobei still believes that he has succeeded in murdering Hashiba Hideyoshi. Does the author imply that the two feudal lords are interchangeable? Possibly. In this play the character of Akechi Mitsuhide is rather sympathetic, while that of Hashiba Hideyoshi is less so than that of Banquo. As the witch prophesies in the opening scene, Akechi Mitsuhide does become a shogun even though he has to lose the post after only a couple of weeks. Hashiba Hideyoshi does not become a shogun in the play itself, but it is common knowledge that he eventually became one. It would be redundant to depict such an event in this play. Obviously Fukuda assumed that his audience was familiar with one of the most well-known rebels in the history of Japan. This deﬁnes the stance of the audience. Rather like the audience of Shakespeare’s histories it knew what was going to happen 48

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

no matter how intriguing the process may have seemed to be. Akechi Mitsuhide is in four acts (which are divided into seven scenes) and has 56 characters. Altogether it is an exceptionally ambitious work. Perhaps Fukuda was trying to produce something like Shakespeare’s histories using characters and events of Japanese history. Moreover he must have expected at least some members of the audience to be familiar with Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well. Without such familiarity the effect of the witch’s equivocal remark or of Akechi Mitsuhide’s soliloquies which are strongly reminiscent of Macbeth’s soliloquy before he kills Duncan would be more than half lost. Thus Akechi Mitsuhide is an intriguingly intertextual piece of work. The connection it has with Shakespeare does not end here. In this play Fukuda used the style he had invented for his translation of Hamlet two years before. With this style he tried to transplant Shakespeare to Japanese soil while reuniting Kabuki with Shingeki. The result combined Kabuki with Shakespeare in a way which was radically different from the way adopted by Tsubouchi Shoyo. It is interesting to note that 1957, the year of the original production of Akechi Mitsuhide, was also the year when Kurosawa Akira’s ﬁlm Throne of Blood was released. As with Fukuda’s play, the ﬁlm was based on Macbeth and used a Japanese setting. Because they are adaptations which can claim an independent existence, they are free from the kind of exoticism which can plague Japanese productions of Shakespeare ostensibly set in medieval Japan. Besides being a playwright, translator and director, Fukuda was a novelist as well, although his novelistic achievements were far less important. Like Shiga Naoya, Kobayashi Hideo and Dazai Osamu before him, and Ooka Shohei after him, Fukuda left a novel (or rather a short story) which was inspired by Hamlet. Like Shiga’s Claudius’s Diary and Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary, Fukuda’s work is written as a diary, but unlike the other two works Fukuda’s Horatio’s Diary (1949) is supposedly written not by one of the characters in Hamlet but by a contemporary English actor named David Jones. Relatively short though it is, Horatio’s Diary is extremely complicated. David Jones is an actor and director in his forties. He once earned an international reputation playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. Now the role is played by his colleague Albert Giles, and 49

Shakespeare in Japan

he is content with directing the production and playing the role of Horatio. David Jones is married to Sheila and while they are rather indifferent to each other – clearly they have no children as there is no reference to them – they seem to enjoy a peaceful life together in their house in Richmond. The diary begins with an entry in which Jones recalls an incident that happened two years ago. He was having supper in a restaurant in London with an eminent French drama critic Michel Périer who had travelled all the way from Paris to catch Jones’s production of Hamlet. During the conversation, Périer said something which was highly disturbing to Jones. He said that he had felt that the look of Horatio – or rather the look of Jones playing Horatio – in the play-within-the-play scene was evil and satanic. Périer could not have realized the implications of his statement, but as the story unfolds, we learn that Jones was far from tranquil when he was playing Horatio in that particular scene. Albert, the actor playing Hamlet, was married but having an illicit affair with Isabel, the actress playing Ophelia, who was also married. Before the rehearsal for the production began, David Jones had a chance meeting with Isabel on the night train travelling to London, and Isabel, who seems to be a near nymphomaniac, blatantly tempted Jones and tried to seduce him on the train. He managed to resist the temptation, but later he dreamed what could have happened, and the incident (or rather the non-incident) continued to torture him. When the French drama critic noticed something satanic in Jones in the play-within-the-play scene, Jones was imagining obscene occurrences with Isabel as the partner. The main part of the ‘diary’ consists of unrelenting selfanalysis of the diarist, and of course the fact that he is an actor is of fundamental importance. He thinks the only function of Horatio in Hamlet is to be a tie with the outside world for Hamlet. He also thinks that Horatio is essentially a man of common sense as well as of inaction. He wonders, however, if Horatio is no more than that. He says there is absolutely no proof that Horatio did not sleep with Ophelia, and he suspects that the man who is mentioned in a bawdy song sung by Ophelia could in reality be Horatio. The possible affair between David and Isabel is never consummated, but he refers to it – or more precisely, to what he thinks 50

Shakespeare in Japanese (I)

could happen – in his diary over and over again, expecting his wife to read it. The last entry of the diary contains a casual reference to the marriage of Albert Giles and Isabel, which, as Jones expected, broke up after less than six months. Jones himself is living an uneventful, if boring, life with Sheila which he knows will go on and on for many years to come. Thus the diary is in a way an essay on Hamlet with a focus on the character of Horatio, who seems to have no particular dramatic function himself. It is also an examination of the relation between a play and the real life of the actors who appear in it. Jones thinks Horatio may have slept with Ophelia, but of course he cannot prove it. Jones in real life imagines an affair with the actress who plays Ophelia, but of course it never materializes. It seems he has to be content with living as a man of inaction. Altogether Horatio’s Diary is a penetrating study of the psychology of a man who cannot act. The work has another, more political dimension as well. It is supposed to begin in 1941 because Jones records that he dined with Michel Périer immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War. Jones mentions Hitler several times and even compares him to Hamlet. According to him they were both visionaries who caused a number of unnecessary deaths. Since Jones also identiﬁes Horatio’s inaction with the Englishman’s calm gentlemanly behaviour, the diary can be read as an essay on history, too. The piece was published in 1949, and of course Fukuda knew how Hitler was defeated and how Great Britain lost former colonies. The work appeared even before Fukuda began as a playwright – his ﬁrst play was produced in 1950 – but readers will already notice the tendency which was to mark his later works. That is, on the one hand he discusses history and civilization and on the other he analyses the idea of self. He relates both of these concerns to drama, especially Shakespearean drama. This early work shows how Fukuda began his career as a modernist and extremely ‘Westernized’ writer. He became, however, more and more conscious of the past. Perhaps he never quite solved the conﬂicts between the modern and the traditional and between the Western and the Japanese. He was free from a preoccupation with modern realism unlike most Shingeki artists, but he was never sympathetic with the avant-garde either. From the 1960s on, theatre artists in Japan regarded him as rather 51

Shakespeare in Japan

old-fashioned. The kind of Shakespearean productions he most detested became fashionable. But the problems he struggled with remain very serious problems, and we have yet to ﬁnd satisfactory answers to them. As for his warnings about egocentric directors, we might ask what modern alternative there is to the modern director, egocentric or not. Like the modern conductor, the modern director is a relatively recent invention and a product of what might be called museum culture. Both came into being as nineteenthcentury Western theatrical repertoires and concert programmes became less predominantly contemporary and ever more concerned with older ‘classics’. The director and the conductor were then expected to combine new and different roles, as museum custodians, as skilled interpreters who could negotiate the differences between ‘classical’ and demandingly modern works, and even as spiritual or cultural guardians. In these historically new circumstances a Peter Quince, who had chieﬂy been concerned with cues and blocking, had to metamorphose into a Peter Brook or a Peter Hall, just as the humble time-beating Kapellmeister would metamorphose into a ‘star’ conductor-interpreter like Furtwängler or Karajan. In Fukuda’s Tokyo, as in contemporary London or New York, somebody had to take on the task of ‘Directing Shakespeare’.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

52

Yamamoto Shuji, Engeki Sunshi (Essays on Theatre) (Kobe: Chugai Shobo, 1958), pp. 173–74. Fukuda, Gekijo e no Shotai (An Invitation to Theatre) (Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1957), pp. 165–88. Fukuda, Watashi no Engeki Kyoshitsu (My Course on Drama) (Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1961), pp. 203–47.

3 Shakespeare in Japanese (II): Kinoshita Junji

In abstract terms the career of Kinoshita Junji looks nearly identical with that of Fukuda Tsuneari. Born in 1914, Kinoshita is only two years junior to Fukuda. They both majored in English literature at the University of Tokyo when militarism was gaining power in the country and studying English was not particularly encouraged. Soon after the end of the Second World War they emerged and almost immediately established themselves as highly intelligent and competent playwrights. They were active as critics as well, and they discussed not only literature and drama but also society and politics. In addition to all this, they translated works of English literature, and devoted a considerable amount of time to translating Shakespeare. In their writings, however, they hardly ever agree with each other, and probably the most signiﬁcant difference between them has to do with their approaches to the task of translating Shakespeare into Japanese. In a way this is odd because they both understood how daunting the task is and how unﬁt to this task today’s prosaic and mundane Japanese is. It is true that one difference between these two eminent writers is political. Fukuda was essentially conservative whereas Kinoshita has been socialistorientated, although he has never been dogmatic in the way many socialists in Japan are. However, since they seldom criticized each other’s political stance, it would be fair to understand the difference between their approaches to the task of translating Shakespeare as primarily aesthetic and not in any direct or obvious sense political. Indeed, the fact that such a difference can exist 53

Shakespeare in Japan

throws further light on the difﬁculties Japanese translators of Shakespeare have to cope with. As a translator of Shakespeare, Kinoshita respects more than anything else what he calls ‘the energy’ of Shakespearean language. Just what Kinoshita means by ‘energy’ is not always clear, but since he emphasizes over and over again the obvious but crucial fact that Shakespearean speeches are meant to be spoken by actors, what he has in mind seems to be the emotive and sensory, and more speciﬁcally aural/oral, quality of the language which goes beyond the mere lexical meaning. Good translations of Shakespeare, Kinoshita maintains, are those which have successfully captured and reproduced such energy. To illustrate his point he quotes, among other passages, Laertes’ speech from Act IV, scene v of Hamlet.1 Here Laertes is furious because he believes (wrongly) that Claudius was responsible for the death of Polonius. After Gertrude’s speech ‘Calmly, good Laertes’, he cries: That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard, Cries cuckold to my father, brands her harlot Even here, between the chaste unsmirchèd brow Of my true mother.

The meaning of this speech does not give itself away, and Kinoshita argues that it is meant to be obscure because what matters here is not the meaning and logic of the speech itself but the speaker’s overpowering emotion. Therefore a translation which has, so to speak, clariﬁed the original and produced a more logical and easier version (like Fukuda’s translation, according to Kinoshita) has failed to reproduce ‘the energy’ of Shakespeare. Kinoshita’s important argument about deliberate or expressive obscurity might be extended by noticing how often, when a Shakespearean character is undergoing some terrible crisis or emotional breakdown, the character also loses control of his logic, syntax and metaphors. This radically comprehensive way of representing breakdown was very unusual, and even unique, in the drama of Shakespeare’s time. For a suitably extreme example, consider the last lines of Othello’s ‘Had it pleas’d Heaven’ speech in Act IV, scene ii of the First Folio text: 54

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

But there where I have garner’d up my heart, Where either I must live, or beare no life, The Fountaine from the which my 〈current〉 runnes, Or else dries up: to be discarded thence, Or keepe it as a Cesterne, for foule Toades To knot and gender in. Turne thy complexion there: Patience, thou young and Rose-lip’d Cherubin, I here looke grim as hell.

A modern editor cannot easily determine whether ‘I’ in the First Folio text means ‘I’ or ‘Ay’, or determine the relationship between Patience, the Cherubin and Desdemona (who is present), or explain the relationship between the Fountain, ‘it’ and the Cistern. Arguably, Othello’s collapse into incoherence is dramatically coherent, and in Kinoshita’s terms it is wrong for the translator to try to iron out or simplify such fraught obscurity. Yet a translator who preserves the incoherence faces the risk of then being charged with incompetence or misunderstanding. To turn to another example that Kinoshita discusses,2 when Macbeth returns to the witches in Act IV, scene i, after the aborted banquet, he says: I conjure you, by that which you profess, Howe’er you come to know it, answer me: Though you untie the winds and let them ﬁght Against the churches; though the yeasty waves Confound and swallow navigation up; Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down; Though castles topple on their warders’ heads; Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure Of nature’s germens tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken; answer me To what I ask you.

The six clauses preceded by ‘though’ do not all bear very urgently on this speech’s meaning, in the strict sense of that word, but their cumulative ‘energy’, in Kinoshita’s sense, heightens the speaker’s emotion and ensures that Macbeth’s ﬁrst ‘Answer me’ has far less weight than its climactic repetition. Therefore, Kinoshita maintains, a translator should try to reproduce the emotional dynamics of the speech rather than its lexical meaning. 55

Shakespeare in Japan

Shakespeare’s language must have seemed difﬁcult even to his ﬁrst Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. Indeed, reproducing what Kinoshita calls the ‘energy’ of Shakespeare’s language would also be formidably difﬁcult for a translator who was trying to translate the plays into modern English, not Japanese. Kinoshita understands these difﬁculties as well as anybody alive, and he has wrestled with them in various ways. One of his most important and controversial strategies is to use somewhat archaic Japanese which can be more congenial to the energy of Shakespeare’s language than the colloquial Japanese commonly used today. He even thinks it acceptable to use the kind of Japanese which might sound ‘un-Japanese’. Of course the result is more difﬁcult for Japanese audiences to understand, but, as Kinoshita says, even in England Shakespeare’s English is not, and perhaps never was, easy to understand. Kinoshita does not want to spoon-feed audiences with a comfortably easy and ‘actable’ Shakespeare, just as any serious Japanese translator of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical works might refuse to make Wittgenstein’s arguments seem easier than they are. Nursery slopes are one thing, but the mountain is another. Of course this uncompromising attitude also meant that Kinoshita’s own translations of Shakespeare make great demands on the actors as well as the audience, and are hardly ever used in modern productions. This is a pity because productions that used Kinoshita’s translations would make audiences attend more closely to the play’s language. Nowadays the conventional or received opinion is that Kinoshita’s translations are ‘unactable’, but before accepting this judgement we should remember that the vast majority of contemporary Shingeki actors and actors belonging to ‘underground theatre’ and ‘little theatre’ schools are still – like their predecessors but unlike Noh or Kabuki actors – either badly trained or entirely untrained. Kinoshita himself frequently criticized Fukuda’s translations of Shakespeare for being too ‘actable’. In one of his essays3 Fukuda analysed several Japanese translations (including his own) of Casca’s speech in Julius Caesar, ‘Speak hands for me!’ Fukuda argues that, because the translations by his predecessors do not deﬁne the actor’s movement clearly enough, they produce a certain discrepancy between the words and the action. Kinoshita fully accepts Fukuda’s argument about the important relationship 56

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

between the words and the action or gesture, but he is far from happy about Fukuda’s version which reads, ‘Kono te ni kike!’ (‘To this hand listen!’). Kinoshita maintains that this does not successfully reproduce the ‘energy’ of the original. The speech consists of four monosyllabic words, and in several recordings of the play Kinoshita had listened to, there is – or so he maintains – a heavy stress on all four words. This might be taken with a pinch of salt. Although Kinoshita does not say which recordings he listened to, it is unlikely that the stress on each word was equally heavy. For instance, the stress on ‘for’ cannot be as heavy as that on ‘speak’ or ‘me’. Even so, Kinoshita’s point about this speech being an orally loaded one is valid. He thinks Fukuda’s rendition is too short and too lacking in violence to convey the ﬂowing movement of the original, and he suspects that Fukuda was only concerned with the ‘actability’ of the speech and tried to make his version as brisk as possible. Kinoshita observes that in Fukuda’s version the only part of the speech the Japanese actor can emphasize will be the last word, ‘kike’: ‘listen’ – and so the ﬁnal effect will be far less impressive than that of the original version. When Kinoshita criticized Fukuda in his 1969 book Essays on Shakespeare4 he had not translated Julius Caesar, but later he did, and in this translation the speech in question reads, ‘Kono te ni iwasete yaru!’, the literal English translation of which would be ‘This hand I will make speak!’ The difference between the two translations may look trivial, but the crucial point is that Kinoshita tries to allow the actor to emphasize more than one word of the speech. Of course Kinoshita’s version is longer and requires more time to deliver, and no doubt Fukuda would have been highly critical because this version could make it more difﬁcult for the actor to move effectively and convincingly. It is not easy and may be futile to decide which of these translations is better, since the translators are privileging different aspects of the original. Of course an ideal translation would combine these aspects, but Fukuda’s essay and Kinoshita’s rejoinder show how this is almost impossible in Japanese. Kinoshita is also unhappy about Fukuda’s translation5 of Hamlet’s second soliloquy (Act II, scene ii), which begins as follows: 57

Shakespeare in Japan

Now I am alone. O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a ﬁction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his whole conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing. For Hecuba!

Long as it is, the passage beginning with ‘Is it not monstrous’ and ending with ‘to his conceit’ is one single sentence, and Kinoshita says it should be translated as one sentence in Japanese as well, which he has managed to do. Fukuda’s version, however, contains three full stops, breaking the long sentence into four short sentences (or more precisely, three short sentences and one relatively long sentence), and this is why Kinoshita thinks that Fukuda has failed to capture the outburst of the energy in the original. To be fair to Fukuda, the full stops in his translation would become less prominent if the actor speaking it paused only brieﬂy at them and managed to take a breath as inconspicuously as possible. On the other hand Kinoshita’s translation contains two points which might sound like full stops, if the actor was less than competent and paused there too long. For the actor, as for the audience or reader, Fukuda’s version is easier to understand because it is less demanding, and this is what Kinoshita ﬁnds so unsatisfactory about Fukuda’s translations. When Kinoshita’s essay appeared in 1969, Fukuda’s translations of Shakespeare were still widely used and were regarded as the translations to replace those by Tsubouchi Shoyo. At that time Kinoshita’s criticisms certainly seemed timely and relevant. However, Kinoshita himself could not foresee what would happen a couple of decades later. The majority of Japanese actors and directors (and no doubt of the Japanese audience as well) now ﬁnd Fukuda’s translations too archaic, too demanding and too difﬁcult for stage productions. Fukuda’s translations have come to be just as ‘unfashionable’ as those by Kinoshita. Contemporary Japanese actors and directors as well as Japanese audiences are likely to welcome translations of Shakespeare which try to be as close as possible to colloquial Japanese spoken today. 58

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

Kinoshita is now in his nineties, and his long struggle to rectify this lamentable situation has produced various experiments. For example, he used rhymes when he translated the dialogue between the witches in the opening scene of Macbeth. Since virtually all the syllables in Japanese consist of a consonant followed by a vowel and since the number of Japanese vowels is rather small, rhyming in Japanese is not a particularly effective literary device. Kinoshita’s solution was to use feminine rhymes. The ﬁrst few lines of the exchange in English are as follows (it is not speciﬁed which lines are spoken by which witch): When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost, and won. That will be ere the set of sun. Where the place? Upon the heath. There to meet with Macbeth. (Act I, scene i)

In Kinoshita’s translations they read: Kono tsugi sannin, itsu mata aooka? Kaminari, inazuma, soretomo ame no naka de ka? Dosakusa sawagi no owatta ato de sa. Ikusa ga makete katta ato de sa. Higure ni naranu mae no ato de sa. Tokoro wa doko yo? Ano areno yo. Soko de matsuno yo – Makubesu o yo.

In this case it would be cumbersome to analyse the translation in detail: what is important is the device the translator adopts. All the lines except the ﬁrst two lines end with a feminine rhyme, and Kinoshita constantly uses the ﬁve- and seven-syllable phrases which are essential in Japanese prosody (together with their variations, six- and eight-syllable phrases). This is ingenious and succeeds in giving the witches their own strikingly distinctive sound or voice, but it inevitably lacks the tempo of the original. For the last line of Hamlet’s second soliloquy Kinoshita used alliteration, so that Shakespeare’s ‘Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ became ‘Kakkiri to oo no kokoro o koko de hittoraete yaru no da’, reproducing the ‘k’ sound in the original 59

Shakespeare in Japan

version. Just how well such experiments work is difﬁcult to judge, and Kinoshita himself has often been highly critical of his own experiments. Indeed he has sometimes been his own ﬁercest critic. But such experiments certainly reveal Kinoshita’s passionately serious concern with the aural/oral aspect of Shakespearean language. Rhymes and alliterations, however, cannot be more than secondary elements in Kinoshita’s idea of Shakespeare translation. What he really wants to produce is the kind of translation which can be effectively delivered only by an actor equipped with an appropriate art of declamation. Kinoshita thinks this art is sadly absent from Japanese theatre, especially Shingeki, and attributes this lack or disability ﬁrstly to the structural differences between Western and Japanese theatres and secondly to the difference between Western and Japanese verse. Traditionally, Western drama was performed in an open-air theatre which required actors to develop the art of speaking their speeches clearly and audibly. This was true of theatres in ancient Greece as well as those in Elizabethan England. In fact the actor’s voice was far and away the most important dramatic resource, since the actors were not able to depend much on visual means such as scenery. Noh theatres and Kabuki theatres used to be open-air theatres too, and Noh actors and Kabuki actors have been expected to master a kind of declamatory art, but unfortunately most Shingeki actors ﬁnd it difﬁcult to acquire vocal training. From this point of view, it is a pity that the Japanese director Deguchi Norio and others were unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade the now commercially orientated but originally very well-sponsored Tokyo Globe Theatre to establish a school or academy for actors, instead of concentrating their efforts and resources on bringing foreign acting companies to Tokyo. Moreover, although the frequency of Japanese productions of Shakespeare has so often been reported outside Japan – a dozen different productions of Hamlet in 1990, in Tokyo alone, and so on – it is not so generally recognized that most of these productions take place in tiny theatres more like the Other Place in Stratford than Stratford’s main theatre. Deguchi was the ﬁrst director to produce all of Shakespeare’s plays in Japan, in the tiny, now defunct Jean-Jean theatre – staging Odashima Yushi’s translations as they appeared, although (according to Deguchi) the translator never attended a single rehearsal. In such small venues 60

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

proper vocal projection and training seemed less pressing, and Shingeki actors are notorious for shouting. The second reason why the art of declamation has not prospered in Japanese theatre, Kinoshita assumes, has to do with the difference of prosodic principles, and more generally, with the differences between Japanese and English. Accentual or accentualsyllabic verse is as natural to English as syllabic verse is to Japanese; some devices or resources like rhyme or alliteration can be deployed very richly in English, but are nearly pointless in Japanese. Kinoshita suspects, rightly of course, that the art of delivery which Japanese actors are expected to master in order to speak verse is very different from the one that Western actors rely upon. Another fundamental difference which we have discussed in earlier chapters is that traditional Japanese drama, whether it is Noh or Kabuki, is essentially ‘musical’ drama, as Shakespearean drama is not. Musical accompaniment is constantly used, and both Noh and Kabuki actors frequently, if not always, chant their speeches. It is true that Kyogen is far less dependent on music than Noh or Kabuki, but even in Kyogen song and dance is usually a major element of a performance. Until the so-called modernization in the late nineteenth century, Japanese people were virtually unfamiliar with the kind of drama where spoken words played a prominent and independent role. There is yet another fundamental and historically very complicated difference that should be mentioned here. Nobody would now question that some of Zeami’s late fourteenth or early ﬁfteenth-century Noh dramas or some of Chikamatsu’s Bunraku (and then Kabuki) plays written in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century are classics of world literature. But it was a long time before they acquired anything like the authority which post-Renaissance English, French and Spanish audiences took for granted in relation to the works of Shakespeare and Jonson, Corneille and Racine, or Calderón and Lope de Vega. In traditional Japanese theatre the actor, not the author, was supreme. One consequence was that, despite the extraordinarily rich range of Japanese acting styles, there was very little interchange between actors working in different forms. It is nothing unusual for an English actor to appear both in Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, but it would be unthinkable and even artistically unforgivable for a Noh actor to appear in Kabuki and no Kabuki actor ever appears in 61

Shakespeare in Japan

Noh. Nobody is considered a sufﬁciently competent Noh or Kabuki actor without going through a rigorous and lengthy training. As a relatively modern form (that started in Shakespeare’s lifetime), Kabuki has inherited from Noh many practices and conventions and some of the methods of training, but even so it has established its own methods which have very little to do with Noh. Today it is fairly common for Kabuki actors (and occasionally Noh actors) to appear in a Shingeki production, including a production of Shakespeare, but it is unthinkable for a Shingeki actor to appear in a professional production of Noh or Kabuki. There are Shingeki actors who have taken lessons in Noh or Kabuki dance, but it does not mean they are good enough to work as professionals in these forms. All this shows what a difﬁcult situation Shingeki actors ﬁnd themselves in. They bear most of the responsibility for performing Shakespeare in Japanese, and yet they usually lack an adequate training. Kinoshita understands the difﬁculty very well, but being a perfectionist, he still tries to ﬁnd ways properly to produce Shakespeare in Japanese. Kinoshita emphasizes yet another important fact that has to do with the history of the Japanese language. Because Shakespeare was writing when modern English was in its early phase his English is not essentially different from the English we use today. But for most contemporary Japanese, reading the great eighteenthcentury dramas of Chikamatsu is more difﬁcult than it is for modern Americans to read Chaucer. What can be safely called ‘modern Japanese’ dates back only to the middle of the nineteenth century. Before then what could be called ‘middle Japanese’ was commonly in use, and so far as grammatical principles are concerned, it was formed from the eighth to the twelfth century. In other words, ‘middle Japanese’ was used for more than one thousand years, at any rate in writings which are not too informal. This leads to another important phenomenon. For centuries there was a serious gap between written and spoken Japanese. The language of Kyogen, which ﬂourished in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, is assumed to be the spoken Japanese of the day, and here the gap between spoken and written Japanese was not yet so prominent, although it is still noticeable. We know fairly accurately what kind of Japanese was spoken by commoners of eighteenth-century Japan, and it is glaringly different from 62

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

written Japanese. It was only after the so-called modernization of Japan that a movement started to use everyday Japanese in serious writings and ﬁll the gap between written and spoken Japanese. While it was absurd to try to translate Shakespeare into the Japanese of the sixteenth century when he was a living playwright, does it really make sense, Kinoshita wonders, to translate his plays into twentieth-century spoken Japanese? After all, this Japanese was less than two centuries old. He therefore advocated a style which was neither too colloquial nor too prosaic nor too modern, and he gave it the name ‘new archaism’. No doubt this oxymoronic expression will sound rather puzzling, but Kinoshita succeeded in writing a play in the kind of language he had advocated for years. It was Shigosen no Matsuri (Requiem on the Great Meridian) which was ﬁrst produced in 1979. The play was based on Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike), a thirteenth-century epic which was recited, rather like Homeric epics, by a narrator to the accompaniment of a lute-like musical instrument. The work deals with the feud between two powerful samurai clans, Taira (or Heike) and Minamoto (or Genji) and the eventual demise of the former. Kinoshita has skilfully mixed dialogue with narrative, and a number of passages have strong choric ﬂavour, which is somewhat reminiscent of Shakespeare’s histories. For instance, there is a scene towards the end of the play where Tomomori, a young lord of the Taira clan, realizes they will almost certainly lose the battle. What follows is an exchange between him and a group of noble women as found in an excellent English translation by Brian Powell and Jason Daniel: TOMOMORI Thinking that the time had come, Lord Tomomori now boarded a small boat And hurriedly crossed to the Imperial Vessel. ‘It seems as though our end is near. Whatever might offend the eye throw overboard!’ So saying, he ran from stem to stern And took upon himself the tasks Of leaving the boat all cleansed and puriﬁed. VOICES OF THE GROUP (Female members only) ‘Lord Tomomori,’ asked the ladies on the boat,

63

Shakespeare in Japan

‘How stand our chances in the battle?’ TOMOMORI Their lord replied with a brutal laugh: ‘You have some guests arriving soon – Rare visitors from the East . . . You’ll like their beards when you see them close.’ VOICE OF THE GROUP (Female members only) ‘How can you joke at a time like this?’ The ladies cried and screamed at him.6

Here both Tomomori and the ladies function as dramatic characters as well as chorus, and, in addition to delivering speeches which can appear in realistic drama, describe their own action. This device might look awkward, but in fact it is constantly used in Noh plays (see Chapter 1). Kinoshita wrote the play in a language which is archaic but not obsolete, and incorporated a narrative technique often used in classical Japanese drama. For the production of the play he succeeded in recruiting actors from Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki, as well as highly experienced Shingeki actors. They managed to produce a style of delivery which overcame the difference of their background, and the production was a great success. What appeared too daunting, or almost impossible, turned out to be feasible. The fact that this epic play, which was probably Kinoshita’s most ambitious work, was a success and has been regularly revived should mean a great deal. It uses the same allegedly impenetrable or archaic Japanese which Kinoshita often uses for his translations of Shakespeare, but it was produced with the utmost care for the way the speeches were to be delivered. Far from being pronounced ‘unactable’, it won acceptance as a classic of modern Japanese drama. This calls into question the familiar contemporary assumption that Kinoshita’s use of the same allegedly archaic Japanese in his Shakespeare translations makes them ‘unactable’. If comparable attention was given to language and delivery, a Shakespeare production that used Kinoshita’s translation might be just as successful. Unfortunately, Japanese directors and actors tend to be more concerned with visual aspects of the production, which is relatively easy, and neglect the aural/oral aspects which are just as if not more important. For the last few decades non-Japanese critics and scholars have been paying a lot of attention to Japanese productions of 64

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

Shakespeare. This is of course a welcome tendency, but their discussion has been almost exclusively centred round actual productions: how a particular play has been directed. This is unfortunate. No discussion of non-English productions of Shakespeare would be complete without some reference to the translation. In Japan, a country with a sophisticated theatrical tradition and with its language which has nothing in common with English, producing Shakespeare is an extremely difﬁcult and complicated but also unusually challenging and fascinating task. Kinoshita’s work reminds us of this difﬁculty, even or especially as it strives to surmount it. So, in his brave and various attempts to negotiate with the challenges of Shakespeare’s verse, the challenges are often too difﬁcult to surmount. We have argued that, although it might sound sensible to translate Shakespeare’s verse into Japanese verse, this view is superﬁcial. For Japanese and French – though not for German and Russian – translators and readers, the crucial question is: what could be gained by translating Shakespeare’s accentual-syllabic verse forms? Once the question is put in that way, it is apparent that the advantages are few, and count for even less when weighed against the inevitably concomitant losses, for example the loss in dramatic tempo. This is all the more obvious if we consider a punishingly extreme example, and then consider how Japanese translators tried to deal with it. Take, for instance, the second half of Macbeth’s ‘If it were done when ’tis done’ soliloquy: Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great ofﬁce, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or Heaven’s cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’other – Enter Lady Macbeth How now? What news?

(Act I scene vii)

65

Shakespeare in Japan

Although those horses seem to emerge or erupt from nowhere, Macbeth began this speech by thinking of consequences metaphorically, as horses or horse-consequences, that it might – but might not – be possible to ‘catch’ and ‘trammel’, like young colts. In this ﬁrst part of his speech, when Macbeth is still striving to suppress his fears and think like a moral gangster, he also declares himself willing to ‘jump the life to come’. Some modern editors explain that ‘jump’ means ‘risk’, without explaining why Macbeth says ‘jump’, not ‘risk’. In this context, the idea of risking salvation is certainly present in one sense of jumping the life to come, but different forms of the jumping metaphor are no less present. The more arrestingly unexpected idea of a daring but potentially catastrophic jump – into nowhere, or into damnation – looks back to Macbeth’s alarmed response to Malcolm’s investiture as Prince of Cumberland as ‘a step / On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap’, and looks forward to the idea of ‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’other’ in his great soliloquy. There, of course, the jump, vault, leap or catastrophic overleaping are all linked to the horse-consequences through Macbeth’s alarmed revision of the horse-riding metaphor, ‘I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent’. Moreover, the earlier implication of his metaphorical horse-consequences was that these might not be consequences that could be controlled or ‘trammelled’, and in the last part of his extraordinary soliloquy the horses resurface in combination with the other fear that Macbeth was trying to suppress: the prophecy of Banquo’s royal heirs also resurfaces – but not from nowhere, and along with the horses on which ‘heaven’s cherubim’ are now ‘horsed’, like the riders of the Apocalypse – in the terrifying idea of the ‘naked new-born babe, /Striding the blast’. We cannot visualize that last metaphor: the sense that this babe can securely stride this blast owes more to our sense that what was suppressed is now exposed. In this extraordinary and extreme case, which tests any translator’s skills to the utmost, a translation that suggests that the horses and the babe really do come from nowhere will have failed. But a translator cannot avoid that failure unless he or she can provide equivalents in the target language and target culture for the intricately linked metaphorical implications of trammel, spur and horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air, and for the obscure 66

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

but potent, psychologically and dramatically coherent connections between the verbs jump, vault, striding and overleaps. How did Japanese translators such as Tsubouchi Shoyo, Fukuda Tsuneari, Kinoshita Junji and, more recently, Odashima Yushi, the second Japanese (after Shoyo) who translated all the plays by Shakespeare, try to solve this problem? So far as the choice of vocabulary is concerned, Kinoshita’s version is the most successful. Unlike the other three translators he does not interpret ‘trammel up’ as a ﬁshing term, although the link between this expression and later more obvious terms of horsemanship is not very clear. Even in his translation, however, the link between these terms and ‘catch’ (which appears soon after ‘trammel up’) and ‘jump’ (which appears a few lines later) has disappeared, so that the association with horses which is inherent in the ﬁrst part of the soliloquy is at best extremely vague. Kinoshita is altogether more successful in the second part than the other three translators. Instead of ‘o’erleaps itself ’ he has used a more direct expression, ‘over the back of the horse’. Of course it makes the translation easier to understand, but in a way it is a pity because Shakespeare never uses such direct expressions except, perhaps, ‘horsed’. All this shows how difﬁcult it is to reproduce Shakespeare’s metaphorical language in translations. Fukuda’s version is less successful. Here the horsemanship metaphors are much more explicit than in the original. The ‘sides of my intent’ has become the ‘sides of the horse of my intent’. Where Kinoshita used ‘over the back of the horse’, Fukuda used ‘over the saddle’. Shoyo’s version is more successful than Fukuda’s but not as successful as Kinoshida’s in reproducing Shakespeare’s metaphors. He uses (as Fukuda does) the expression ‘a galloping horse’ in connection with ‘Heaven’s cherubim’. Perhaps this is acceptable because Shakespeare himself used the word ‘horsed’. (It may sound strange that Kinoshita even here avoids using any expression which is too obviously connected with horsemanship. If it was translated back into English, his version would read ‘Heaven’s cherubim running astride the invisible air’.) On the whole Shoyo tends to be more restrained about making metaphors too explicit (and so easy to understand). Odashima’s version is probably about as successful as Shoyo’s version. Instead of offering ‘a galloping horse’, like Shoyo and Fukuda, he uses ‘a heavenly horse’ which is possibly more 67

Shakespeare in Japan

compact. Like Fukuda he uses ‘the saddle’ but whereas Fukuda’s Macbeth leaps over the saddle, Odashima’s Macbeth ‘tries to jump and reach the saddle’. Then Odashima adds an expression meaning ‘too eagerly’. Of course this makes the translation unquestionably clear, but at the same time it sounds somewhat verbose. Something similar happens with ‘the blast’. Odashima did what none of the other three translators did: in his translation ‘the blast’ reads ‘the blast of a trumpet’. One wonders if it is really necessary to make a translation of Shakespeare so unambiguous. Shakespeare’s blast is ambiguous. It is not only sonic, it is part of all of the horrifyingly furious and retributive commotion in the heavens, which the ‘babe’ somehow ‘strides’. It is linked to the winds, which are doubly ‘sightless’: they cannot see, and they cannot be seen. There is no trace, in Odashima’s unambiguous ‘blast of a trumpet’, of the ambiguity that ﬁred and inspired William Blake at the end of his poem, ‘London’: But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage Hearse.

Odashima is widely (and rightly) recognized as the translator who has made Shakespeare acceptable and familiar to the reading public and theatre audiences of Japan. Not only with his translations but also with his numerous books and essays he has contributed more than anyone else to popularizing Shakespeare. As a translator he tried to shorten whatever distance there was between Shakespeare and the Japanese. He chose vocabulary and expressions which are not too alien to his readers and audiences. Deguchi Norio always used his translations when he directed Shakespeare with young audiences in mind. Deguchi would not have dreamed of using Kinoshita’s translations which are extremely demanding. In many ways Odashima’s approach to the task of translating Shakespeare is the opposite of Kinoshita’s. It is true that his translations are easily accessible but how far they have caught the complexities of Shakespeare’s language is another matter. We have already seen how Shingeki actors – like most contemporary Western actors who earn their living by playing in ‘realistic’ modern drama – looked for psychologically consistent, 68

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

‘inside-out’ motivation. Such an approach assumes that the dramatic character is choosing his or her words. In Japan this basically naturalistic assumption had one peculiarly ironic consequence: it was unfamiliar and indeed anachronistic in traditional Japanese, as well as Shakespearean, terms. Ironically, both in Shakespearean poetic drama and in the traditional Japanese drama that Shingeki tended to repudiate, many speeches belong to the dramatic representation, not to the character. This cultural and historical irony now extends in further, disconcerting directions, since contemporary Western and especially American Shakespeare critics usually discuss Shakespeare’s poetic dramas as though they were, or might as well have been, written in prose. Nonetheless, we should ask a question that is certainly not fashionable or might seem startling or even perverse. Do characters like Othello or Macbeth choose the words and metaphors in their speeches, or do their words and metaphors sometimes belong not to the characters but to the poetic-dramatic representation of what the characters are thinking and feeling – which the characters do not and cannot fully understand? When Othello collapses into prose in the eavesdropping scene, is the character Othello choosing to speak prose, or is his prose not really ‘his’ at all, but a poetic-dramatic and shaming measure of the character’s unconscious degradation? One minute’s hard thought should be enough to suggest and conﬁrm that Shakespeare’s characters can never choose to speak prose, because they never know they are speaking verse. As the Japanese director Suzuki Tadashi astutely said, ‘Shakespeare writes speeches that the characters themselves may not understand.’7 (See Chapter 4.) But of course this richly complex kind of poetic-dramatic representation is hopelessly at odds with any ‘inside-out’ approach to character in modern realistic or naturalistic schools of acting. According to this approach, which so obsessed Shingeki actors and directors, the actor/character casts about for and then – Eureka! – discovers the very word or idea or metaphor that he wants. In recent years even the Royal Shakespeare Company has often favoured this ‘Eureka!-approach’: without any concern for how they are mangling Shakespeare’s verse, actors will stop everything while they search for, then discover, and then usually shout, whatever tremendous word or metaphor they suppose the character was looking for. 69

Shakespeare in Japan

In 1982, John Barton, revered director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, conducted a series of workshops with a group of actors from the troupe. They were recorded and shown on television in 1984 and in the same year they were published as a book, Playing Shakespeare. It is a tantalizing record (partly, at any rate) of how Barton, who understands the nature of Shakespearean language as well as anyone, tried to compromise with the demands of a contemporary audience. He admits that most audiences do not really listen to a complex text unless the actor makes them do so, and that this problem is most pressing in soliloquies and long or set speeches. He then asks, ‘How can an actor make the audience feel the story is still moving forward in a long speech and is therefore worth listening to?’ and answers his own question: the actor ‘must ﬁnd the language and make his listeners feel the words are coming out for the very ﬁrst time’.8 He tries to demonstrate this approach with several actors, and one, Richard Pasco, is asked to deliver the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech from As You Like It. When it was over Barton said, ‘You certainly made me feel I hadn’t heard that before.’ Pasco said, ‘Very broken up though, wasn’t it?’ and Barton answered, ‘Very broken up. But you made me feel I was hearing it for the ﬁrst time and you certainly made me listen.’ 9 Clearly Barton felt that as a professional director he had to do something with a very pressing situation and chose to accept it at the expense of the poeticdramatic representation of Shakespearean language. From an artistic viewpoint, however, such an approach is just as inappropriate and grotesque in Shakespearean poetic drama as it would be in opera, or Noh, or Kabuki. Of course we recognize that our own disturbance is not shared by most contemporary directors and Shakespeare critics. Indeed, that is part of the point we are wanting to make. For these reasons, which are both historical and challengingly contemporary, it seems all the more important to ask whether, when Macbeth says that his bloody hand will the ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red’ (II.ii.60 – 62), this terrifyingly powerful warrior is suddenly revealing that he is a secret bookworm who is able to produce the vividly original coinage: ‘incarnadine’. Of course he is not. Should we suppose that Macbeth also reveals a hitherto unexpected and tender consideration for those who are intellectually and linguistically less 70

Shakespeare in Japanese (II)

well equipped, by providing a gloss on that difﬁcult word ‘incarnadine’: ‘Making the green one red’? Of course not. We are wanting to dismiss any suggestion that the character Macbeth is making and then presenting such discoveries, like some visionary psychic miner: the discoveries in question belong to the representation, not to the character. But how should – or rather, how do – Japanese translators confront and deal with Macbeth’s lines? Of all the translators we have already mentioned, again Kinoshita is most conscious of the problem. He even analyses this speech in his essay, ‘Why is Shakespeare untranslatable?’10 and points out that the word ‘incarnadine’ is far more ‘difﬁcult’ than the words before and after it. The most important point is that he differentiates between ‘incarnadine’ (which contains the idea of ‘red’) and the ‘red’ which comes after it. He does not go so far as to ‘coin’ a Japanese equivalent of ‘incarnadine’ but he uses the Japanese word ‘ake’. This means ‘red’, but sounds more archaic and elegant than the more common ‘aka’ which is the word he uses for Shakespeare’s ‘red’. Fukuda used the word ‘kurenai’ (which like ‘ake’ is archaic and poetic) when he translated ‘incarnadine’. But he made a fatal mistake in using the elegant ‘ake’ for ‘red’, thus missing the crucial and sudden shift from the line with multisyllabic (and Latinate) words, ‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine’ to the phrase with monosyllabic (and English) words, ‘the green one red’. In Fukuda’s version it is the emotional tension of Macbeth himself rather than Shakespeare’s artistry that the audience is most likely to appreciate. Odashima (like Kinoshita) uses ‘ake’ for ‘incarnadine’, but uses ‘shinku’ for ‘red’. ‘Shinku’ means ‘pure red’ and sounds formal and vaguely Chinese. It is not clear why he did not use the simplest ‘aka’ for ‘red’. Here we can detect Macbeth’s psychological posture as a troubled warrior, although it is not as conspicuous as in Fukuda’s version. In Playing Shakespeare John Barton warned against ‘playing the general mood or emotion which the speech suggests to (the actor)’ and said, ‘It is so easy to play a kind of summary of a speech and not to discover it line by line as it is spoken.’ We have already seen what this warning led to, but it is quite pertinent as it is. It seems that a translator of Shakespeare is expected to pay attention to 71

Shakespeare in Japan

this warning and translate each word and each line rather than ‘the general mood or emotion’ of the text. Somewhat surprisingly it is Shoyo’s version that is the worst of the four. It is not even accurate. It should be mandatory for any translator to repeat (or rather rephrase) ‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine’ with ‘Making the green one red’. Shoyo does not. He compresses the two phrases into one, and for ‘red’ uses ‘makka’ which like ‘shinku’ means ‘pure red’ but sounds far more colloquial than ‘shinku’. Almost until the end of his life Shoyo kept revising his translations of Shakespeare so that they would become more congenial to contemporary Japanese readers and audiences. With his knowledge of classical Chinese and Japanese literature, he would not have found any problem about reproducing ‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine’ in appropriately austere and alien-sounding Japanese. The fact he did not do so is almost saddening. He must have faced the chronic dilemma of a translator of Shakespeare. On the one hand he wanted to be faithful to Shakespeare, but on the other he had to take into account the intellectual level of his readers and audiences. He chose a compromise, as John Barton was to do several decades later.

Notes 1. Kinoshita, Sheikusupia no Sekai (The World of Shakespeare) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973), p. 285. 2. Kinoshita, Dorama ni Miru Unmei (Fortune in Drama) (Tokyo: Kage Shobo, 1984), p. 89. 3. Fukuda, ‘On Translation’. See Chapter 2. 4. Kinoshita, Zuiso Sheikusupia (Essays on Shakespeare) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1969), p. 25. 5. Ibid., p. 30. 6. Kinoshita, Requiem on the Great Meridian and Selected Essays (Tokyo: Nan’un-do, 2000), pp. 245–46. 7. Performing Shakespeare in Japan, edited by Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 197. 8. John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 86–87. 9. Ibid., p. 89. 10. Kinoshita, Fortune in Drama, pp. 71–167.

72

PART 2: PRODUCTIONS AND CREATIVE CRITIQUES

4 Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

Producing Shakespeare in Japan, like translating Shakespeare into Japanese, has never been easy or simple. Only the hopelessly naïve and optimistic, whether they are Japanese or non-Japanese, would fail to realize what a daunting task it really is. It is doubtful how well the people who were responsible for the earliest productions of Shakespeare in Japan understood the historical, religious and political signiﬁcance of his work – probably not very well – but the fact that they presented Shakespeare as Kabuki adaptations shows their acute awareness of the difference or discrepancy between Shakespeare and Japanese drama. Clearly they felt that the only feasible way to produce Shakespeare which would be acceptable to the contemporary Japanese audience was to use the form of Kabuki, by far the most popular type of theatre of the day. The attempt certainly made Shakespeare congenial to the Japanese audience, but the result was more often than not signiﬁcantly different from the original. One of the ﬁrst productions of Shakespeare in Japan was a Kabuki adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, and while it was commercially successful – it was revived several times – it got rid of the racial tension between Shylock and the Christians which is a crucial element in Shakespeare’s version. Hamlet was also adapted as a Kabuki play, and again the attitude toward revenge and suicide was far less complex than it is in Shakespeare’s version. When a literary work belonging to one 73

Shakespeare in Japan

culture is ‘adapted’ so that it will ﬁt another culture, it is always inevitable that some elements in the original are lost and some elements which are not in the original are added. This is especially true of drama because ‘adaptation’ occurs on two levels: text and performance. Tsubouchi Shoyo tried to rectify this situation by presenting Shakespeare not as an adaptation but in translations, and Shakespeare’s plays together with those by Ibsen occupied the central position in the repertoire of the earliest Shingeki. As Shingeki became more political and more realism-orientated, however, Shakespeare became less fashionable and ﬁnally the outbreak of the Second World War extinguished any possibility of producing plays deriving from what were then hostile countries. After the end of the war Shakespeare’s plays began to be produced again, usually in Tsubouchi Shoyo’s translations, but it was only after Fukuda Tsuneari’s production of Hamlet in 1955 that Shingeki artists started to take Shakespeare more seriously. It is widely known that Fukuda’s Hamlet was inspired by Michael Benthall’s production of the same play which Fukuda had seen in London and admired. It would be unfair to Fukuda to call his own production an imitation of the Benthall production. Throughout his career, Fukuda was aware (and said and wrote) that Japanese actors were ill-equipped to play Shakespeare. He, of all people, would have understood that imitating an English production would be both impossible and meaningless. It is far more likely that Fukuda took hints from the English production and used these as a means of breaking away from the aesthetics of Shingeki which depended so heavily on psychological realism. We emphasized the importance of this break with Shingeki tradition in Chapter 2, but there is little to suggest that Fukuda attempted any more thoroughly radical examination or reappraisal of the relationship between Shingeki and traditional Japanese theatre. However, he did go on to translate and direct several more Shakespearean plays and used Kabuki actors in some of these productions. Another Shingeki artist who directed and sometimes acted in productions of Shakespeare was Senda Koreya, one of the leaders of the Haiyu-za (Actor’s Company). Senda was a Marxist who spent his youth in Germany and became an admirer (and later a Japanese translator) of Brecht. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare 74

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

productions he mounted for the Haiyu-za emphasized political aspects of the plays, but it must be mentioned that Senda, being a quintessential man of theatre, never made his productions superﬁcially didactic. At the same time it is clear that he never thought of the possibility of producing Shakespeare with some recourse to the aesthetics of traditional Japanese theatre. During the 1970s and 1980s, Masumi Toshikiyo, another director of the Haiyu-za troupe, presented a number of Shakespearean productions. His works were not strikingly original but they were always meticulously prepared and tried to grasp the central theme of the play as clearly as possible. He usually worked with the members of his own troupe, but in 1976 he directed Macbeth in which the role of Lady Macbeth was taken by Bando Tamasaburo, a popular and intelligent Kabuki actor specializing in female roles. When the production was brought to a Kabuki theatre in Kyoto, part of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene was played on the hanamichi, a long elevated passageway running from the main stage to the rear of the auditorium. Thus the scene was totally free from any sense of illusion of reality. Here there was at least a hint of how Shakespeare might (sometimes) be united with the indigenous theatre. This possibility was more fully explored by a number of theatre artists in Japan after the late 1960s, when the reaction against the hitherto dominant aesthetics of Shingeki became more active and powerful. The movement in question was given the rather vague title ‘underground theatre’, and had political as well as artistic implications. Three artists who were initially involved with this movement should be mentioned as they became the most important and interesting directors of Shakespeare working in Japan today. They are Ninagawa Yukio, Suzuki Tadashi and Deguchi Norio. Ninagawa originally trained as a painter, but changed his career and became a Shingeki actor, and soon turned to directing. He often surprised the audience by creating an unexpected and impressive stage picture. This tendency became even more conspicuous in his productions of Shakespeare. The ﬁrst Shakespearean production he mounted was that of Romeo and Juliet (1974) and the stage was dominated by an enormous, tower-like ediﬁce. It was produced by a commercial company and Ninagawa was able to spend a much larger budget than he had been used to. 75

Shakespeare in Japan

Romeo and Juliet was followed by King Lear (1975) and Hamlet (1978), and while the preoccupation with visual elements of the productions, mainly scenery and costume, remained overwhelming, they did not contain anything particularly Japanese. A major change took place with Macbeth (1980) which was set in medieval Japan. Warriors and ladies wore the costume of the period and props belonging to the period were used extensively. The scenery contained Japanese-style shoji, or sliding doors covered with rice paper. When these Japanese Macbeths opened their kimonos, one saw cherry blossom designs. In some scenes, cherry blossom fell so profusely that the theatre was overpowered with its strong and sweet but easily overpowering and then objectionable scent. In Japan, cherry blossom is commonly associated with ephemerality, and it seems the director used it as a symbol of the rise and fall of Macbeth. In visual terms the whole production was stunningly beautiful. Ninagawa also used a special device which made Shakespeare’s Macbeth a kind of play-within-a-play. The entire stage was transformed into a huge Buddhist altar, complete with a set of double doors. When the performance began, a couple of old women slowly approached the main stage and opened the double doors. Throughout the performance the women remained crouched on each side of the forestage, and when the play of Macbeth was over, they stood up and closed the double doors. In other words, the action of the play was conﬁned within the Buddhist altar and was meant to be a pseudo-religious experience of the old women which the audience was expected to share. There was one scene, however, which certainly departed from this premise: when Malcolm’s soldiers entered the auditorium from the rear and rushed to the stage with a loud war cry, the action was not conﬁned within the Buddhist altar. Some will dismiss this as a minor inconsistency; others will think that what is in question is not the mere hobgoblin of consistency, or even ‘conceptual’ clarity, but integrity. That Ninagawa’s productions so frequently provoke such arguments, and sometimes startlingly ﬁerce controversies, is one measure of his power and originality. In contemporary terms, his passion for combining – or is it just mixing? – different cultural and theatrical traditions produces what some regard as great theatre. However, such cross-cultural combinations need to be sustainable in some 76

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

dramatically meaningful way. If their effect is merely local, visually clever or exotic, they trivialize the different traditions in question. In historical terms, these controversies and Ninagawa’s international acclaim have a much older and by now irreversible origin. Hamlet and other Elizabethans would speak of going to hear, not see, a play. Not long afterwards, when the masque had become a favourite form within the court of James I, people began to speak of going to see a play, which prompted Ben Jonson’s ﬁercely vigilant protest in The Staple of News, which was ﬁrst performed in 1626. In that play’s ‘Induction’ a ‘Prologue’ appears and manages to say ‘For your own sake, not ours’, before he is interrupted by a gaggle of ‘Gossips’: Gossip Mirth, Gossip Expectation, Gossip Tattle and Gossip Censure. When Gossip Censure ﬁnally calls for ‘Peace’, the ‘Prologue’ is able to report the attitude of the disgruntled ‘Poet’: For your own sakes, not his, he bade me say, Would you were come to hear, not see, a play.

This irreversible change is written into the title of Dennis Kennedy’s immensely impressive study, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-century Performance.1 Kennedy and the directors he most favours – including Ninagawa – are especially concerned with the visual aspects of a production. Ninagawa’s Macbeth was exported to several countries outside Japan, including Great Britain, and almost immediately gained its director an international reputation. (Indeed, the Western coauthor of the present book wrote an almost adulatory review for The Times Literary Supplement.) When some of Ninagawa’s subsequent productions of Shakespeare were exported, the excited foreign reviews conﬁrmed and paid tribute to Ninagawa’s genius for creating impressive and exciting stage tableaux. In this sense his productions of Shakespeare are always inventive, enjoyable to watch and never for a moment dull. The crucial question is whether such an almost exclusively visual approach really does justice to Shakespeare who wrote for an ‘open’ stage with virtually no scenery. Neither Ninagawa nor his many Occidental and Oriental admirers emphasize Shakespeare’s own dependence on the summoning power of language. In an interview with several Shakespearean scholars conducted in 19952 Ninagawa talked at length about Japanese actors’ 77

Shakespeare in Japan

inadequacy to cope with Shakespeare’s language, and this inadequacy, he seems to suspect, derives at least partly from the Japanese lacking ‘an assertive, aggressive self ’ which is common in the West. He says: If you read the play, you may understand, but when you actually say the words, they start to lose meaning. And also, actors can’t project the self for long. They can hold it for maybe two lines but not for ﬁve. They need physical strength and a strong personality to maintain a strong, self-conscious presence.3

Ninagawa is really talking about the personality of Japanese people in general, and he ﬁnds the same kind of inadequacy in his audience which he feels his actors are burdened with. We do not have to accept his entire argument, because what is important here is that he ﬁrmly believes it is extremely difﬁcult for the Japanese audience to understand Shakespearean rhetoric and that he as a director has to do something about the situation. Therefore, he says, ‘I use visual images to make it easier for Japanese to understand the meaning of the scene.’4 In other words, his approach is supported by two assumptions: (a) Japanese audiences cannot understand Shakespearean rhetoric and (b) visual images make it easier for them to understand it. Ninagawa is very speciﬁc about the visual images he chose for his production of Macbeth: when I went back home and opened up our family Butsudan [Buddhist home altar] to light a candle and pray for my father, at that moment, I thought, ‘this is the right image’. I had two overlapping complex ideas: ordinary people watching Macbeth, and a Japanese audience looking at the stage and seeing through it to our ancestors. When I was in front of the Butsudan, my thoughts were racing. It was like I was having a conversation with my ancestors. When I thought of Macbeth in this way, I thought of him appearing in the Butsudan where we consecrate dead ancestors. Then we could change the setting when the witches appear, as in the Japanese expression, ‘To be tempted by time.’ We could create a setting like dusk, neither night nor day, when, according to a Japanese tradition, one often meets with demonic beings. I was thinking about the scene of Birnam Wood too. In that scene, they carry Kadomatsu-like tree branches [New Year’s gate decoration of pine sprigs], which look a bit funny. I thought I could change the setting to a lot of cherry blossoms moving, suggesting that the season is changing. As spring arrives, the whole scene would change, and the

78

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

doors of the Butsudan would turn into the great gates of a castle, and the shelves within the Butsudan would turn into its stately staircase. Everything would connect together in this way.5

Nobody could help admiring the inventiveness of the way this director conceives his production, but at the same time it is (glaringly) clear that the inventiveness is primarily visual. Ninagawa is right when he says Shakespeare’s language is difﬁcult for the Japanese, but we wonder if he realizes it is also difﬁcult for the English-speaking audience of today. It is full of references to events and things today’s audience knows very little about. It contains a lot of archaic expressions, and numerous words have a different meaning. Most importantly, Shakespeare’s speeches are primarily in verse. There is really no way to make them sound easier. We can even say that Japanese translations of Shakespeare are less difﬁcult to understand for the simple reason that they are essentially in contemporary Japanese. There have been countless attempts to produce Shakespeare in ‘modern dress’ so that the production, whether it was in the original English or in translation, would look familiar. Ninagawa’s productions which make Shakespeare visually Japanese belong to the same line. We must not think, however, that making Shakespeare visually familiar successfully solves the problem of the linguistic difﬁculty which is essentially aural. Moreover Shakespeare’s difﬁculty does not simply lie in his language. While it is true that his plays are highly enjoyable and that unsophisticated audiences can appreciate them, it is also true that they contain layers of metaphysical implications which are not easy to penetrate. How could it be otherwise when an author with exceptional intelligence is at work? Schoolchildren will no doubt have a good time watching Hamlet or Macbeth but it would be hypocritical to pretend that they can grasp the full meaning of these profound works. Macbeth for instance raises, among other things, a philosophical question about a hopelessly complicated and ambiguous relationship between fate and free will. This is a question any serious director of Shakespeare would want to engage, and while there is nothing wrong with making the production visually familiar, it does not much help the audience contemplate the metaphysical aspects of the play which because of their very nature cannot be easily visualized. Unfortunately, what 79

Shakespeare in Japan

is difﬁcult to visualize tends to be ignored in Ninagawa’s productions of Shakespeare. What is more, Ninagawa’s visual images such as the Buddhist altar and cherry blossom are so evocative to the Japanese audience that they are likely to convey associations which are not really relevant to the play Shakespeare wrote. They may even function as a kind of barrier between the play and the audience. To present Macbeth as a story enacted by dead ancestors is certainly clever and may make it look familiar to the Japanese audience, but it could also make it rather emotional and blur the very metaphysical nature of the work. It is widely known that Ninagawa is extremely faithful to the text. He hardly changes a word of the Japanese translation he uses. It is less widely known that he often uses devices which signiﬁcantly change the meaning and effect of the given text. Sometimes he even makes the speeches inaudible with music and sound effects. It seems that this tendency existed from the very beginning. When he directed his ﬁrst Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet, he was appalled (perhaps rightly) by the actors’ incompetence. In the interview already mentioned, he says: [the actors] were too rough, and the commercial actors didn’t remember the lines. When they read a line, it sounded like stereotyped samurai speech. The lines just didn’t mean anything. So I thought I should submerge them under Elton John’s music. Then you wouldn’t hear anything when the play started, only sound. I wanted strong contrasts, such as people running, with music coming from everywhere – a sort of visual rhetoric.6

It is not quite clear what he means by ‘visual rhetoric’, but he seems to refer to his own approach to the opening speeches of the play by which he almost totally ignored their meaning and used them as part of the sound effects. He repeated the same approach with the opening speeches of The Tempest. The ﬁrst scene of the play takes place on a ship in a storm. In his production an enormous prow of a ship was thrust towards the front of the stage, and the storm was represented with ﬂuttering of the sails and deafening sound effects. In Shakespeare’s time they probably used some sound effects, but Shakespeare clearly expected his actors to express the storm with their own bodies and voices, giving them speeches which describe 80

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

the storm and its effect on the ship and the people on board quite graphically. In Ninagawa’s production it was nearly impossible to make out what the actors were saying. A similar device was used yet again in Richard III, but this time the director used it at the end of the production. The production began with dead bodies of various animals crashing down on the stage from above, signifying no doubt that the whole world was in a chaotic state. The same animals were dropped again during Richmond’s speech which concluded the play. This time it was probably the director’s interpretation of the play rather than the actor’s incompetence that drove Ninagawa to this device. Perhaps he thought that the marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth and the union of the Houses of Lancaster and York do not mean the restoration of order at all. The world will remain in a state of chaos, he must have thought, and so Richmond’s speech is ‘meaningless’. It is certainly an interesting interpretation and can even be a valid one, but if we say we wish Ninagawa had conveyed the meaninglessness of the speech without drowning it with the sound of the carcasses crashing onto the stage, are we asking too much? The audience really should have been given a chance to judge for themselves whether the speech was meaningless. What happened was rather ironical because only the initiated members of the audience who knew the speech well enough were able to understand what the director was aiming at. Whatever the justiﬁcation may be for making Shakespeare’s speeches inaudible, it will puzzle the audience if the same device is used in a production with highly trained and highly experienced actors who by any standard cannot be called incompetent. In 1999 Ninagawa directed an English-language production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company. So far he is the only Japanese director who has worked with this prestigious troupe, and of course it is an eloquent proof of the kind of recognition he has been enjoying outside Japan. The role of Lear was played by Nigel Hawthorne, and to him the whole experience was, to put it mildly, a very ambivalent one. In his posthumously published autobiography – Hawthorne died in 2001 – he writes: Ninagawa wasn’t a great one for giving direction: in fact for the whole time I worked on the play he gave me not one single note. Having

81

Shakespeare in Japan

trained as an artist, he enjoyed tinkering with the sets, the props and the lights. He was like an opera director. My ﬁnished performance as the King was supposed to have travelled with me from London in my luggage. He was only there to make it look good. One word came instantly to mind – ‘HELP!’7

Ninagawa’s preoccupation with technical elements of the production made the actor even more uneasy. The rehearsal took place in Japan, and on the ﬁrst day of the rehearsal the actors were shown the stage of the theatre where the production eventually opened. In a short essay he contributed to Players of Shakespeare 5, a collection of essays by dozen or so Shakespearean actors, Hawthorne recounts the experience: there, on the stage, was one of the most chilling sights I have ever seen in my ﬁfty years as an actor. The scenery was up, and ready for the ﬁrst night; it was lit; the huge stage crew was standing by all dressed in black; the music had been composed and recorded; the sound effects were all ready; there were rehearsal clothes for us all to wear; and my wig had arrived from London. It was as though Ninagawa-san was saying: ‘All right. You’ve come over here to do King Lear. We’re all ready for you. Get up there and do it!’ At that moment I felt real terror and I would be very surprised had every single member of our company not felt as I did.8

One of the scenes where the actor was most uncomfortable was the storm scene, because rocks and sand kept falling from above during Lear’s speech. In the same short essay Hawthorne writes: The ‘rocks’ for the storm scene turned out to be huge lumps of wood covered with lead foil. . . . They were dropped from the grid and landed with the most almighty crash. I knew that if one of the stagehands was incorrectly cued, or wasn’t paying attention, just one of those ‘rocks’ was heavy enough to crush the living daylights out of me. . . . Sometimes a cue would be changed and I would have to wait for the wretched rock to land before continuing. There was considerable competition. The whole theatre shook. I couldn’t help feeling from time to time that the storm scene was difﬁcult enough without ‘rocks’ to contend with. A wag called it ‘The Rocky Horror Show’. Occasionally a fearsome-looking specimen would roll into the audience, provoking squeals of alarm. That didn’t help matters either, or inspire conﬁdence.9

82

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

In the autobiography Hawthorne records what happened about the storm scene during the rehearsal: [Ninagawa] was adamant that the falling rocks remain a feature and constantly resisted any appeal from the actors that they were dangerous and would land at irregular times, making it difﬁcult to accommodate the lines. I even went so far as to suggest they be cut, but the only concession Ninagawa would make was to reduce the number. Feeling that we could lose another half dozen without missing them, I suggested it but to no avail.10

Lear’s speech in the storm scene is unquestionably one of the greatest examples of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, and the least a director could do is to let the actor as well as the audience concentrate on the speech itself. When the role is played by an actor of Nigel Hawthorne’s calibre, it is almost insulting to punctuate and illustrate the speech with falling rocks, thus seriously restricting the actor’s movement and delivery. Not surprisingly the production incurred terrible reviews when it was brought to London. Critics were extremely hostile to Ninagawa’s direction and Hawthorne’s acting which, they felt, was not violent enough in the storm scene. It seems they had expected him to rant and rave. This reaction made the actor deeply unhappy. He told Kathleen Riley, the future author of Nigel Hawthorne on Stage: The words do so much for you. In the storm scene, you don’t need storm effects because Shakespeare has written the words and he paints the picture for the audience. Now you’ll always get a director who’ll want to put his directorial stamp on the storm scene, and here we’ve got the rocks and the sand and everything. When Robert Stephens played it here [in Stratford], he actually had rain, he had to stand in pouring rain, which must have been miserable to do, apart from anything else, but also unnecessary because, as I say, it’s all in the words. And so I think that when it comes to the big moments, if they’re played with intensity, it’s almost better than if they’re played at high volume because they have a reality to them then. I was criticized very much by the press for not ranting and raving, but I can ﬁnd no evidence in the text that he rants and raves. Through the centuries actors have seized on these moments like the storm scene and wanted to display their histrionic ability, and so they’ve let loose, but it seems to me to say much more about the actor than it does about the King.11

83

Shakespeare in Japan

Here Hawthorne is unhappy about the reaction of the press as well as about Ninagawa’s direction. It is a futile speculation of course, but one wonders what the reaction would have been like if the actor had been allowed to deliver the speech in whatever way he felt was ﬁtting without being disturbed by the falling rocks and sand. Critics might still have hated it, but at least Hawthorne would have been less uncomfortable because he would have had only himself to blame. To be fair to Ninagawa (and to Hawthorne), it must be mentioned that the essay in Players of Shakespeare 5 is concluded with the following sentence: ‘I’m proud to have been a part of Ninagawa-san’s gloriously rich and spectacular production, and feel deeply honoured to have been chosen to play King Lear on this unique occasion.’12 While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this remark, any reader of the essay, the autobiography and the records of the conversation the actor had with Kathleen Riley will realize that the feeling of sadness and misery far outweighs the feeling of pride and honour. Interestingly enough, this was not the ﬁrst time that English drama critics attacked Ninagawa’s production. In 1994 the director mounted an English-language production of Peer Gynt in London, and this was almost unanimously panned by reviewers. What is rather ironical is that many of the hostile reviewers were exactly the same people who had extravagantly praised the same director’s productions of Macbeth and The Tempest. What happened seems to be very simple. When the production was in Japanese which the critics could not understand, they loved it. When the production was in English which they understood perfectly well, they hated it. They did not seem to realize, however, that Ninagawa is an extremely consistent artist and his directorial approach to Macbeth and The Tempest was essentially the same as that to Peer Gynt and King Lear. So why did they respond positively to the Japanese-language productions? The obvious answer would be: they loved them because they were able to concentrate on non-verbal aspects of the productions without being bothered with what the actors were saying. Of course drama critics have every right to love or hate a production in a language they do not understand, but as professionals they owe it to their readers to examine the fundamental aesthetics of the production in question as carefully as possible 84

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

and if they belong to a theatrical tradition which they are not necessarily familiar with, then they should do as much homework as possible before they come up with ﬁnal judgements. Unfortunately that was not what happened when Ninagawa’s production of The Tempest went to Great Britain. In the interview with a group of Shakespearean scholars, Ninagawa explained how he had conceived the production of the play which had a subtitle ‘A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado’: I thought Sado Island in Japan should be the place! Zeami [the Shakespeare of Noh theatre] was exiled there. For the Japanese, Sado Island is also a place where convicts were sent. Then I wondered, ‘What would The Tempest look like if Japanese performed it?’ So, I developed the idea of setting the whole play within a rehearsal – which I thought would reduce the incongruity of the play being done in Japanese. If we set it during a rehearsal, we would be signaling our pretence. We would remain Japanese but suggest Miranda or Prospero in any style of clothing. It would be a sort of play within a play.13

Here Ninagawa is both honest and accurate. He does not say a word about the play to be rehearsed being ‘a Noh play’. (The more accurate translation of the Japanese subtitle would be ‘A Rehearsal on a Noh Stage on the Island of Sado’.) The ﬁnished product did have a Noh theatre-like building which was set on the stage, but soon it became unquestionably clear that the action of the play-within-the-play would not be conﬁned within this built-in theatre. This was no doubt a sensible decision on the part of the director because conﬁning the action of The Tempest there would have alienated it from the audience. In fact the director used every thinkable space of the stage. In one scene Ariel ﬂew in the air and perched on the top of the roof of the built-in theatre. Such staging is reminiscent of Kabuki perhaps, but it never happens in a performance of Noh. In another scene Stephano appeared exposing his bare buttocks. Again it is impossible in Noh because no Noh actor would expose his buttocks. What we were served was an abundant pot-pourri of Noh, Kabuki and Japanese folk art. It is true that various techniques and conventions of Noh were assimilated but more often than not they were used in a way which is irrelevant to or sometimes at odds with the original context. For example, in Act I, scene ii of the play Ferdinand draws a 85

Shakespeare in Japan

sword to attack Prospero but he is ‘charmed from moving’. Prospero ‘charms’ Ferdinand with his magical power. Ninagawa’s Prospero ‘charmed’ the young prince by throwing a bunch of white threads towards him. It was certainly spectacular and apparently quite effective. Unfortunately the bunch of white threads derives from one particular Noh play in which a demonic spider appears and tries to kill a samurai by throwing bunches and bunches of white threads towards him so that they will entrap him. To anyone with an elementary knowledge of Noh the association of the white threads with the demonic spider is too strong to ignore, which could make it rather difﬁcult to accept this scene without any reservation. It would be unrealistic to think that Ninagawa did not know what he was doing. While he was preparing the production, he must have realized all the time that he was not going to present the real thing. English reviewers were enthusiastic but unfortunately they missed the whole point. Many of them thought they were watching a performance of an authentic Noh play. Many of them revealed an appalling ignorance about and misunderstanding of Noh. Many of them knew nothing about the difference between Noh and Kabuki. Although they did not realize it themselves, they were simply responding to what was vaguely Japanese. All this was unfortunate, because Ninagawa is unquestionably a major director with a long and impressive track record. He deserves a fairer treatment. He should be praised or criticized for what he does, not for what he does not. In the interview already mentioned several times, Ninagawa, after explaining the reason why he uses visual images in his productions of Shakespeare, refers to Suzuki Tadashi almost casually: ‘Of course, if I produced the way Suzuki does and used only easily manageable scenes, rather than the whole play, it would be totally different.’14 This remark seems to delineate the most important difference between the two directors. Unlike Ninagawa, who originally trained as a Shingeki actor, Suzuki to this day has had virtually no working relationship with Shingeki. Like Ninagawa he emerged as one of the leading directors of the so-called underground theatre in Japan. He formed his own troupe and developed what is now widely known as ‘the Suzuki method’. According to what he himself said in an interview conducted with several scholars and critics in 1995,15 it 86

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

is ‘a basic training to increase focus and energy’,16 and it is taught and practised in Japan as well as in a number of countries outside Japan. While Ninagawa is far from indifferent to the way actors use their bodies and voices – how could a director be otherwise? – it should be noted that Suzuki is much more conscious of the problem and has become a teacher in this particular ﬁeld – a highly respected teacher for that matter. Both Ninagawa and Suzuki have been enjoying an international reputation, but the nature of their reputation is signiﬁcantly different. Ninagawa has brought his Japanese-language productions to countries outside Japan and has directed several English-language productions. Suzuki has done the same, but he has much more experience as director of English-language productions (of the works he himself composed) than Ninagawa. Unlike Ninagawa he has also been amazingly active as a producer. First in the remote mountain village of Toga in Toyama Prefecture and then in Shizuoka City he built theatres which he used as venues for an international festival. Thus on the one hand he introduced works by avant-garde directors from non-Japanese countries to the Japanese audience and on the other he helped non-Japanese theatre artists acquire ﬁrsthand knowledge of Japanese theatre. Today, holding a workshop in Japan, for instance, with non-Japanese directors and actors is a fairly common practice, but Suzuki was deﬁnitely a great pioneer in this ﬁeld. Suzuki started his career directing new works by contemporary Japanese playwrights, but soon he turned to preparing his own scripts. Some of them were collages of well-known plays, Western as well as Japanese, with a vaguely Japanese setting, and the unexpected clash between a scene from a Greek tragedy and a sentimental Japanese pop song, for example, made the productions both funny and poignant. Obviously he tried to connect elements which apparently cannot be connected, and by doing so alienated them all. He also adapted Western classics which were ‘recreated’ in a Japanese setting. In the 1995 interview Suzuki said: Usually an insane person is my main character; basically, the structure of my theatre is that a person with excessive illusions sits alone in a room in a real time, sometimes accompanied by an assistant. And the texts of Euripides and Shakespeare possess him or her.17

87

Shakespeare in Japan

He also said, ‘Like (Freud) I look at humanity in terms of individual consciousness.’18 For instance, his production of The Trojan Women was set in Japan immediately after the war. There was an old woman surrounded by debris produced by bombing. What the audience watched was the story of the fall of Troy told through the Japanese woman’s imagination. The miseries of the Trojans were identiﬁed with those of the Japanese, and the whole process vulgarized what to many people’s minds had been epic and mythic. Suzuki tried to examine the story of the Greek tragedy (which was heavily cut and rearranged, as is always the case with this director) in the context of Japanese culture and sensibility. Such juxtaposition is essential to Suzuki’s theatre. Like Ninagawa he used a Japanese frame, but while Ninagawa tends to impose the frame to a text of Shakespeare or Euripides which is basically unchanged, Suzuki usually fuses the frame with the contents, thus producing an organic and coherent entity. Suzuki has not directed Shakespeare as frequently as Ninagawa has, but he has produced several stimulating works based on Shakespeare. The most important of them is no doubt The Tale of Lear ﬁrst produced in 1984, which was of course inspired by King Lear. The scene was a home for elderly people (or perhaps a hospital) in today’s Japan, and the audience found a shabby old man who was almost certainly very ill and possibly insane. He was reading a book which, the audience learned, was Shakespeare’s King Lear. Gradually he and Lear became one and the same person in his fantasy, and the ‘tale’ of Lear (or rather part of it, because Suzuki as usual omitted a number of episodes and characters in the original version) as recreated in the old man’s mind was enacted before the audience. As the tale ended, the old man died. It is clear that the predicament and madness of Lear is identiﬁed with and examined by way of those of an ill-treated old man in the highly industrialized Japan of the twentieth century. This summary, brief as it is, amply shows how cleverly Suzuki interpreted Shakespeare in the context of Japanese culture today. But when the play was revived in 1988, he made a major revision and introduced a nurse working in the home (or the hospital) where the old man was living. She picked up the copy of King Lear lying on the ﬂoor which apparently the old man had 88

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

dropped unconsciously. She started reading it, and as she read on, the tale of Lear was enacted on the stage. Takahashi Yasunari, distinguished critic and scholar of English literature, analysed the device in his succinctly written essay: If the play-within-a-play structure was already clear in the ﬁrst production, the new version has added another framework. The continual presence of the Nurse leads us to suspect that the dramatic action going on onstage is not only a ﬁgment of the Old Man’s fantasy but also a representation in ‘real time’ of what she is reading. We keep wavering between the two possible perspectives. The double framework, in other words, is far from clear-cut. From time to time, the structure is turned inside out, and parallelism becomes intersection. For instance, the Nurse, besides being a nurse and thus situating the drama in a contemporary nursing home, plays the role of the Fool in Shakespeare’s text as well. . . . the Nurse even manages to carry on a semblance of conversation with the fantasizing Old Man. What she does is to read aloud the lines of the Fool directly from the book she is reading. It may look as if she is improvising, but she is not. Hence a preposterous ambiguity: is this a case of improbable coincidence between the Old Man enacting the story and the Nurse reading it, or should we rather think that the Old Man is enacting just what the Nurse is reading?19

It may be possible to detect in this ambiguity closeness to the kind of ambiguity which is found in numerous Noh plays. In these Noh plays a secondary character (played by ‘waki’, a secondary actor), a travelling priest for instance, meets a not particularly impressive character such as an old villager or an old woman (played by ‘shite’, a main actor). They have a conversation. Then the secondary character has a dream, and in this dream what looked like an unimpressive person appears, reveals his/her true identity as a renowned samurai or a court lady for instance, and narrates and enacts the events which belong to the past. Here the distinction between the present and the past is extremely vague. Does everything happen in the secondary character’s dream? Or do the past and the present coexist with each other? Does the person clearly belonging to the past re-enact what happened in the past or are we really watching what happened in the past? We never know, and perhaps we are not meant to know. In The Tale of Lear, the nurse wearing a modern uniform shares the time and place with the audience. Lear belongs to the 89

Shakespeare in Japan

past. The old man seems to belong to the present, but it may be possible to think that he is going to re-enact what has already happened to him as the nurse reads on or rather that he reveals his true identity by enacting the tale of Lear. Of course such interpretation may be too far-fetched, and Suzuki may not have had such an idea at all. Still it may not be altogether irrelevant because in the production Suzuki assimilated some techniques of Noh (and to a lesser extent those of Kabuki as well). Like Kabuki and Noh it was an all-male production. Kabuki actors who play female roles try to move like a woman and speak like a woman using a high-pitched voice. This is not the case with Noh. Noh actors, even when they play female roles, never try to imitate a woman either visually or aurally. (Suzuki went a step further. In his production some of the female roles were played by actors with beards.) In some scenes the actors’ movement was slow and highly stylized. They walked without lifting their feet from the ground. All this was strongly reminiscent of Noh. And yet it would be wide of the mark to call The Tale of Lear ‘a Nohstyle production’ of Shakespeare. Suzuki uses techniques and conventions of Noh and Kabuki, but he never simply reproduces them or emulates them. Rather he ‘deconstructs’ them by putting them in a totally irrelevant context. Sometimes he openly ridicules them. (This never happens in Ninagawa productions.) It seems that he is well aware of the fact that these techniques and conventions cannot be easily assimilated. When they are adopted in his productions, they become less sublime and less Japanese. Perhaps this was why the English-language production of The Tale of Lear with English-speaking actors turned out to be successful. Almost violently, Suzuki had destroyed the connection between techniques of Noh and Noh as a dramatic genre. Suzuki’s concern about style is inseparable from his preoccupation with language. In the interview already mentioned, he discussed peculiarities of Shakespeare’s language: I found it interesting that in Shakespeare, words for the inner worlds are clearly indicated. For example, ‘Blow, winds’ and ‘rage, blow’. These are not so much expressions of anger or sadness as metaphors of an inner world – or they present poetically the condition that such an inner world produces. Shakespeare’s poetry excels in this respect. In Macbeth, ‘If it were done when ’tis done’ is not what you would speak consciously, but it is accurate as an expression of consciousness.

90

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

A monologue is not a natural form. It is always the speech of a stage character. Shakespeare writes speeches that the characters themselves may not understand, but others do. In other words, there is a gap between the character Macbeth and what he says. I’m very sensitive to what lies in that gap.20

He also said, ‘The most interesting thing is the power of Shakespeare to make the invisible world visible through the poetic use of words’.21 It would be unthinkable to hear these remarks from Ninagawa. Suzuki, unlike Ninagawa, does not try to make Shakespeare’s poetry ‘easy’ for the audience with visual means. It is true that he heavily cuts Shakespeare’s texts, but he is extremely demanding of the actors (and of the audience as well) in handling what he retains. Of course Suzuki does not categorically deny Ninagawa’s approach. Like Ninagawa, he often uses visual images which are distinctly Japanese, though they tend to be disturbing rather than beautiful. In the same interview Suzuki commented on Ninagawa as director: Ninagawa was accepted [overseas] simply because he had a power to command the space. If we heard only the words on the textual level, we would ﬁnd them weak . . . . But, fortunately, Ninagawa is a powerful director, and his work was well received. It was because of Ninagawa’s talent as a metteur en scène. In other words, whether one is accepted in foreign countries or not greatly depends on whether one can ﬁll the space with energy and create striking visual effects.22

When people suggest that his productions of Shakespeare were intended for an international market, Ninagawa gets angry. He has his reason because he only had the Japanese audience in mind and had no prospect of ‘importing’ his work when he was directing Macbeth. At the same time, we should accept the fact that his productions were well received outside Japan mainly because of their ‘Japaneseness’. Suzuki seems to be more realistic about the way his work is received outside Japan. With all his preoccupation with Shakespearean language he is sober enough to admit that Japanese productions of Shakespeare will not be well received outside Japan (where a majority of the audience does not understand Japanese) unless they contain ‘striking visual effects’. He is therefore very 91

Shakespeare in Japan

pessimistic about the possible response Deguchi Norio’s productions of Shakespeare will get if they are brought overseas. Deguchi has a stronger tie with Shingeki than Suzuki and Ninagawa. He was a member of Bungagu-za, one of the oldest and most prestigious Shingeki companies, and in 1971 he directed Twelfth Night for the troupe. By deﬁnition it was a Shingeki production of Shakespeare, and it did retain traces of attempts at orthodoxy which were characteristic of the genre. For instance the actors still wore pseudo-Elizabethan costume. But the production as a whole pleasantly departed from such pointless endeavours and contained scenes and dialogues which would have been unacceptable by the standard of the stuffy, old-style Shingeki. For instance, the production began with the naked Orsino washing himself in a bathtub before he dressed himself properly with some help from the servants. The script had been freely changed by the director so that it contained references to then-fashionable slang and jokes. It was Twelfth Night in the idiom of an average television viewer of the day, and yet Deguchi ﬁrmly grasped the structure and plot of the play so that the whole production was an exceptionally moving and effective one in which both farce and romance successfully came through. There may have been people who felt that Deguchi was too frivolous and unorthodox to be taken seriously as a director of Shakespeare, but by all accounts he has proved himself to be quite the opposite. He eventually left Bungaku-za and in 1975 organized his own troupe, the Shakespeare Theatre (perhaps better known in English as the Shakespeare Theatre Company) and started presenting Shakespeare in a style which struck many people as quite refreshing and almost revolutionary. The company staged Odashima Yushi’s translations (which we discussed in Chapter 3) as they appeared. Each new Deguchi production was staged in the tiny Jean-Jean theatre in downtown Tokyo, which could not seat more than about 90 people, although it was possible to jam another 90 down the aisles or in the back of the auditorium. These ﬁgures were provided by Nonaka Shigi, who was then a member of Deguchi’s company. When that company ﬁnished presenting its complete Shakespeare cycle, she left it, as many former members did, and founded the Tokyo Shakespeare Company. This company’s production of Antony and Cleopatra was 92

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

the very last Shakespeare production in the Jean-Jean, before it closed. The production had a very short run, and because the stage area was so tiny, just a few square metres, it sometimes seemed dangerously likely in crowded scenes that some actors might fall off. But the translation used by the actors – who included the remarkable Yoshida Kotaro, who is one of the most impressive Shingeki actors now working in Japan – was specially prepared (as usual) by the director. We offer these details not to be anecdotal, but to make a general point that is perhaps not generally known outside Japan, or Tokyo. Although the number of Shakespeare productions in Japan each year may look astounding and for that reason has occasioned international comment, and although the dedication in question can be no less remarkable – including, in this case, an immensely distinguished actor and a new but unpublished translation – most such productions are tiny affairs, which are presented in very small venues and run for no more than a few days. Deguchi’s recent production of Hamlet, performed without an interval in one such small venue, was electrifying, and far more absorbing than his Tokyo Globe production of Timon of Athens (both starring Yoshida Kotaro) where there was money enough for sets and costumes and a bevy of wheelchairs. In his ﬁrst complete Shakespeare cycle in Jean-Jean, Deguchi did not – and quite simply could not – depend on elaborate scenery and costumes, which had been taken for granted by Shingeki artists. His actors wore everyday clothing and worked on a bare as well as tiny stage. Although these economies were obviously determined by ﬁnancial exigencies, they also answered to Deguchi’s own deep-rooted suspicion about the use of visual elements in a production. The result was strikingly Elizabethan because – like Shakespeare – Deguchi depended almost exclusively on actors’ bodies and voices for the dramatic effect. In a way he was even more ‘Elizabethan’ than Shakespeare. Little as we know about the conditions of the original staging of Shakespeare’s plays, it is likely that expensive costume was used. Deguchi even got rid of that. Deguchi’s decision to depend primarily on his actors was artistically right, but it was a courageous one. They were far from welltrained and had a difﬁcult time trying to articulate Shakespeare’s speeches. Frankly it is still a problem with this troupe. Over the 93

Shakespeare in Japan

years, Deguchi’s actors became more competent but most of them left the company. (Some such as Yoshida Kotaro are now working as leading Shakespearean actors in the country.) Deguchi himself has been spending years training semi-amateur actors. When the Tokyo Globe Theatre was established, Deguchi and others begged in vain that some part of the then plentiful funds, that were used to import visiting companies, could be used to set up an acting school. The original members of the company compensated for their lack of training with their energy and youth, and Deguchi’s lively and fast-moving productions of Shakespeare quickly gained popularity among young audiences. Deguchi used Odashima’s translations but he often changed them adding vocabulary of young Japanese of the period and scattered them with such unlikely features as well-known television commercials and popular songs. He was not hesitant about using products of modern technology such as a telephone or a bicycle. These practices are now universally accepted but in the 1970s they were still frowned upon by conservative adherents to the old-fashioned Shingeki. The company eventually staged every single play by Shakespeare – some of them more than once – and Deguchi still remains the only Japanese director who has such an impressive achievement to his credit. It might be easier to deﬁne Deguchi’s work by what he did not do rather than by what he did. He did not use elaborate and expensive scenery and costume and in this sense his productions were the opposite of the kind of productions favoured by Ninagawa. He did not try to assimilate techniques and conventions of traditional Japanese theatre, and in this sense his work was signiﬁcantly different from the kind of work represented by Suzuki. It is true that he sometimes used Japanese settings for his productions. For example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was set in a bar. Later he prepared another version of the same play which took place in a school. But a bar and a school belong to modern Japan, and there is nothing conspicuously Japanese about them. In fact Deguchi is highly sceptical about making a Shakespearean production obviously ‘Japanese’. His remark in an interview with a group of scholars and critics conducted in 199523 is worth quoting at some length: 94

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

Shakespeare was becoming increasingly remote from our contemporary social reality. So I got the idea of pulling it back to our daily reality by returning Shakespeare to the level of my personal history. For me, making it ‘Japanese’ is not the ultimate aim. The important thing is to ﬁnd a place where I and the text can converge. I also know that you can’t cross borders by ‘Japanization’. ‘Making it Japanese’ is already about making a border where exoticism begins. But I think exoticism is partly due to the ignorance of other nations. If there were no such ignorance, mysteriousness would not exist. Once you know that, it becomes an ordinary matter. When people prostrated themselves before British productions, they were worshipping exoticism. Now we are used to seeing British companies, so there’s no longer anything mesmerizing about them. For that reason, I don’t think we should emphasize our ‘Japaneseness’. The images most people have of Japan at the present time derive from the period when we were an agricultural society: that is, old Japan, the ‘so-called Japan’. However, today’s Japan is only partly traditional Japan. It is difﬁcult to give an exact deﬁnition; nobody can say, ‘This is Japan.’ But it is also true that if we present Japan in all its ambiguity, foreigners would not understand. It means that ‘Japanese Shakespeare’ production cannot be recognized unless we simplify our Japaneseness. I don’t think that is universalization; Japanization is simply a particularization.24

Deguchi did not name names, but he was almost certainly thinking of Ninagawa among other people when he made this remark. Ironically enough, however, Deguchi has something in common with Ninagawa, although Deguchi is likely to be the ﬁrst person to deny it. They are both of them popularizers of Shakespeare. They both feel Shakespeare is difﬁcult (or remote). Ninagawa retains the text and adds visual images to make it easier. Deguchi changes the text itself. Of course it will be desirable if the text remains intact, but if the difﬁculty lies in the text itself, how can we solve the problem without doing something to the text? Even in England people felt Shakespeare was too uncivilized or too remote and changed his plays extensively. This went on for more than two centuries after the Restoration. During this period the English audience was offered not Shakespeare’s King Lear but Nahum Tate’s version of the play. Although we now tend to disapprove of what Davenant, Dryden, Cibber and Garrick did to Shakespeare, there is nothing intrinsically wrong in making Shakespeare ‘ﬁt’ and there is no fundamental difference between what they did and what 95

Shakespeare in Japan

acclaimed directors such as Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman are doing today. We cannot categorically say that their attempts are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. What matters is whether or not each individual attempt works. Deguchi is critical of Suzuki as well. This time he named names. He mentioned Suzuki and Kara Juro, another highly successful director (though not of Shakespeare) and said: Since the 1960s, when the high-growth period began, I think that Suzuki Tadashi and Kara Juro have perpetuated the agricultural society’s forms within their work and have nostalgia for it. However, The Shakespeare Theatre has a sensibility that is totally urbanized. . . . In the 1970s (Suzuki and Kara) still tried to represent the old popular culture that was rapidly disappearing in reality. They were regarded as ahead of their time, but, in reality, they were behind it.25

This is a difﬁcult point. Deguchi’s argument sounds convincing so far as the change of economic condition is concerned, but we suspect what Deguchi calls ‘agricultural sensibility’ is still prevalent – in fact, far more prevalent than he feels. The economic condition of a country may change rapidly, but usually it takes much longer for the sensibility of a nation to change fundamentally. Even if Deguchi is right, he will have to accept a very plain fact that on the whole Suzuki and Ninagawa have been highly successful outside Japan, and this success may have been due to the ‘agricultural sensibility’ which permeates their works. It is intriguing to note that Suzuki made the following remark in connection with Deguchi’s work: ‘There is no guarantee for success overseas even if a production is viewed as a successful staging in Japan.’26 Very true. At the same time, we should always bear in mind that a lack of success overseas does not mean that the production in question is an artistic failure. It is true that Deguchi has virtually no international reputation and it is highly unlikely that he will ever earn one. But he is a serious director who has been exploring ways – difﬁcult but artistically right ways – to make Shakespeare acceptable to Japanese sensibility. If he is not readily accepted outside Japan, the phenomenon will serve as a proof of an excruciatingly complicated situation which almost always hampers the so-called international cultural exchange.

96

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage

Notes 1. Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, in 1993. The second edition which appeared in 2001 contains more detailed discussion of Ninagawa’s work. 2. ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, edited by Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 208 –19. 3. Ibid., p. 211. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., pp. 212–13. 6. Ibid., pp. 210 –11. 7. Nigel Hawthorne, Straight Face (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002), p. 313. 8. Robert Smallwood (ed.), Players of Shakespeare 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 185–86. 9. Ibid., pp. 187–88. 10. Hawthorne, Straight Face, p. 318. 11. Kathleen Riley, Nigel Hawthorne on Stage (Hatﬁeld: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), pp. 293– 94. 12. Smallwood, Players of Shakespeare 5, p. 191. 13. ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, p. 213. 14. Ibid., p. 211. 15. ‘Interview with Suzuki Tadashi’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, pp. 196–207. 16. Ibid., p. 199. 17. Ibid., p. 196. 18. Ibid. 19. Takahashi, ‘Tragedy with Laughter: Suzuki Tadashi’s The Tale of Lear’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, p. 113. 20. ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, pp. 196– 97. 21. Ibid., p. 197. 22. Ibid., p. 205. 23. ‘Interview with Deguchi Norio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, pp. 183– 95. 24. Ibid., p. 190. 25. Ibid., p. 188. 26. ‘Interview with Suzuki Tadashi’, p. 205.

97

5 Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

Fukuda Tsuneari’s Horatio’s Dairy is not the only work of Japanese literature which was inspired by Hamlet. It is not the best known either. Shakespeare’s play became the source of a number of novels and short stories produced in twentieth-century Japan. There might seem to be nothing striking about this phenomenon. After all Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most popular play, and had an extraordinary inﬂuence in nineteenth-century Germany and later Russia, as well as England. Indeed, one measure of the way in which Hamlet was assimilated in Germany and Russia was that some writers in these countries became sharply critical of Prince Hamlet before there was any equivalent critical debate in England, where critics from Coleridge to A.C. Bradley persisted in taking a Hamlet-centred view of Hamlet. Nonetheless, there is something unique about the appeal Hamlet had to Japanese intellectuals, because many of the novelists wrote their versions of Hamlet with the idea of self as their central theme. Although Japan began to modernize or, rather, Westernize itself, during the second half of the nineteenth century, it remained a strongly patriarchal and feudalistic society, especially until the end of the Second World War in 1945. It is sobering to realize that it was only after the end of the war that Japanese women were legally regarded (if not treated) as men’s equals, and that the supremacy of the eldest son over his younger brothers was abolished. To behave as an independent, self-determined person was not at all easy for many members of this society, and a striking number of Japanese authors identiﬁed their own dif98

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

ﬁculties with the difﬁculties that confront the Prince of Denmark. Of the Japanese writers who produced Hamlet-inspired works, at least four should be mentioned: Shiga Naoya, Kobayashi Hideo, Dazai Osamu and Ooka Shohei. Shiga Naoya’s short story Claudius’s Diary (Kurodiasu no Nikki, 1912) is especially important in Shakespearean terms because, as readers of Ashizu Kaori’s English-language translation of the story which recently appeared in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2004) will realize, Shiga was the ﬁrst writer to maintain that the ‘Mousetrap’ fails. Later, in 1917, W.W. Greg took a similar view in his essay ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’,1 which prompted the appalled John Dover Wilson to write (and dedicate to Greg) his immensely inﬂuential What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (1935). Although Dover Wilson’s account of what happens in the ‘Mousetrap’ was (as we shall see) tendentious, and although only a few Western critics went on worrying about Greg’s heretical arguments (without knowing Shiga’s), the idea that the ‘Mousetrap’ fails eventually resurfaced in Peter Hall’s revolutionary 1964 production with David Warner as Hamlet, and then in the 1980 BBC production with Derek Jacobi as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as his truly mighty opposite. The idea is by now familiar, though not orthodox, and is taken for granted by the actor and director Michael Pennington in his absorbing Hamlet: A User’s Guide.2 Shiga’s remarkable story of 1912 and the essay he published the following year need to be sifted, and given their place in this complicated history. Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) is generally regarded as the master of the so-called ‘I-novel’ (‘watakushi shosetsu’). The ‘I-novel’ is a pathetically unique type of modern Japanese novel which dominated the Japanese literary scene for nearly a century until the 1970s or 1980s. In this kind of novel the protagonist, who frequently acts as the narrator, is a thinly disguised portrayal of the novelist him or herself. Despite the term ‘I-novel’, the basic expectation was not that the story would be told in the ﬁrst person (many are not), but that its events would be based on the novelist’s own experiences. This expectation, which many British and European novelists and readers might by then have regarded as a weakness or limitation, distinguished the Japanese ‘I-novel’ from earlier nineteenth-century classics such as David Copperﬁeld, Great Expectations or Jane Eyre, in which the protagonist is also 99

Shakespeare in Japan

the narrator. In these English novels we hear the adult narrator’s voice from the ﬁrst and then see how, as the novel unfolds, the protagonist (who is ﬁrst seen as a child) is turning into the narrator. This distinctive closing of a gap between the protagonist and narrator is narratologically demanding as well as psychologically fascinating, and Dickens and Charlotte Brontë both aim at some kind of impersonality: to confuse Dickens with David or Pip, or Charlotte Brontë with Jane would signal a slack or sentimental reading. The Japanese ‘I-novel’ was predicated on a very different and rather naïve understanding of realistic and more speciﬁcally, naturalistic writings of nineteenth-century Europe which, the Japanese authors thought, respected the idea of the truth more than anything else. Since the most unarguable truth to a novelist is his or her own experiences, it became prevalent to write a novel about them. Although such a novel may be truthful, it very easily becomes mundane or self-indulgently trivial. What distinguishes Shiga from most practitioners of the ‘I-novel’ is that he does not simply relate events in his life but is more profoundly concerned to analyse the idea of self. Of course it would be absurd to assume that every single event in Shiga’s novels actually took place, and like most ‘I-novel’ writers he also produced works which had nothing directly to do with his own experiences. Claudius’s Diary is one such work. However, although the story is clearly based on Hamlet and is a no less ‘intertexual’ work than Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, it is signiﬁcant that Shiga probes into the idea of self even in this story. In fact his analysis is twofold. Ostensibly the story is a diary written by Claudius and so it can be understood as Claudius’s examination of his own self, but at the same time it is a close examination of the emotion and psychology of Hamlet as well. According to his own introduction to the story, Shiga was moved to write the story after he had seen the Literary Society’s 1911 production of Hamlet (which used Tsubouchi Shoyo’s translation). In this respect Shiga’s story could be compared with D.H. Lawrence’s account of Hamlet in the ‘Amleto’ chapter of Twilight in Italy (1916): both Shiga and Lawrence were prompted to present their highly critical and original views of Hamlet after seeing the play performed by actors they disliked. Shiga found Claudius as played by Togi Tetteki far more sympathetic and likable (or 100

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

respectable) than Hamlet as played by Doi Shunsho, who seemed to Shiga frivolous and repugnant. Common sense might suggest that an actor’s interpretation of a dramatic character does not always convey what a playwright has in mind, but Shiga, being a hard-core ‘I-novelist’ who took his own impressions very seriously, concluded that the Prince of Denmark is an unworthy hero. Here it is worth noticing that Shiga, and indeed D.H. Lawrence, assume that if something is wrong with Hamlet then something is wrong with Hamlet: although their reappraisals of the prince were severe and indeed unprecedented in Japan or England, they do not directly challenge, and in an odd way continue, the long tradition of Hamlet-centred views of Hamlet. More importantly, Shiga’s sympathetic identiﬁcation with Claudius led this subtle and imposing novelist to feel, when watching the ‘Mousetrap’ scene, that he himself would have behaved like Claudius: in Shiga’s view, the fact that Claudius terminates the performance of The Murder of Gonzago – and Hamlet’s own grossly insulting and ﬁnally threatening commentary – did not establish that Claudius had killed King Hamlet. Of course this view was entirely at odds with Hamlet’s own view that the ‘Mousetrap’ was a complete success, so that Hamlet himself never again worries that the ghost may have been a devil sent to take advantage of his melancholy. Consequently, Shiga was unwittingly opposing all those earlier and later Western critics whose Hamlet-centred readings suppose that the ‘Mousetrap’ must have been successful because Hamlet says so. In What Happens in ‘Hamlet’, John Dover Wilson’s account of what happens when the king ‘rises’ terriﬁed by the thought that ‘Hamlet knows all!’, reads like a vivid stage direction or extract from the scenario for the ﬁlm Olivier had not yet made: [Claudius] pulls himself to his feet, and, squealing for light, he totters as fast as his trembling knees will carry him from the terrible, the threatening room. King Mouse has become a shambling, blinking paddock.3

In his vastly inﬂuential Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), A.C. Bradley had similarly assumed that ‘Hamlet’s device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to expect’ – while also professing to know which speech Hamlet had written and inserted into The Murder of Gonzago: 101

Shakespeare in Japan

He had thought that the King might ‘blench’, but he [Claudius] does much more. When only six of the ‘dozen or sixteen lines’ have been spoken he starts to his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed Court.4

The idea that Claudius is unable to control himself also resurfaces in the new Norton edition of Shakespeare when Stephen Greenblatt writes, ‘after the King has stormed out in a rage’.5 But of course there is no such stage direction in the Folio or Quarto editions of Hamlet, and we do not know what happened in the ﬁrst performances at the Globe. Unfortunately, we also do not know how this scene was staged in the performance that Shiga saw in the Imperial Theatre. But in Peter Hall’s 1964 production Gertrude ﬁnally lost patience and slapped the grossly insulting Hamlet hard, whereupon Claudius rose, called for lights and stopped what was becoming a scandal, not an entertainment. In the BBC production, Patrick Stewart’s Claudius similarly stopped the show without in any sense losing control, or betraying himself. Bradley, Dover Wilson and Greenblatt are all inventing stage directions which they then treat as part of Shakespeare’s text or script. At this point we need to set Shiga’s story to one side for a moment and turn to Shakespeare’s play. We also want to distinguish between two different aspects of the basic problem in this scene. Obviously, the ﬁrst question is whether Claudius does betray his guilt in some unequivocal way, as Hamlet supposes. But this also involves a practical problem of staging: if Hamlet is right and Claudius does betray his guilt, how does he betray it, and to whom? If Claudius behaves like Dover Wilson’s ‘blinking, shambling paddock’ or the weak bloat king in Olivier’s ﬁlm version, how can we possibly make sense of the prayer scene, in which Claudius speaks as if nobody but God knows of his ‘offence’? Dover Wilson’s Claudius is terriﬁed by the thought that ‘Hamlet knows all!’, but Shakespeare’s Claudius is not. Far from speaking like a man who has just betrayed his guilt, he expresses no fear that anything in ‘this world’ might make it difﬁcult or impossible to ‘retain’ those ‘effects for which I did the murder, / My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen’ (III.iii.54–55). Dover Wilson is clearly wrong about this. Moreover, although this later scene clearly shows that Claudius has murdered his brother, this is only 102

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

clear to the offstage audience. No character in the play, including Hamlet, hears what Claudius says when he is trying to pray. Moreover, if the ‘Mousetrap’ has been a success and Claudius has betrayed his guilt in some unequivocal way, it is difﬁcult to make sense of the other characters’ responses. How, for example, do we make sense of Horatio’s apparently doubtful ‘Half a share’ (III.ii.267), which is often cut in performance? Would Polonius have the effrontery to tell Gertrude that Hamlet’s ‘pranks’ – pranks! – ‘have been too broad to bear with’ (III.iv.2)? Would Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dare to speak at such length to Claudius himself about the ‘cess of majesty’ and their ‘Most holy and religious fear’ (III.iii.8, 15), if they thought Claudius had killed King Hamlet? Zefﬁrelli’s fast-food ﬁlm of Hamlet shows Ian Holm’s thunderstruck Polonius suddenly guessing what Claudius must have done, but then it became difﬁcult to explain why this Polonius speaks as he does when he is next alone with Claudius in III.iii. Some directors, like Grigori Kozintsev and Ingmar Bergman, stave off such difﬁculties by making the whole court corrupt, but what should we then make of Gertrude’s response to whatever she sees, while sitting next to Claudius? Just how wicked, or stupid, do we think Gertrude is? In Peter Wirth’s 1960 production, the disturbed Claudius removed his hand from Gertrude’s when Lucianus came on, and Gertrude looked at Claudius ‘in shock and dismay’ as she ‘ﬁnally begins to suspect what her doting husband may have done to win her’.6 Such locally thrilling theatrical moments have dramatic consequences. If Gertrude thinks that Claudius murdered her ﬁrst husband, she will need to be as brazenly, chillingly self-possessed as Lady Macbeth when she tells her son, ‘Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended’ (III.iv.9), or when she asks her seemingly shocked question, ‘As kill a king?’ What the text recalcitrantly suggests is that these characters – Gertrude, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and even Horatio, who has been told what to watch for – have not seen Claudius betraying his guilt in public. They are indeed ‘dismayed’, as Bradley suggests, but not for the reason that Bradley suggests. They have been watching The Murder of Gonzago, in which a king is murdered by his nephew, not his brother. They have also been watching and listening to Hamlet, whose insulting choric commentary wrecks the performance and ﬁnally – just before the ‘King rises’ and stops the show – threatens his royal uncle. 103

Shakespeare in Japan

In the BBC -Time Life production the difﬁculty of making sense of these multiplying difﬁculties disappeared – because the ‘Mousetrap’ fails. Patrick Stewart’s Claudius did not lose control, did not wobble his knees or his goblet and did not ‘rush’ away in panic or ‘rage’. Indeed, there was a very pointed reversal of the business with the torch in Olivier’s ﬁlm. After receiving the ‘lights’, Stewart’s Claudius walked across to Hamlet and held up the torch to examine his nephew’s face. When Jacobi’s Hamlet laughed nervously and covered his face with his hands, Claudius shook his head and then walked away, as if reluctantly but ﬁnally giving up on this hopeless case. Hamlet’s own view that the ‘Mousetrap’ is a success can only be salvaged if we suppose that there is some way in which Claudius somehow betrays his guilt to Hamlet, but not to the other characters, while also remaining entirely unconscious that he has done so and that ‘Hamlet knows all!’ To convey this in a staging would be exceptionally difﬁcult, or impossible, in practical terms. Nonetheless, Anthony Dawson’s inﬂuential and generally admirable study of Hamlet in performance maintains that this is what came through, against all the odds, in Peter Hall’s 1964 production, when Brewster Mason played Claudius: The court watched carefully for the royal cue. It came a few moments later when the King called for lights. Far from being a spontaneous manifestation of guilt, the interruption became, in Brewster Mason’s hands, a mark of ‘offended dignity’; he was publicly rebuking Hamlet for an impertinent ‘social gaffe’ (Times), i.e. for daring to enact a nephew’s murderous inclination toward his uncle. But there was also a ﬂicker of fear in his eye, noticeable to Hamlet, if not to the rest of the court. This led to an electric moment when the two met ‘eye to eye’ with Claudius ‘silently accepting the challenge of a duel to the death’ (Mervyn Jones, Tribune, 27 Aug.) Here perhaps was Hamlet’s strongest moment before the ﬁnale, but the King had clearly won nevertheless, by turning his nephew’s theatrical test into a public relations victory.7

Like Dover Wilson and Bradley, Dawson is clearly wrong. No audience could possibly have seen these ‘ﬂickers of fear’ or even Claudius’s ‘eye to eye’ contact with Hamlet. Dawson’s account actually shows (as he has privately and very generously conﬁrmed) that he never saw the production in question. John Bell, who played Guildenstern in Hall’s 1964 production and is now 104

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

the very distinguished director of the Bell Shakespeare Company, Australia’s nearest equivalent to a National Theatre, told us privately that when Peter Hall ﬁrst assembled his cast he announced that what was to be unusual in this production was that the ‘Mousetrap’ would fail. One unfortunate effect of the ‘Hamlet-centred’ tradition that sees the play through Hamlet’s eyes is that it fails to distinguish, at some very important moments, between what the audience knows and what Hamlet knows. The main object of the ‘Mousetrap’ is to provide Hamlet himself with conclusive proof that Claudius is guilty and that the ghost is not a devil. In the soliloquy that concludes Act II, Hamlet recognizes that his test must allow for the possibility that Claudius is innocent. But then, after being morally and logically scrupulous in seeing the need for such a test, Hamlet himself loses control, spoils the test, and then insists that it was a complete success. Since Shiga knew little or nothing of Shakespeare’s play before he saw it performed, his own sceptical response to the ‘Mousetrap’ scene provides a salutary example of what is wrong with so many historicist arguments that treat Shakespeare’s ﬁrst audiences as a many-bodied beast with one ‘collective’ and critically undistinguished head. Shoyo’s audience at the 1911 Imperial Theatre production included distinguished and dissenting novelists such as Natsume Soseki and Shiga Naoya. Shakespeare’s ﬁrst audiences would also have included various distinguished individuals – like Ben Jonson, John Donne or, say, Francis Bacon and John Selden – whose individual responses should also not be ‘collectivized’. We must now admit our own account of this controversy has so far been ‘tactical’, since we have deliberately suppressed some points that might prevent Western readers – like the Japanese critics who had read Shiga but then deferred to the West and Dover Wilson – from taking Shiga’s revolutionary view of the ‘Mousetrap’ scene seriously. Unfortunately, both Shiga and W.W. Greg harnessed their profoundly challenging accounts of the ‘Mousetrap’ scene to arguments that could be and were more easily dismissed as, to put it bluntly, silly. So, Greg’s 1917 essay shackled and subordinated his best insights to a perverse argument, by maintaining that the ghost was ‘Hamlet’s hallucination’, and not only Hamlet’s: Greg even argued we should regard the fact that the ghost is seen eleven times by four different people as 105

Shakespeare in Japan

‘a freak of collective suggestion, and explain it away as we should any other spook’ (Greg, ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’, p. 401, our emphasis). Although Dover Wilson exploded that argument quite conclusively, his argument against Greg’s view of the ‘Mousetrap’ invents further stage directions and might be politely described as ‘teleological’: the king does not betray his guilt during the dumbshow because he is not watching it, and we know that he is not watching it because he does not betray his guilt. Like Greg, Shiga harnessed his profoundly original perceptions to a more silly argument when – a year after Claudius’s Diary had appeared – he published his essay ‘On Claudius’s Diary – To Funaki Shigeo’. Shiga maintained that in Shakespeare’s play as well as his own short story there is not ‘a single piece of objective evidence to prove Claudius murdered his brother’. Although Shiga also maintained (in his somewhat patrician manner) that he had carefully studied Shoyo’s translation of Hamlet, he seems to have missed the prayer scene in which Claudius admits that he is guilty of ‘A brother’s murder’ (III.iii.38). But, as we have seen, this is known only to the audience, and follows the ‘Mousetrap’ scene – to which Shiga responded in an intuitive rather than scholarly, but brilliantly original fashion. Our ‘tactical’ reason for not mentioning the later essay earlier is that it does not in any sense reduce or invalidate the powerful insights in his story. But it does make it more difﬁcult to sift and judge Shiga’s contribution to our understanding of Hamlet. Before returning to the story, it is worth mentioning one rather interesting feature of the later essay. Although Shiga overlooked the scene in which Claudius tries to pray, he does comment on the earlier speech in III.i, where Claudius responds to Polonius’s remarks to Ophelia: ’Tis too much prov’d, that with devotion’s visage And pious action we do sugar o’er The devil himself.

This is followed by Claudius’s comment, which modern editors usually mark as an aside: O ’tis too true. How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience. The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it

106

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden!

Clearly Claudius is suffering from a guilty conscience, but the speech is not enough to conﬁrm that the ‘deed’ involved a ‘brother’s murder’ – as Shiga rightly notices. So what does it refer to? In maintaining that Claudius was innocent of murder Shiga supposes that the ghost was lying, which was a most unusual view in Japan. Shiga does not suppose (like Ernest Jones or Dover Wilson) that Claudius is troubled because his marriage to Gertrude was – according to the ghost and Hamlet – incestuous. That is not so surprising: Japanese widows have often been encouraged to marry their brothers-in-law. So is Claudius troubled because his marriage was, as Gertrude says in the play, ‘o’erhasty’? In Shiga’s story ‘Claudius’ is hurt when Gertrude says this (adopting her son’s position). He insists more than once that he is neither ashamed of nor feels guilty about his marriage to Gertrude, but this insistence might suggest that he is far from comfortable about what he did. Shiga’s idea that Claudius’s guilty conscience might make him misunderstand a casual remark of Polonius’s may be far-fetched, but it is not entirely absurd. The important point, which Shiga obviously wanted to emphasize, is that this speech, which precedes the ‘Mousetrap’, does not prove that Claudius murdered his brother – even if, as Shiga’s story suggests, he sometimes wanted to. In Shiga’s arrestingly powerful story Claudius has loved Gertrude for many years, but did not kill King Hamlet. His seemingly guilty behaviour is the result both of his own neuroses and of his horror at Hamlet’s obsessive manipulations. The story begins with a diary entry in which Claudius hopes to be able – when the time is right, and when they are not both under such ‘natural’ and understandable strain – to gain Hamlet’s understanding and sympathy. Claudius writes that ‘He’ – the unnamed prince – should eventually be able to understand, since he is sensitive, highly intelligent and even ‘something of a poet’. Later, Claudius even hopes that Hamlet’s apparent interest in Ophelia, ‘that sensitive girl’, will succeed, since this should help Hamlet to understand Claudius’s own long-frustrated passion for Hamlet’s mother. But then, as Shiga’s Claudius recognizes with such anguish during the ‘Mousetrap’ scene, the seemingly sensitive and 107

Shakespeare in Japan

poetic Hamlet displays an abominable low taste for melodrama and keeps attacking Ophelia as well as his mother and stepfather/ uncle. ‘Haven’t you ever questioned yourself?’, Claudius asks in his diary: Nobody is so theatrical as you. Do you really want to play the role of such a stupid, tragic hero? I wouldn’t at all mind you playing it by yourself. What I can’t stand is the way you drag me in as the antagonist. Nobody is so affected, preachy, selﬁsh, theatrical and garrulous as you. . . . You seem to believe that you can read my mind, but what makes you so sure? Of course you could see that I was disturbed, but you never considered other possible reasons for that. . . . Once I guessed why you were giving me that glance, the cheap literature in my own mind betrayed me. The more innocent I tried to remain, the more constrained I felt, until at last I was responding in a way that conﬁrmed your expectations. And for you this circumstantial evidence was enough. What was that play? The Murder of Gonzago? How could you, who babble about histrionics, contrive such a transparent trick? And then force it upon me so shamelessly? For all your sceptical declarations you are ready to believe anything, and then never hesitate to force your belief on others. How could I fail to be affected by your brazen expression? Of course I was. But what does that prove? How hard I had to ﬁght against some inner demon during that dumbshow. From that moment I could hardly bear to stay, but knew my departure would provoke suspicion. I don’t know how often I repeated to myself, ‘Remain calm, seem indifferent’, while feeling how the eyes of the dreadfully composed Horatio never left my face. Finally it was as if my own nerves were scanning my face for the slightest betraying twitch.

Of course there is an important sense in which whatever we happen to know of what prompted Shiga to write his story – the story’s ‘germ’, as Henry James would say – is incidental or accidental, so far as the story is concerned. The success of Shiga’s story does not depend on whether its ﬁctional premise is convincing in relation to Shakespeare’s play. Even if the premise were demonstrably false in Shakespearean terms, the story itself could still be read in the way that we read counterfactual ﬁctions in which the premise involves some ‘alternative history’: suppose Hitler had won the Second World War, or suppose that DNA uncoiled in the opposite direction and so on. Moreover, Claudius’s Diary could be compared with what may be Shiga’s 108

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

greatest story, Han’s Crime, or even with the two Akutagawa stories that provided the basis for Kurosawa’s Rashomon: all of these stories are, in psychological and moral terms, grimly compelling because they undermine the conﬁdence with which we customarily distinguish between what seems innocent and what seems guilty. However, the story’s power also depends on the remarkable way in which it reinterprets one after another familiar detail from Hamlet – while supposing that the ‘Mousetrap’ provides no real evidence of Claudius’s guilt. Claudius’s Diary begins soon after the diarist’s marriage to his sister-in-law. He is jubilant because he has been in love with Gertrude for many years. Later he reveals (in the diary, that is) that he started loving her even before Hamlet was born. At the same time he is nervous about other people’s attitude towards the marriage, especially that of Hamlet. He thinks Hamlet is ‘an exceptionally bright man’ and hopes to gain his approval by telling him everything. However, Claudius thinks that Hamlet is not yet ready for this, because Hamlet is ‘unbalanced’ and apparently far from happy about his mother’s remarriage. This is in line with Shakespeare’s play, but Claudius also senses that he himself is ‘unbalanced’. According to his earlier diary entries this is because he was at last united with the woman he loved, and loved even before Hamlet was born. However, since he keeps referring to his unstable state of mind throughout the diary and admits to feeling ‘terriﬁed of myself ’, the reader cannot help suspecting that the reason may be more deep-rooted. The ‘Mousetrap’ is the turning point in the story as in the play. Shiga’s Claudius has tried, like Shakespeare’s Claudius, to establish some amicable relationship with Hamlet. Once he realizes what Hamlet suspects, Shiga’s Claudius writes that he can no longer ‘bear the risk of being nice to you’: ‘I cannot bear to go on making that stupid, painful effort, which is like struggling to submerge something that is rising to the surface with tremendous force. I’m going to hate you from the bottom of my heart. – Yes, I can do that!’ That diary entry catches the note of relief when Shakespeare’s Claudius ﬁnally announces, after the ‘Mousetrap’, ‘I like him not’ – although Shakespeare’s Claudius may never realize what Hamlet suspects. The next diary entry very well illustrates that subtle and minute psychological analysis for which Shiga was so celebrated, in Japan. 109

Shakespeare in Japan

Suddenly, after declaring how much he ‘hates’ Hamlet, Shiga’s Claudius seems to be once again hoping for some mutual understanding: but why? In this diary entry, Claudius has so far recovered from his terrible shock on realizing what Hamlet suspects that he can set out to refute Hamlet’s assumptions. As he points out, poisoning a king is so serious an offence that it would be impossible to conceal it forever: people would start speculating, but there is no such rumour. Of course Hamlet was in Wittenburg at the time of his father’s death – and of course Claudius never considers that Hamlet might, since then, have encountered a ghost. So, Claudius continues, with mounting conviction: if he were indeed the murderous Machiavellian villain Hamlet takes him to be, he would have behaved more cautiously. He would never have married his sister-in-law so soon after his brother’s death, and he would never have responded to The Murder of Gonzago in a way that would prompt suspicion. What is psychologically deft about this diary entry is the way in which it shows how, after the appalling shock of the ‘Mousetrap’, Claudius collects his responses: once he begins to try to refute Hamlet’s assumptions, his conﬁdence in his own arguments (and innocence) leads him to hope, once again, for some reconciliation. This hope is shattered by the next development: Hamlet impetuously slaughters Polonius, without even thinking to lift the arras before he strikes. In the play Claudius determines to send Hamlet to England immediately after the ‘Mousetrap’ scene, and only later decides, after Hamlet has killed Polonius, to have Hamlet killed in England. These decisions are separate and differently timed, although some critics – most notably Bradley – conﬂate them. That conﬂation then encourages Bradley’s quite unreasonable and textually unwarranted assumption that Claudius is already planning another murder when we see him trying to pray, and the further assumption (by Hamlet as well as Bradley and his various followers) that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are accomplices to the plan to have Hamlet murdered. In the so-called closet scene Hamlet already knows – somehow, but how is never explained – that he is to be sent to England. But of course Hamlet does not know of Claudius’s later decision to have him killed in England, since Claudius has not yet made that decision. In the next diary entry in Shiga’s story Claudius appears to have decided to have Hamlet killed at the same time that he 110

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

decides to send him to England, but the diary entry is curiously oblique: ‘I must take dangerous, drastic measures. I shall send him to England. It’s more tragic, if the protagonist dies and the antagonist survives.’ Arguably, this is another nice, and chilling, psychological touch: Claudius will not directly admit – in the diary or even to himself – that he has just arranged what, in the story, is his ﬁrst murder. Instead, he relishes the way in which the ‘antagonist’ will show himself a better and more ‘tragic’ dramatist than the ‘protagonist’, who loves ‘cheap’ literature and melodrama. It would be possible to conclude at this point that the previously innocent Claudius has now not only become the antagonist or villain, but gone mad. Like Shakespeare’s Claudius and unlike Hamlet, Shiga’s Claudius does not brood or delay when it is necessary to act – but once he has taken this decisive action, after Hamlet has killed Polonius, Shiga’s Claudius ﬁnds himself more alone and isolated than ever. Clearly, he cannot explain what he has now done to anybody – least of all to Gertrude, his adored wife, who so adores her son. He then becomes more introspective – or Hamlet-like – than ever, and the story itself swerves in a quite unexpected and un-Shakespearean direction. The increasingly neurotic Claudius now recalls a fearful incident which happened about three years earlier, when he and his brother were on a hunting trip. By this time his brother had become suspicious about Claudius’s feelings for Gertrude. Claudius was woken in the night by the moaning of his brother who was sleeping beside him. To his horror Claudius realizes that his brother is having a nightmare in which he is being strangled by Claudius. This of course works to conﬁrm earlier hints – like ‘Wasn’t it more natural that I couldn’t really grieve for my dead brother’ – that although Claudius did not kill his brother, he wanted to, and also tried not to acknowledge that impulse. How could such a story end? Claudius’s Diary ends with a short entry in which the king writes about the anxiety he feels while waiting for the news of Hamlet’s death. This is followed by the author’s insouciant postscript which says, ‘The destiny of Claudius may not necessarily turn out to be the same as that in Hamlet.’ Although Shiga’s Claudius sometimes seems to regain tranquillity of mind, his incessant, morbidly self-conscious introspection 111

Shakespeare in Japan

makes him seem more and more unbalanced – especially when he feels that his adored Gertrude is withdrawing from him. Sending Hamlet to a probable death might be regarded as an act of madness. What is most fascinating about the story is Claudius’s analysis of his own state of mind – and Hamlet’s. This is complicated enough, but to the reader who has biographical information about Shiga Naoya the story has yet another dimension. It is well known that Shiga had a tense relationship with his own father and some of his novels deal directly with this. In those works Shiga as the author naturally identiﬁes himself with the son. Since Claudius’s Diary also has a conﬂict between a father ﬁgure and a son as its central theme, it would not be too far-fetched to think that Shiga actually felt some sympathy towards Hamlet, no matter how repugnant he may have found him to be. In other words, the author’s position is an ambivalent one. On the one hand he plays the role of a father ﬁgure, but on the other he plays, if subtly, the role of a son. There is another such biographical or psychological point to consider. The ﬁrst entry in Claudius’s Diary describes Hamlet as ‘something of a poet’. He is called ‘a dramatist’ as well, although in a furiously disapproving context. Again there is ambivalence. Shiga was a novelist himself, and there is nothing strange if he thought that being a poet was commendable. But when he makes Claudius attack Hamlet as a dramatist of the lowest rank we might remember that Shiga lived in an age that sometimes treated writers as less than respectable members of society. He himself sometimes had to occupy the position of a rebel, however reluctantly. All this leads to one conclusion. Shiga could have identiﬁed himself with Hamlet, the son, the rebel and ‘a poet’, but instead he wrote the story from the viewpoint of Claudius, the authoritarian father ﬁgure who detests ‘cheap literature’. But throughout the diary Claudius keeps appearing as an oversensitive writer, and shares this quality with Hamlet. Thus Claudius’s Diary is an ‘I–novel’ in disguise, or rather an ‘I–novel’ in more ways than one. Shiga was an extremely inﬂuential literary ﬁgure. One of the many authors who wrote under his inﬂuence was Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83). Kobayashi eventually established himself as a distinguished and highly inﬂuential literary critic, but when he was young he turned his hand to writing ﬁction. The short stories 112

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

he produced as an aspiring artist are marked, rather like Shiga’s stories, by the detailed analysis of the protagonist’s psychology. Ophelia’s Testament (Oferia Ibun) published in 1931 when Kobayashi was already active as a critic retains this particular characteristic, but like Shiga’s Claudius’s Diary it is an intertexual work based on Hamlet and ostensibly written from the viewpoint of one of the characters in the play, in this case Ophelia. Kobayashi’s Ophelia has locked herself up in her room. It is midnight. She is waiting for the dawn, and while doing so she writes a letter addressed to Hamlet who she believes is on his way to England. Then why is she leaving a letter which the prince may never read? It is because she has decided to kill herself – or drown herself, to be more precise – as soon as the day breaks. The nature of Ophelia’s death is ambiguous in Shakespeare’s play. If Gertrude’s report is correct, perhaps it was an accident. Yet one difﬁculty in taking this view is that Gertrude’s speech is rather mysterious: she describes Ophelia’s death in such detail that it seems almost as though she witnessed it, yet did nothing to prevent it. That seems most unlikely; on the other hand, to suppose that Gertrude is imagining what she describes, or is wanting to ensure that Ophelia will receive a Christian burial even if she did commit suicide, seems too like a rationalization. Both the churlish priest who conducts Ophelia’s burial and one of the gravediggers clearly suspect that Ophelia killed herself. Kobayashi, however, is absolutely unequivocal about her death. His Ophelia knows what she is doing. It is worth adding that suicide has never been regarded as a sin or as a crime in Japan. Kobayashi’s premises make his story signiﬁcantly different from Shiga’s in two ways. The latter’s work is supposed to be a diary, and the diarist does not have to have a reader in mind. He can be as self-indulgent as he wants. But a certain degree of selfrestraint would be required of Kobayashi’s Ophelia since she has to be aware that what she writes may eventually be read by someone else. This consideration will affect the nature of the writing. The other difference is a much more fundamental one, because it has to do with the sanity of the narrator. Shiga’s Claudius may be ‘unbalanced’ but nobody thinks he is pathologically mad. Ophelia in the original version is clearly mad after a certain stage, but what about Kobayashi’s Ophelia? It may be difﬁcult to regard a person who has decided to kill herself as totally sane, but if that 113

Shakespeare in Japan

person were as hopelessly mad as Ophelia becomes in Shakespeare’s play, then what she wrote would be unlikely to make much sense. Kobayashi makes the testament of his Ophelia fairly lucid and readable, but he does hint at her madness in two ways. One is the style rather than the content of her writing, although at one point she suffers from a delusion. What she says is not so difﬁcult to understand but her style is often repetitive and muddled. The other is that Kobayashi makes his Ophelia refer to or rather recollect her madness, which means that she may be mad but not to such an extent as completely to lose her self-awareness. There is a moment when Ophelia wakes up with a terrible headache and realizes that her shoes are covered with mud and her body is covered with ﬂowers. Clearly this is meant to be an aftermath of what happens in Act IV, scene v where Ophelia gives ﬂowers to Claudius and Gertrude as well as her brother Laertes. The crucial point, however, is that Ophelia recollects both the scene and its aftermath in a rather tranquil state of mind, and she is deeply embarrassed about what she thinks may have happened. Kobayashi implies that his Ophelia was mad – or at least did not know what she was doing – when she gave the king and queen ﬂowers, but later became sane and sober enough to regret her action. Thus Kobayashi manages to make his story sound convincing enough as one written by a madwoman as well as a piece of literature which is worth serious attention. The testament begins with Ophelia’s address to Hamlet. She analyses her state of mind, which she thinks is amazingly composed. Like Shiga’s Claudius, Kobayashi’s Ophelia is both protagonist and narrator: while writing her testament she incessantly analyses the act of writing. She recalls her relationship with Hamlet, and probably the most signiﬁcant impression the reader gets from these recollections is how little Hamlet and Ophelia understood each other. According to Ophelia, Hamlet was extremely talkative and always critical of her blank expression while he was talking to her. Ophelia says she was in fact listening to him carefully. She now tries to tell him that she knew everything including the appearance of the ghost which she coaxed from Horatio. This departure from Shakespeare’s original makes Ophelia stronger and more independent. She wanted only one thing (meaning, clearly, his love for her) but Hamlet was too full of dreams – dreams of 114

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

revenge and war – and too immersed in books. And yet, Ophelia complains, Hamlet, who loved reading books, was not even capable of reading her expressions. Then Ophelia corrects herself and thinks that perhaps he did understand everything. Such minute analysis of the matter goes on and on, which is sometimes rather irritating, as time passes and the dawn approaches. Then something intriguing happens, which has no Shakespearean equivalent. She notices someone exactly like herself in another room, and this person is writing what is exactly like what she is writing. It is not at all clear if all this is her delusion, and as if to prevent readers from futile speculation Kobayashi makes his Ophelia say that she is not quite certain whether or not she is dreaming, but that she thinks she saw this someone leave the room. Ophelia then describes in minutest details how she will commit suicide. The separation of the watcher and the watched is now complete. To put this more simply, Ophelia’s Testament is a study of madness and love. It is common knowledge that people who are deeply in love tend to do and say things which do not necessarily make sense. Kobayashi cleverly combined madness and love in one person and made that person the narrator. Still more cleverly, he assumed a woman’s persona and then related at length from the woman’s point of view how difﬁcult it is for a man to understand a woman. The love between Ophelia and Hamlet may not be a major topic in Hamlet, and by concentrating on this Kobayashi domesticated Shakespeare’s play far more than Shiga Naoya had done. But in its modest way Ophelia’s Testament makes another contribution to the Japanese attempt at exploring the idea of self using Shakespeare’s most famous play as its basis. Dazai Osamu (1909–48) was, like Shiga, a major practitioner of the ‘I–novel’ genre but unlike his predecessor, who tended to take himself rather seriously, Dazai was witty and his wit frequently expressed itself as self-mockery. The New Hamlet (Shin Hamuretto), his adaptation of Hamlet which was published in 1941, is not an ‘I–novel’ in the strict sense of the word, but the portrayal of the Danish prince as a spoilt, immature and petulant young malcontent is clearly a reﬂection of the novelist who was trying of make fun of himself, as he repeatedly did in his later works. The New Hamlet is a much longer work than those by Shiga and Kobayashi, and unlike the earlier pieces it consists 115

Shakespeare in Japan

exclusively of the speeches spoken by the characters. So far as the form is concerned it is a play rather than a novel. It is true that Dazai himself regarded it as a novel and did not expect it to be performed, but there have been a number of attempts at staging it. The work is in nine scenes. It takes only three days for the whole action to develop and dissolve, and so the piece has the kind of intensity which is not to be found in Shakespeare’s version. At the same time we cannot deny that Dazai’s version lacks the scope of the original. In the original version at least one scene is set outside the castle of Elsinore, but throughout Dazai’s adaptation the scene is set within the castle. Dazai’s version does contain references to the hostility between Denmark and Norway, but essentially it is a deﬁnitely more domestic piece than Shakespeare’s. In the short preface to the adaptation the author says that the piece deals with what happens to two families. The time, the place and the action are strictly deﬁned and limited. In other words, the work is almost faithful to the principle of the three unities. It might sound preposterous but The New Hamlet is actually closer to classical French tragedies than Shakespeare. The afﬁnity does not end here. The only physical violence which is shown on the stage is the death of Polonius who is murdered by Claudius rather than by Hamlet (the scene in question will be discussed later). In addition to Polonius’s death, Hamlet’s hurting himself with a dagger in the ﬁnal scene could be mentioned, but since he does not really try to kill himself, perhaps it is unnecessary to pay too much attention to the incident. On the other hand, the death of Gertrude and the attack of the Norwegian navy against a Danish ship which causes the eventual death of Laertes are not enacted on the stage but simply reported by one of the characters. The death of Gertrude is reported by Horatio (who functions rather like Gertrude reporting the death of Ophelia in the original version) and the outbreak of the war is reported by Claudius. The technique is reminiscent of plays by Racine. But by far the most prominent (and most Racinean) feature of the work is the length of the characters’ speeches. All the characters are excruciatingly analytical about their own psychology and emotion as well as those of the other characters. They simply go on and on and on, making the whole piece curiously static. 116

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

Dazai is well aware of the various devices in the original, and what makes his version most intriguing is the way he has departed from Shakespeare. For instance, the ﬁrst scene opens with Claudius’s speech about what happened recently in Denmark, such as his succession to the throne and his marriage to Gertrude, which of course reminds us of the same character’s speech in Act I, scene ii of Hamlet, but later in the same scene there is an exchange (or rather a confrontation) between Claudius and Hamlet which is not in the original version at all. This is one of the numerous points where Dazai cleverly and subtly twisted the original. Another has to do with the age of some of the central characters. In Hamlet the prince is perhaps around 30 years old, but Dazai is much more speciﬁc and makes his prince 23 years old, the age which he shares with Laertes. Horatio is 22 years old. On the other hand, Gertrude seems to be considerably older than she is in the original. She says that Hamlet was born when she was not young any more, and at one point Hamlet says rather maliciously that she has lost all her own teeth so that it is unthinkable that Claudius was infatuated with her. It is not clear exactly how old Claudius is, but it seems we can safely assume that he is at least as old as the queen. Thus the gap between the old and the young is much more conspicuous than in Shakespeare. The reader of Hamlet is not quite certain about the degree of intimacy between Hamlet and Ophelia. This is not the case with The New Hamlet. The prince and Polonius’s daughter have been having an affair for some time, and recently they learned to their great embarrassment that the lady was pregnant. Polonius is also deeply embarrassed because it is presumptuous, to say the least, for a daughter of a subject to sleep with a royal personage (who by the way was supposed to get married to an English princess, obviously for diplomatic reasons – another clever invention of Dazai’s), and Polonius feels guilty of not being careful enough about his own daughter’s conduct. He hands in his resignation from the post he occupies in Danish court. As it turns out, Polonius dies before Claudius decides what to do with Polonius’s request, but that is a different matter altogether. In any case, Dazai made the intimacy between Hamlet and Ophelia one of the crucial events in his work. Another change has to do with the aftermath of the sudden death of the former king. Claudius upon request from Gertrude 117

Shakespeare in Japan

sends a letter to Horatio who is in Wittenberg and asks him to come back to Elsinore. Soon after Horatio returns to Denmark, he meets Hamlet and with considerable hesitation tells the prince about a bizarre rumour which is current in Wittenberg. According to the rumour which apparently originated in Elsinore, Horatio says, the ghost of the former king recently appeared, told Hamlet that he had been murdered by Claudius and urged the prince to take revenge. Because of the mental strain caused by the order from (the ghost of ) the father, Horatio continues, Hamlet has gone mad – or so people say. All this is news to Hamlet. This is extremely unconvincing, because if the rumour has travelled as far as Wittenberg, it is impossible that Hamlet has never heard it. We learn later that both Claudius and Polonius have been aware of the rumour, which makes the situation even more unconvincing. Clearly Dazai intended to incorporate the episode about the ghost which is in the original in a way which ﬁts his whole scheme, but frankly he was not very successful. What follows, however, is almost hilarious – at least to the reader who is familiar with the original version. The ﬁrst person Hamlet consults with after he learned of the rumour is Polonius. Polonius conﬁrms the rumour and confesses to Hamlet that he has been secretly suspecting Claudius for some time. Then Polonius suggests putting on a play in the court to test Claudius, and tries to entice some help from Hamlet and Horatio. Hamlet is hesitant and thinks, exactly like Shiga’s Claudius, that Claudius’s reaction to the play cannot prove anything, but eventually he accepts Polonius’s suggestion. So does Horatio. The play they put on is an adaptation (by Dazai) of part of ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, a poem by Christina Rossetti, which consists of dialogue between the bride on her wedding night, the bridegroom and the ghost of the bride’s former lover. The relation between the bride, the bridegroom and (the ghost of ) the bride’s former lover is of course supposed to reﬂect that between Gertrude, Claudius and (the ghost of ) the former king. In the performance, the role of the bridegroom is played by Horatio, which is more or less acceptable, that of the ghost by Hamlet, which may be tolerable, and that of the bride by Polonius, which by any standard is likely to be ludicrous and even offensive. Watching the play Claudius remains calm and amused, but Gertrude ﬁnds the whole piece unbearable and disgusting and 118

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

leaves the room. Claudius somewhat reluctantly follows the queen, but before he does so he orders Polonius to come to his chamber. The encounter between Claudius and Polonius in the king’s chamber is of course a variation on (or perhaps a parody of ) the encounter between Gertrude and Hamlet in the queen’s chamber. It is probably the most revealing scene in Dazai’s piece because here we learn the terrifying truth. Polonius was actually watching Claudius kill his brother and he says so to the king in so many words. Claudius is furious and stabs Polonius with a dagger. Thus, as in Shakespeare, Polonius is stabbed to death, but in this case the person who kills him is not Hamlet but Claudius who, unlike Hamlet in the original version, knows exactly what he is doing. Hamlet, on the other hand, is far from happy after the performance of the play-within-the-play. He suspects (wrongly) that Polonius was conspiring with Claudius after all. Claudius’s calm response to the play, he thinks, was exactly what they were up to, because it would once and for all dispel Hamlet’s suspicion about Claudius’s possible crime. A naïve reader might admire Hamlet’s exceptionally analytical state of mind which is not prone to believe anything easily. But Dazai is not so simple as that. Hamlet tells all this to Ophelia in the ﬁnal scene of the piece (scene ix), but we already know that Polonius was murdered in the preceding scene (scene viii). While it is true that Hamlet is extremely cautious about interpreting what he perceives, he does not in the end succeed in grasping the ﬁnal truth. The story ends with Hamlet harbouring a suspicion which he knows he may never be able to solve. But the action takes a quick and unexpected turn before the end of the story. Gertrude has always been highly critical about the way Hamlet and Ophelia have been behaving. At least, she looked critical. Finally, however, a lengthy confrontation takes place between her and Ophelia, and the queen, after pretending to be still adamant, admits that she does admire Ophelia’s naïvety and repents what she has been doing. Gertrude is now without any vestige of hope. She throws herself into a pond and drowns herself, just as Ophelia did in Hamlet – another clever distortion of the original. But Gertrude’s death is only a minor domestic incident compared with the war between Denmark and Norway. According to 119

Shakespeare in Japan

Claudius who brings the news, the ship which was carrying Laertes to France was suddenly attacked by the Norwegian navy, and Laertes, after ﬁghting most courageously, died like a hero. Claudius is now ready to wage a full-scale war against Norway. The news of the outbreak of the war is used very effectively, because the enmity between the two countries was mentioned rather casually in the ﬁrst scene of the piece, and perhaps most readers have virtually forgotten it by now. The news then is a surprise and suddenly gives a larger dimension to the piece which has so far looked like a domestic one. The tone of Claudius’s speech is also worth some attention. Clearly he is jubilant about what is happening. There is nothing to prove that Claudius planned everything, and perhaps he did not know that the war would begin this way. But nobody can deny that the war will divert the attention of people around him, especially Hamlet, from the domestic troubles in the Danish court. It might look strange that the denouement of the piece is somewhat incomplete. Both Hamlet and Ophelia do know that Polonius is missing, but they do not know the circumstances of his disappearance – not yet, anyway. Eventually they will perhaps, but as yet they are not aware of the nature and scope of Claudius’s evil conduct. In a way, The New Hamlet is a highly frivolous piece of writing. It trivializes, no doubt intentionally, Shakespeare’s tragedy. What is most remarkable and signiﬁcant is no doubt the portrayal of Claudius. The ﬁrst sight we get of him is that of an excessively polite and humble monarch. He is very modest about everything from his capability as a politician to his physical appearance. Later, when he is alone with Hamlet, he sounds almost sycophantic. He asks Hamlet to pretend that he loves the man who used to be his favourite uncle at least in the presence of other courtiers so that he can deceive them. Of course it is not yet clear in this scene (scene i) but the author gradually and subtly shows the reader that it is in fact Claudius who is pretending and deceiving courtiers. He is not at all the polite and humble person he tries to show himself to be, but a murderer, a usurper to the throne and a cunning politician who is rather good at manipulating people. Unlike Gertrude in Shakespeare as well as in Dazai’s version and unlike Claudius in Shakespeare, this Claudius never suffers from a guilty conscience. Shakespeare makes his Claudius utter an 120

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

aside in Act III scene i and a soliloquy in Act III scene iii, both of which show that the man is not without conscience after all. This is not the case with Dazai’s Claudius. The ﬁnal scene of the piece irrevocably shows the man to be a warmonger in addition to a power-hungry politician who murdered his own brother. Thus he is an incarnation of the kind of evil which is far nastier than the evil depicted in Hamlet. We should bear in mind the fact that The New Hamlet was published in July 1941. The Japanese army had already been ﬁghting in China for several years, and in December of the same year Japan was to declare war against the USA and the UK. Clearly, the evil Dazai had in mind was not dissimilar to the evil which was powerful and prevalent in the country at that time. The fact that Hamlet cannot really grasp the nature of the evil makes it even more horrifying. No matter how frivolous it may seem, The New Hamlet is essentially a story of a highly intelligent young man confronting an unfathomable evil which engenders dictatorship and war. His feeling of helplessness which he is more than aware of must have been shared by Japanese intellectuals of the 1940s. Thus The New Hamlet can be interpreted as a study of self in the political context of modern Japan. War played a very important role in the writings of Ooka Shohei (1909–88) as well. Unlike Dazai (and unlike of course Shiga and Kobayashi), Ooka had to spend some time as a soldier of the Japanese army in the Philippines where he acquired a more than adequate ﬁrsthand knowledge of the atrocities of war. He dealt directly with this experience in some of his writings, and although his Hamlet’s Diary (Hamuretto Nikki) contains no direct reference to the author’s life during the war, it would be only natural to think that it had some effect on the way he treated politics in the work. What is perhaps crucial is that it was written after the end of the war, which means that Ooka was the only novelist among the four under discussion who was able to take freedom of speech for granted. Neither Shiga, nor Kobayashi, nor Dazai encountered any suppression from the government, but it is important to remember that the condition under which these authors worked was considerably different from that for Ooka. No doubt it will be a futile speculation but it is intriguing to imagine what Dazai’s criticism of dictatorship supported by warmongers would have been 121

Shakespeare in Japan

like if he had written The New Hamlet after the end of the war. Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary ﬁrst appeared in 1955 in an unﬁnished version, and the ﬁnal version with extensive revisions was published in 1980. The novelist does not tamper with Shakespeare’s version as Dazai does. It follows the original version meticulously, and the entries in the ‘diary’, unlike those in Shiga’s version, often contain lengthy quotations from the play, which could make the work read rather like a ‘novelized’ version of Shakespeare, but the author, with his ﬁrmly established viewpoint, does add details which are not in the original version. The diary begins with the entry of 20 December and ends with that of 14 June. It is followed by a kind of postscript: Horatio’s letter (dated 3 September) to his friend living in Paris which describes the circumstances surrounding Hamlet’s death and the political upheaval in Denmark after the death of the prince. Ooka’s novel is more than anything else a political one. He sets what happens in the Danish court ﬁrmly within the political context of Renaissance Europe. His Horatio is a 32-year-old Florentine living in exile and so in many ways he is more mature than Hamlet and Laertes who are both 25 years old. Polonius is not an aristocrat but comes from a wealthy bourgeois family and he is far from indifferent to the possibility of his daughter marrying the prince because it will further elevate him socially. The work is full of references to the social, economic and political conditions of the time and so historically speaking it is perhaps much more accurate than Shakespeare’s version. There is, for instance, a reference to feverish activity in armouries in Denmark which has caused a shortage of iron to be used for horseshoes and carriages and resulted in a serious difﬁculty in transportation. Ooka’s Hamlet is a politically ambitious Machiavellian and he is extremely critical of Claudius’s political stance. He hears the rumour about his father’s ghost from Horatio. According to Horatio, the witnesses of the ghost are Marcellus and Barnardo. Hamlet goes to the scene in question with the soldiers and although the soldiers swear they can see the ghost, Hamlet cannot see anything. The prince suspects they may be telling a lie. Then he realizes that they are unhappy about Claudius’s reign, too, and that the crucial point is that they need the appearance of the ghost. After he has been alone for a while, Hamlet tells the 122

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

soldiers that he did meet his father’s ghost, which of course totally surprises them. After the play-within-the-play, Hamlet visits Gertrude’s chamber and, as in Shakespeare’s original, sees the ghost – or thinks he sees the ghost. Then he realizes that it was an illusion. Ooka makes his Hamlet meet the ghost of Polonius on the ship sailing toward England. Hamlet’s own explanation about these experiences is that if he sees (or thinks he sees) a ghost, perhaps he is somewhat mad after all. As in Dazai’s version, there is some possibility of Hamlet marrying an English princess. However, he visits Ophelia one day pretending to be mad and tries to seduce her and to his surprise does not encounter any resistance from her. Here, as elsewhere, Hamlet is a cold-blooded schemer. While no one can deny his intelligence, this Hamlet is probably the least sympathetic of the four under discussion. The Machiavellian aspect of the man is most clearly shown in his confrontation with Fortinbras, which is by far the most important scene Ooka has added. While Fortinbras is in Denmark, Hamlet visits him, although Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to prevent him from doing so. Hamlet tells him everything including his doubt about Claudius’s conduct and ﬁnally suggests that Fortinbras send his army to the castle of Elsinore rather than to Poland and regain the land Norway had lost, on the condition that Hamlet will succeed Claudius as the King of Denmark. Hamlet does not really mean what he says. He was surprised to see that Fortinbras’ army was more heavily equipped than he had heard and was carrying canons which were necessary only when the army was about to attack a castle. In other words, Hamlet was testing Fortinbras. However, Fortinbras, who is 30 years old and somewhat cleverer than Hamlet, sees through all this and politely declines the latter’s offer. Ooka’s Hamlet puts on a performance of The Murder of Gonzago as Shakespeare’s Hamlet does, but again Ooka has added a situation which is not in the original. One day he goes to town, watches a performance of the play, and asks the actors of the company to perform it in the court. Then he returns to the castle and plans the way to stage it very carefully. He decides that the production should consist of two parts: the dumbshow and the play itself. Claudius will be too drunk to pay much attention to 123

Shakespeare in Japan

the dumbshow, he thinks, but the general public will understand the meaning of it well enough. Even the drunk Claudius will not totally ignore the play itself which contains words and more movements than the dumbshow. If he leaves before the performance is over, the general public who know how the play is supposed to end will understand why Claudius cannot stay on. Ooka’s interpretation of ‘the double structure’ derives from What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ by John Dover Wilson, and at least in this case it is convincing. But Ooka sometimes tends to be too meticulous and so his novel does not retain any feeling of the mystery which is prevalent in the original version. Claudius does leave in the middle of the performance. Then Hamlet delivers a long speech to the courtiers and tells them how he has been unhappy about the recent turn of events in Denmark. He virtually tries to agitate them to a rebellion but they do not respond. As in the case of the confrontation with Fortinbras the schemer does not succeed. The diary itself ends with the entry about Hamlet’s encounter with Osric, but the novel ends with Horatio’s letter to his friend Antonio who has been living in Paris as an exile since they experienced a political disappointment in their native Florence. Horatio is now back in Wittenberg and earning his living as a teacher of Latin. He sends the letter to Antonio together with the manuscripts of Hamlet’s diary which Horatio is certain Antonio will enjoy reading since Horatio knows he is keenly interested in human psychology. In a way, Antonio is identiﬁed with Ooka who is supposed to be reproducing a diary written by someone other than himself. In the letter to his friend, Horatio describes the circumstances of the deaths of Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet, and in this case Ooka is extremely faithful to Shakespeare. There is, however, another twist. Fortinbras became the King of Denmark as Hamlet had wanted him to be, but after an objection from England someone else succeeded to the throne to rule Denmark under the approval of England. Fortinbras himself had to be content with regaining the part of Denmark which used to belong to Norway. Horatio concludes his letter by writing, ‘Even the ﬁnal will of Hamlet was not realized.’ Hamlet’s Diary is more than anything else a political novel. Politically speaking, it has a grander scope than Shakespeare’s 124

Shakespeare and Japanese Literature

play. In spite of all the references to the political and diplomatic situation of contemporary Denmark, however, the author’s interest seems to be centred around individual characters rather than the situation which they are in. Perhaps it is no coincidence that both Hamlet and Horatio are political failures. In the end they are disappointed. What Ooka was concerned with was the portrayal of ‘self ’ which could not be realized in Japanese society. Like his eminent predecessors he tried to address the question of self versus society using Shakespeare’s tragedy as a means of analysing the Japanese situation.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

W. W. Greg, ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’, Modern Language Review, 12 (1917): pp. 393–421. Michael Pennington, Hamlet: A User’s Guide (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996), pp. 84– 93. John Dover Wilson, What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 195. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy; 1951 reprint of second edition (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 133. Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 1662. Bernice Kliman, ‘Hamlet’: Film, Television, and Audio Performance (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1988), p. 149. Anthony Dawson, Hamlet (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 141–42.

125

6 Shakespeare and Japanese Film: Kurosawa Akira

The classic status of Kurosawa’s ﬁrst and greatest Shakespeare ﬁlm – Kumonosujo, or Throne of Blood (the literal translation of the original title is The Cobweb Castle) (1957) – has been accepted for so long that it is a shock to discover how cool and mocking some of the ﬁrst Western reviews were. Bosley Crowther, the very inﬂuential New York Times reviewer who had warmly praised some of Kurosawa’s earlier ﬁlms, wrote in an incredulous, mocking way, describing the ﬁlm as ‘amusing’ and its ending as a ‘conclusive howl’.1 Yet in 1965 Peter Brook described Throne of Blood as ‘the great masterpiece among Shakespeare ﬁlms’,2 and in 1969 Peter Hall echoed this judgement and described it as ‘the most successful Shakespeare ﬁlm ever made’.3 In Western terms this turnabout is probably not so difﬁcult to explain. When Kurosawa’s ﬁlm was ﬁrst seen in the West, it could not but seem joltingly, even grotesquely inappropriate to those who took the then dominant Christian providentialist view of Macbeth, seeing the play in terms which suggest some reassuringly inevitable triumph of good over evil and recall Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: ‘The moment had come for supreme incorruptible justice to intervene . . . Napoleon had been denounced in inﬁnity, and his fall had been decided. He was in God’s way.’ So, for Irving Ribner, the play’s dominant theme was the ‘idea’ that ‘through the working out of evil in a harmonious order good must emerge’.4 John Danby similarly referred to ‘the eventual mustering of the powers of outraged pity and justice; their return and the overthrow of the ungodly rule’.5 Even a 126

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

self-declared Marxist critic like Paul Siegel aligned himself with the ‘Christian’ readings of critics like Roy Battenhouse, Roy Walker and G.R. Elliott when he explained how ‘Nature violently expels Macbeth’ for having ‘violated’ its ‘laws’.6 Kurosawa certainly did not see Macbeth (or Nature) in this way, but, just as certainly, he was not intervening in a Western critical debate. Indeed, that debate only began a few years later, when critics such as Jan Kott and Wilbur Sanders protested (in their very different ways) against attempts to dilute this play’s terrors. Roman Polanski’s 1971 ﬁlm of Macbeth often contributed to or followed from this later Western debate, for example when it ﬁnished by showing Donalbain climbing the hill to the witches’ cave. When Shakespeare’s play ﬁnishes some of the witches’ prophecies have still not been fulﬁlled. As Pauline Kael commented, Polanski was making it clear that ‘the cycle of bloodletting is about to begin again’.7 Stephen Booth has shown well how the frightening sense of discomfort swelling from every seeming comfort characterizes the dramatic rhythm of this play, even in its ﬁnal scene, where it became common in the 1970s for directors to stress the uncertainties that complicate the seemingly strong or triumphal sense of closure.8 In Trevor Nunn’s magniﬁcent and very inﬂuential 1976 Stratford production with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench (available on video), the assembled Scottish lords gaze at each other fearfully, as if wondering how soon the next horror will emerge. In this greatly changed climate, which also showed the inﬂuence of Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd, the bleakly unafﬁrmative ending of Kurosawa’s 1957 ﬁlm – in which Washizu, Kurosawa’s Macbeth, is slaughtered by his own terriﬁed, treacherous troops – was far more acceptable. Kurosawa eliminated Macduff, and there is no suggestion of a sacred and benign ‘Order’ reasserting itself. In Kurosawa’s ﬁlm, as in Shakespeare’s play, men carry the branches to Macbeth’s stronghold; ‘Nature’ does not move the trees or anything else. But in this new, post-1950s climate, Bosley Crowther’s earlier, incredulously mocking verdict seemed to reﬂect the perennial tendency of Anglo-centric critics to regard their view of Shakespeare (whatever that happens to be at the time) as the real Shakespeare, and foreign views as more or less exotic ‘versions’ of Shakespeare. Nonetheless, even though the later, admiring Western responses to Throne of Blood were more perceptive, they 127

Shakespeare in Japan

continued to assimilate their sense of what Kurosawa was doing to their changed but still Western sense of what Shakespeare was doing – for example by supposing that Kurosawa was taking a modern, secular and ‘nihilistic’ view of Macbeth, like Jan Kott, Peter Brook (who wrote the Preface to the British edition of Kott’s Shakespeare our Contemporary (1966)) and Polanski. Western ‘nihilism’ is a late growth, or process of rejection, in which the nihilist (like Dostevsky’s Ivan Karamazov) rejects the cultural or religious notions he had started from. In Japan ‘nihilism’ was another Western import, like Shakespeare and trams. Its inﬂuence can be traced in the writings of some modern Japanese novelists such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke or Dazai Osamu, but when Kurosawa based Rashomon on some Akutagawa stories, he made its ending very much less nihilistic. The peculiar bleakness of Throne of Blood, and the chilling distance it maintains from its characters, owes very much more – in visual as well as conceptual terms – to Noh drama and the Buddhist concept of mu, or nothingness, which is not a late growth but a starting point. A few Western critics, most notably Frank Kermode in his 1972 essay ‘Shakespeare in the Movies’, still refused to allow that Throne of Blood is in any serious or critically signiﬁcant sense a version of Shakespeare’s play. For Kermode, who was of course very well aware of the shift in critical attitudes to Macbeth and rather bravely regarded Peter Brook’s ﬁlm of King Lear as the most successful Shakespeare ﬁlm, the objection to Throne of Blood was very basic, and followed from Kurosawa’s radical response to the problem of what to do with Shakespeare’s script – which was, to cut it out. There is no attempt in Throne of Blood to translate Shakespeare’s words into Japanese words – it should be noted especially that there is no attempt to reproduce Shakespeare’s poetry – and when, according to his usual practice, Kurosawa took his three co-writers off to a ryokan or Japanese inn to thrash out the script for Throne of Blood, they did not even take a copy of Macbeth with them.9 If we look though the published script10 to see what has become of Macbeth’s greatest speeches, we ﬁnd Washizu’s corresponding responses are sometimes indicated by the eloquent but unpoetic and indeed non-verbal symbol: ‘?!’ So, for Kermode, Throne of Blood should be considered as ‘an allusion to, rather than a version of, Macbeth’.11 One response to that summary distinction might be to protest 128

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

or exclaim that the ‘allusion’ in question is remarkably sustained, as well as powerful: the ﬁlm stays very close to the sequence and structure of what might in this context be called Shakespeare’s scenario. A more thoughtful response would involve asking what else Kurosawa could have done, or what Japanese translation he could have used. In our view, the most thoughtful response would consider how Kurosawa’s Shakespeare is always and profoundly Japanese. Kurosawa was born in 1910, towards the end of the Meiji period, and was in some ways a typically ‘Westernized’ and ‘modernized’ late-Meiji intellectual who frequently afﬁrmed that his favourite authors were Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Although Kurosawa does not anywhere discuss his impressions of staged Shakespeare, we can be fairly sure that the young Kurosawa would not have cared for Kabuki-inﬂuenced adaptations of Shakespeare since he disliked Kabuki, and we can be fairly sure that the young Kurosawa would have scoffed at some of the amateurish features of Shingeki productions. By 1957, when Throne of Blood was released, much had changed, in ways that earlier chapters of this book described. To recall just one striking and contemporary example: in his essays as in the 1955 production of Hamlet that used his own translation, Fukuda Tsuneari very clearly saw that Shakespeare is not modern in the ways that Ibsen or Gorky were modern, and that the Shingeki obsession with motivation, psychological consistency and insideout characterization was anachronistic when it was applied to Shakespeare. As we also noted in Chapter 2, Fukuda’s play Akechi Mitsuhide, which was based on a well-known historical event in sixteenth-century Japan as well as Macbeth, appeared in the same year as Kumonosujo, or Throne of Blood. Although neither of these two works could have inﬂuenced the other, they were doing something similar in assimilating Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the sengoku or the civil war period of Japanese history, when gekokujo, or the killing of a lord by his retainers, was a frequent occurrence. Moreover, both Fukuda’s play and Kurosawa’s ﬁlm were seriously historical, which cannot be said of the jidai-geki or period ﬁlms that were so popular in the 1950s. Throne of Blood was, like all of Kurosawa’s historical ﬁlms, an antidote to the prevailing habit of presenting prettiﬁed or romanticized views of this period of Japanese history: Kurosawa’s costumes and castles 129

Shakespeare in Japan

always look lived in, and his passionate concern with historical detail was famous or notorious. The available Japanese translations could not have served Kurosawa’s creative purpose in Throne of Blood, and his decision to start from scratch may well have reﬂected a view that corresponded with Natsume Soseki’s harsh comment on Shoyo’s 1910 Hamlet, which we quoted earlier: ‘Dr Tsubouchi should have chosen to become a faithful translator of Shakespeare without thinking of staging a performance, or to become an unfaithful adaptor in order to put Shakespeare on the stage.’12 Although Throne of Blood is far more than an ‘allusion’ in Kermode’s sense, Kurosawa chose to become an ‘unfaithful adaptor’ in something more like Soseki’s sense, in order to put Shakespeare on the screen. Although Japanese critics so often castigated Kurosawa for being ‘too Western’, Kurosawa’s Shakespeare is always profoundly Japanese. Or, to put that point differently: although Kurosawa was never interested in intervening (like Polanski or Peter Brook) in Western critical and interpretative debates about their Shakespeare, he was profoundly engaged with what the Japanese were doing to, or making of, Shakespeare. Indeed, if we are attending to the Japanese contexts for Kurosawa’s so-called Shakespeare ﬁlms, it seems all the more signiﬁcant that the ﬁlm that followed Throne of Blood was Donzoko, Kurosawa’s wonderful version of Gorky’s 1902 play, The Lower Depths. Gorky’s play became one of the ﬁrst landmarks of Shingeki theatre in 1910, when it was produced by Osanai Kaoru and his company, the Jiyu Gekijo (Free Theatre). Osanai’s ﬁrst production, a year earlier, was Ibsen’s late play, John Gabriel Borkman. As we saw in Chapter 1, Shoyo’s Bungei Kyokai had coupled Shakespeare and Ibsen in the other order: their ﬁrst production for the general public was Hamlet, which was quickly followed by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Kurosawa’s decision to ﬁlm his own versions of Macbeth and Gorky’s play in utterly different styles might be seen as his own retrospective but formidably modern and original comment on what the Japanese had hitherto been doing with Shakespeare, when they staged his plays in much the same way that they staged Ibsen and Gorky. The temptation to regard Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths as a kind of corrective diptych is all the stronger when we consider how these two remarkable and remarkably different ﬁlms were made back-to-back with extraordinary speed 130

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

and energy, and were released in the same year. Kurosawa began shooting Throne of Blood on 29 June 1956, and the ﬁlm was ﬁnished in just over six months; it opened on 15 January 1957. Four months later Kurosawa was ready to begin rehearsing The Lower Depths. Kurosawa and Oguni Hideo – who had also been one of the co-writers of the script for Throne of Blood – prepared the script for The Lower Depths in just two weeks. After very extended rehearsals, ﬁlming began on 24 June 1957; the whole ﬁlm was completed in just four weeks, and was released a couple of months later, in September 1957. Like Osanai, Kurosawa relocated or transposed his version of Gorky in (Edo-period) Tokyo, just as his earlier adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot was relocated in Hokkaido, not St Petersburg. Kurosawa was ‘making it new’, in Ezra Pound’s sense, by translating the original into the target culture as well as the target language. So, in Kurosawa’s version of the Gorky play – which is more faithful to Gorky in literary or verbal terms than Throne of Blood is to Shakespeare – the characters are all utterly Japanese, and the ‘Macbeths’ of the earlier ﬁlm reappear in another, very different but no less doomed alliance. Mifune Toshiro who was Washizu in Throne of Blood now plays a petty thief who dreams of possessing his landlord’s daughter while being the lover of the landlord’s wife – who is played by Yamada Isuzu, the actress who was Asaji in the earlier ﬁlm. In its subtle, beautifully modulated naturalism, Mifune’s performance could not be more different from that in the earlier ﬁlm, and Donald Richie – in the ﬁrst and still the most inﬂuential full-length study of Kurosawa’s ﬁlms in English – describes it as ‘miraculous’: ‘not only Mifune’s ﬁnest role but also one of the great pieces of acting in Japanese cinema’.13 However, there is no sense in which Mifune or Yamada are this ﬁlm’s ‘stars’ because this ﬁlm has no central character and no stars. The ﬁlm is a triumph of ensemble playing, and could be seen as a loving tribute to what, by the 1950s, seemed most vital in the Shingeki movement. In The Lower Depths it is as if Kurosawa were saying: ‘Look! This is what naturalistic Shingeki acting at its ﬁnest can achieve, with no need for false noses and eyeshadow. Gorky’s play can live and breathe in our own Tokyo, or in any hell-hole where hopeless poverty breeds pitifully hopeless illusions.’ But in Throne of Blood it is as if Kurosawa were saying: ‘Look! Shakespeare’s play is “Western” but not “modern”, not 131

Shakespeare in Japan

naturalistic, and not at all like Gorky or Ibsen. It can best ﬁnd us through our own earlier history, our own performance traditions, and our own folk beliefs.’ Like Orson Welles in his Shakespeare ﬁlms, but without the Shakespearean words, Kurosawa is ﬁnding cinematic, visual and spatial equivalents for what Shakespeare’s words and images might convey – to the Japanese. The result is not only a cinematic translation, it is also a cultural translation or transposition, which assimilates Shakespeare’s play to a profoundly Japanese perspective. For example, the composition of images on screen frequently recalls Japanese painting, especially scroll paintings, where some detail is picked out in a large area of empty space. In this ﬁlm the space is often mist: repeated shots of mist, stone and wood seem part of the characters’ nature, not merely decorative backdrops like all the shots of clouds in Ran. The most potent Japanese inﬂuence is that of Noh drama, which Kurosawa himself has described as ‘the real heart, the core of all Japanese drama’.14 Noh is unmistakably present in the choruses at the beginning and end of the ﬁlm, in the visual echoes of Noh masks and in the music. To take that last point ﬁrst: in most American ﬁlms, and in Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare ﬁlms, music is used to tell us what to feel and when to feel. In other words, it is used to direct and simplify our responses. So, in Branagh’s thin delivery of ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’ in Henry V, where Branagh does not have the vocal resources or imagination of an Olivier, Patrick Doyle’s pseudo-Elgarian music functions as a kind of emotional support system or ampliﬁer; Branagh’s Hamlet abounds in other, still more irritating examples, that do not even have the ingenuity of Doyle’s music for Henry V – where ﬁfths are used for that King Henry V’s motif, and fourths and sixths for his father and son. Kurosawa always recoiled from using music in this ‘Hollywood’ fashion. Often, he would boldly set the music against whatever is happening on screen, as in Yoidore Tenshi (Drunken Angel) when Mifune’s gangster goes down the dark streets in his ﬁnal, fatal attempt to redeem his life and we hear the banal ‘Cuckoo Waltz’, or in Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low) when we hear ‘O sole mio’ in a moonlit scene where the police move in on a killer. In Throne of Blood the music (by Kurosawa’s very close friend, Sato Masaru) is used sparingly, but we repeat132

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

edly hear the Noh ﬂute and drum announcing, punctuating and, in that sense, reinforcing key moments. This reinforcement is not like that in Branagh’s ﬁlms; rather, it has a detaching, even chilling effect that immediately recalls the desolate opening chorus and either checks or complicates any involvement with the characters. In a Noh drama the chorus would of course be on stage throughout, and although the chorus may on occasion speak (in the ﬁrst person) for the protagonist, they would also take this more detached (or choric) perspective. Sato’s death was a terrible blow to Kurosawa, as the mediocre score for Kagemusha showed – whereas Takemitsu Toru’s score for Ran is one of the (in our view not very many) strengths of that overrated ﬁlm, which Kurosawa – perhaps sincerely – hyped in the manner his Hollywood sponsors would have approved. As for the masks, it is no surprise to learn that Kurosawa gave his Macbeth and Lady Macbeth Noh masks to imitate. At the same time there is a remarkable contrast between different acting styles, that is, between Asaji’s masklike face and her terrifyingly concentrated immobility through much of the ﬁlm, and Washizu’s own extraordinary and hyperactive mobility, which is both facial and bodily, producing eruptive explosions of energy which are sometimes like those in Kabuki. When the arrow goes through Washizu’s neck his face freezes into an exaggerated, contorted expression that is like a mask but also, in this case, like the mie in Kabuki, when the actor ‘freezes’ an expression or gesture. Noh acting is often described as static, but, as Kurosawa himself insists in his (partial) autobiography, where he quotes the medieval Noh dramatist and theorist Zeami, it can also be remarkably athletic and even ‘terribly violent’ – with the difference that the actor hides the violence, or rather distributes it, in a remarkably controlled way, between different parts of the body.15 So, as Zeami explained, if the actor makes a very violent movement with one part of his body, the other part must remain controlled and still: ‘Violent body movement, gentle foot movement.’16 Similarly controlled alternations appear compositionally, when the screen image suddenly explodes from stillness into movement, like the movement of the frenzied horse of Miki, Kurosawa’s Banquo, or the unforgettable eruption of birds in Washizu’s conference chamber. Sometimes, as when the Macbeths prepare for the murder, the camera is at the eye level of a kneeling spectator, as in 133

Shakespeare in Japan

Ozu’s ﬁlms; at other times there are rapid, powerfully edited shots from unexpected angles. In an unexpected way, the result is more faithful to the effect of the violence in Shakespeare’s play than Western ﬁlmed versions such as Polanski’s. This is because the violence in Shakespeare’s play is horrendous but rarely occurs on stage. So, in Macbeth a messenger described how Macbeth ‘unseamed’ Macdonwald from nave to chops, with his ‘smoking’ sword. The speech is appallingly violent, but we do not see the unseaming, just as we do not see Duncan being killed, any more than we would in Greek tragedy or Racine. Such restraint makes it all the more shocking later, when Macduff’s son is butchered on stage. In Polanski’s admirable ﬁlm the violence is calculated but widespread and in that sense less controlled; the shocks are more visceral, as well as far more frequent. Rightly or wrongly, we think that Shakespeare considered such shocks very carefully. For example, those who come to know Henry V from Olivier’s and Branagh’s ﬁlms might be startled when they read the play and see how much of it was cut (respectively, 51 per cent and 49 per cent) – not least to make room for the lengthy battle scenes that Shakespeare (who could do and did such things when he wished to) deliberately excluded. The only scenes in Henry V where blood is shed on stage are pointedly unheroic – ﬁrst, the scene in which the French prisoners’ throats are cut, and then the scene in which Fluellen beats and bloodies Pistol’s head with an ‘English cudgel’. In comparison, Kurosawa’s alternations of stillness and violence, or the quiet horror of the scene in which we see his Macbeths sitting in front of a bloodstained wall, are, in a paradoxical sense, far more faithful to Shakespeare’s careful scaling of the violent and visceral. In a similar but more paradoxical and challenging way, Kurosawa’s Noh demon is far more ‘faithful’ – or less unfaithful – to Shakespeare than the witches in most modern Western productions. For any Western director Shakespeare’s witches present a grave difﬁculty, since modern Western audiences do not believe in witches. To make the witches, or one selected witch, physically revolting (as Polanski or Trevor Nunn did) is not enough. When Western directors like Welles or, more surprisingly, Trevor Nunn try to invoke Christian motifs, things either get embarrassingly naïve (as in Welles’s ﬁlm), or that wretched idea of a reassuringly 134

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

active providence creeps back into Shakespeare’s far less reassuring, and more terrifying, play. Shakespeare’s bearded witches seem more primeval or even pagan than that, while the play’s few Christian references are not at all reassuring, and increase its terrors without bringing any relief. What seems to have been especially difﬁcult for English, post-Restoration audiences was the ambivalence of Shakespeare’s ‘weyard sisters’, who are sometimes rather comical and sometimes serious and are never called witches in Shakespeare’s play. Once the witches became less ambivalent and started wearing conical hats and brandishing broomsticks, they became less frightening, while multiplying in number from three to more than ﬁfty ( John Philip Kemble in the 1770s) or ‘a hundred or more pretty singing witches’ (according to one bewitched review of the 1864 production with Samuel Phelps and the fascinating Helen Faucit). Even A.C. Bradley was arguably snarled in this very English tradition when he argued in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) that the witches are not, ‘in any way whatever, supernatural beings’: ‘They are old women, poor and ragged, full of vulgar spite.’17 Here too the problem is not an unequivocal either–or (whether the witches are or are not supernatural) but a thoroughly equivocal both–and: they are both as vulgar as Bradley suggests and they have real powers of prophecy. In his revolutionary 1847 Macbeth Verdi got this right – following Schlegel and knowing nothing of the corrupted English tradition. True, Verdi’s libretto provided three alarmingly large covens of witches, who then sing of what they have been doing in the third person: the immediate problem is that of suspending derision, rather than disbelief. But Verdi as composer-dramatist took over by noticing how – as he told Leon Escudier (in a famous letter written on 8 February 1865),18 the witches should be ‘brutal and coarse’ in ‘both their singing and acting’ when they are with each other, but ‘sublime and prophetic’ when they confront Macbeth and Banquo: the music perfectly registers that profound difference. To be faithful in this case does not mean giving the witches back their beards and hats, like restoring Macduff’s hat so that he can pull it over his brows in the English scene. Arguably, the witches are culturally untranslatable in the modern West, so that Kurosawa begins with a great advantage. With her spinning wheel and thatched hut, Kurosawa’s witch is evidently modelled on the 135

Shakespeare in Japan

demon in the Noh play Kurozuka: in her ﬁrst and later appearances her face is made up to resemble different Noh masks – ﬁrst the yaseonna (a thin woman), and then the yamauba (a mountain witch) mask. Of course the religious context for this is Buddhist, not Christian, but it is also deeply felt and richly, coherently presented. Kurosawa is not ﬂirting with his Japanese material in the manner of a Ninagawa, and then presenting a kind of JapaneseShakespearean cocktail that fails to take either tradition seriously.19 The result is that Washizu’s ﬁrst encounter with the witch has a real power to disturb, which any Western director might envy. Of course this is not like whatever Shakespeare’s ﬁrst audiences saw; but if we could see that we would not feel whatever they felt. Perhaps because Westerners thought of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare, or Japanese Shakespeare in general, as a kind of ‘samurai Shakespeare’, they took a remarkably long time to notice how Kurosawa’s next excursion into Shakespearean territory came in the ﬁercely contemporary and much underrated ﬁlm, Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru, or The Bad Sleep Well. This 1960 ﬁlm was the ﬁrst ﬁlm Kurosawa produced once he was able to set up his own company. It was bitingly contemporary (and still seems timely) in its attack on the ‘cosy’ alliances between politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and (with a little help from the CIA) gangsters or yakuza in Prime Minister Kishi’s post-war Japan. Unfortunately, once Western critics recognized the ﬁlm’s relation to Hamlet, they approached – and badly distorted – the ﬁlm as Kurosawa’s version of Hamlet. In fact, as we shall see, the relation with Hamlet does not begin to be apparent until the ﬁlm is half over, and then appears in an astonishing, rapidly multiplying series of reversals and inversions. To read Hamlet into the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst half is to destroy the mystery and suspense that Kurosawa so carefully builds. In hindsight, however, we are likely to realize that Kurosawa used various devices originating in Hamlet such as the ‘Mousetrap’ and the ghost. The Claudius-ﬁgure in Kurosawa is Iwabuchi, who is vicepresident of the ‘Japanese Corporation for the Development of Unused Land’. No organization with this name exists, but it is strongly reminiscent of government organizations which are responsible for building public highways and bridges as well as developing industrial and housing complexes. Because of the 136

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

nature of their work they maintain a very close – perhaps suspiciously close – relation with construction companies which can make an enormous proﬁt by receiving what was originally taxpayers’ money. The president of this public corporation is a quiet and incompetent old man, who obviously has no power of his own (a very Japanese detail). We see him introducing the bride and bridegroom to the guests in the long, brilliant set piece that launches the ﬁlm: a lavish and highly formal wedding dinner held almost certainly in one of the luxurious hotels in Tokyo in which things go badly wrong. Somebody – but it is very important that we do not know who, for the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst 68 minutes – has sabotaged the wedding, alerting the journalists who gather outside and offer their cynical commentaries on the company celebration, and tipping off the police who begin to make arrests immediately before the dinner begins. They arrest Wada, a middle-rank government ofﬁcial working in the organization who was supposed to chair the celebration. He asks Shirai, who is also a middle-rank government ofﬁcial but occupies a higher position in the bureaucratic hierarchy, to take over. Shirai is embarrassed because he is totally unprepared and being a typical Japanese bureaucrat who is oversensitive to the hierarchy he is far from happy about doing what his inferior was ordered to do. The trigger for the scandal is a wedding cake in the form of the building which houses the organization in question. There was a widespread rumour about a scandal involving the construction of the building, and a middle-rank ofﬁcial who was responsible for preparing contracts and clearly knew all the nasty secrets had jumped out of one of the windows to his death ﬁve years before. In Japan it is not uncommon for employees of large organizations, whether public or private, to commit suicide in order to save their superiors as well the organizations from scandal. That Iwabuchi did not directly give orders for this death is crucial and chilling, as we realize much, much later: the bureaucrat understood what was ‘required’. (It is often conveyed with a vague word ‘yoroshiku’, which would mean ‘act properly’ or ‘do us a favour’: a crucial word in this ﬁlm. In normal circumstances ‘yoroshiku’ would sound perfectly harmless, but in special circumstances it would sound extremely intimidating.) Soon after the aborted wedding supper we see Miura, one of the directors of Dairyu Kensetsu, a large construction company 137

Shakespeare in Japan

which has been paying bribes to Iwabuchi and other members of the government organization, commit suicide: he is arrested, then released because he adamantly refused to co-operate with public prosecutors and to provide any evidence, but is arrested again on another suspicion. But then the company lawyer tells him what the president of the company expects or requires from him – the lawyer tells him that the president says ‘Yoroshiku’ to him – and he immediately jumps in front of a car. However, this is still not enough to stave off scandal and disaster, and we then see another scapegoat, Assistant Chief Wada who was arrested immediately before the wedding dinner, preparing to commit suicide soon after he was released to save Iwabuchi and the corporation from scandal. He leaves his suicide note, hesitates and suddenly encounters Iwabuchi’s son-in-law, who slaps him. This particular episode very well illustrates the ﬁlm’s mordant humour, since the brilliant editing actively misleads us. We do not see Wada jump to his death, of course. We hear Nishi, the son-inlaw, ask, ‘So you want to die?’ Instead of seeing a body falling we see the camera pan down – and then, in classic ﬁlm noir style, we see a montage of newspaper headlines reporting Mr Wada’s death. Only later does it become clear that Wada did not jump, and is not dead; later still, in the next extract, we see Wada being taken by Nishi, the son-in-law, to watch his own funeral. In this case the ﬁlm’s mordant humour emerges as a musical contrast, between the priests’ solemn chanting and the vivacious but tawdry music on the tape that Nishi plays to the shattered Wada. Nishi made the secret recording the night before the funeral, in a nightclub with Moriyama and Shirai, two of Iwabuchi’s top aides: they were speaking of the relief they felt when Wada committed suicide, and the different kind of relief ‘a young girl’ will bring. We – and Wada – hear the tape as we see Moriyama and Shirai being suitably solemn at the funeral. The account of Wada’s supposed suicide in Donald Richie’s book on Kurosawa is both wrong and very misleading: We watch Fujiwara [Wada] climb to the top of a volcano, and prepare to throw himself in, when out of the fog and steam ( just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father) steps Mifune and his ﬁrst question is an uncomprehending: ‘But, don’t you want revenge?’20

In fact Nishi does not say anything about revenge at this point in 138

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

the subtitled Western version, or in the slightly longer Japanese version or in the published ﬁlm script. Nonetheless, Western critics have gone on repeating Richie’s error. So, for example Stephen Prince writes, much more ﬂoridly: In his determination to embrace evil, Nishi emerges as one of the darkest of Kurosawa’s heroes. The revelation of his identity as an avenger is visualized as an emergence from hell. Nishi stands on the rim of a volcano, clothed in mist and vapor, a dealer in death. Wada has come here to commit suicide. Nishi initially prevents him from jumping in by asking him if he doesn’t want revenge.21

Nishi does not ask Wada that question about revenge until much later in the ﬁlm – when he takes Wada to his own funeral and plays him the tape. But even then, when we hear Nishi say, ‘Can you forgive them? Don’t you want revenge? Join me!’, we do not have any idea why Nishi himself apparently wants revenge. This mystery is resolved later still, when we at last learn that ‘Nishi’ (it is not his real name) is the ‘illegitimate’ son of Furuya, the ofﬁcial who had been driven to suicide by Iwabuchi, Moriyama and Shirai ﬁve years earlier. In short, we have been watching the ﬁlm for 68 minutes before there is any indication that this might be, in some sense, a ‘version’ of Hamlet. We are then, but only then, in a position to begin relating some scenes and events to those in Shakespeare’s play. This half-way moment of discovery is beautifully timed, since Iwabuchi and his colleagues are also beginning to put things together – with fatal consequences for Nishi. When Nishi ﬁnally reveals that he was responsible for the ﬁasco in the long opening scene – it was indeed he himself who had ordered the cake complete with a rose stuck to one of the seventh ﬂoor windows out of which Furuya had jumped – and wanted to watch the responses of those responsible for his father’s death, we can indeed think of Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’. But only in retrospect: in the opening sequence there was no sign that Nishi was watching anyone or anything. Once we are in a position to make the comparison with Hamlet, it is the contrasts or reversals that are most striking. During this scene Nishi is the very picture of an impassive, bespectacled Japanese salaryman, whereas Hamlet keeps interrupting and arguably wrecks his own ‘Mousetrap’ with his grossly insulting and ﬁnally threatening 139

Shakespeare in Japan

comments. Hamlet cannot stop talking, whereas Nishi has been acting, quietly and ruthlessly, for the last ﬁve years. In order to gain the clinching information he needs, he has even married the crippled Yoshiko, the daughter of Iwabuchi – with whom he then falls in love. This reshufﬂes another feature of Hamlet, since Nishi becomes Iwabuchi-Claudius’s son-in-law. Hamlet is chillingly unconcerned with the fate of Ophelia after he has butchered her father; Nishi on the other hand is deeply worried about the effect that exposing Iwabuchi will have on Yoshiko. Still, he does not abandon his plan for revenge (Richie is also misleading about this). In another reshufﬂing, which is mordantly funny once we think of Hamlet, Yoshiko’s playboy brother – who, like Laertes, threatens to kill both ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Claudius’ – worries (rightly) that Nishi-Hamlet is not making love to his sister. When Nishi ﬁnally decides to consummate his marriage and returns home with a bouquet for his wife, it is too late. Iwabuchi has learned of the son-in-law’s identity from Moriyama. Other such inversions involve the echoes of the poison in the goblet, which in the ﬁlm is not poisoned, Wada’s pretence of being a ghost to annoy Shirai and Shirai’s insanity after he is mentally tortured by Nishi and Wada. Such tragicomic ironies would be remarkable enough, especially since traditional Japanese theatre is rarely tragicomic. But although the ﬁlm’s eruptive variations on Hamlet are obviously secondary to its contemporary social and political themes, these variations are assimilated to tense and powerful consideration of the ethics of revenge. We referred earlier to the way in which early adaptations of Hamlet assimilated Shakespeare’s play to the Japanese tradition of adauchi-mono (or katakiuchi-mono), that is, revenge drama. Within that tradition the most important relationship in the play would then be that between father and son, and in the ‘Dramatis Personae’ of several Japanese translations (including those by Shoyo, Fukuda and Odashima) the ghost is listed, without further ado, as ‘The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father’. According to the samurai code of bushido and Confucian classics like Li Chi, revenge is a sacred duty. Kurosawa sets this against the familiar and rather sentimental tradition that is familiar in many ﬁlms where the audience hopes that the anguished would-be avenger will abandon thoughts of revenge and at last ﬁnd happiness, living forwards with the woman he loves. The result is a very 140

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

troubled contemporary version of the familiar conﬂict in so much traditional Japanese drama (and in much classical French drama) between obligation (or giri) and personal inclination (or ninjo) – with an important twist. The twist appears when Nishi upbraids himself at one point: ‘I’m not hard enough. It makes me sick.’ At another point he admits: ‘I wanted to rake up my hate . . . It wasn’t just to avenge my father. I wanted to punish them all, all those who prey on the people who are unable to ﬁght back.’ This is yet another inversion or reversal of Hamlet, since Shakespeare’s Hamlet never worries about others in this way, and is never concerned about the situation of the helpless, anonymous Danes. In this respect the anguished Nishi may seem more sympathetic and impressive than Hamlet. This implied critique places Kurosawa’s ﬁlm in the line of Japanese creative critiques (including Shiga’s Claudius’s Diary and Dazai’s Shin Hamuretto or The New Hamlet) that raise doubts about Prince Hamlet or Hamlet-centred readings of Hamlet. In effect, Kurosawa was confronting his contemporary Japanese audience with a punishingly difﬁcult question: ‘In our terribly corrupt society, should Nishi be more or less like Shakespeare’s Hamlet?’ Of course this question is subordinate to the larger, contemporary issue of what can be done about those who ‘prey on the people who cannot ﬁght back’. Hamlet ends on a stage littered with corpses; The Bad Sleep Well ends with the triumph of evil. Frank Kermode might say of this ﬁlm, as he said of Throne of Blood, that it is ‘an allusion to, rather than a version of ’ Shakespeare’s play. This would be true, but the tragicomic allusions to Hamlet pose important and challenging questions about Hamlet and the ethics of revenge. Ran (1985) is another matter, alas, and could not be defended from Kermode’s judgement. In the Hollywood blockbuster The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise and his valiant rebels have a climactic battle with the Meiji army. Not only are they vastly outnumbered, they have no guns, and do not even want guns: as we are told more than once, the Bushidoinspired samurai choose to live and die by the sword. This is Hollywood tush, of course. Historically, when Saigo Takamori rebelled against the Meiji Restoration he had helped to establish, he and his band of brothers in the Satsuma rebellion had guns, but ran out of ammunition. By far the best thing in the 141

Shakespeare in Japan

Hollywood ﬁlm is Watanabe Ken’s performance as Katsumoto, the rebel leader and awesome warrior who loves cherry blossom but seems too pure ever to want a woman. Again, the historical contrast is rather sharp. It is not even certain that Saigo himself fought in the climactic battle: some historians have suggested that he was conﬁned to his tent by a parasitic infection of his testicles. But in happier times Saigo’s favourite mistress had been the famously fat Kyoto geisha who was known as Butahime, or ‘Princess Pig’. In Kurosawa’s Ran (the word means ‘chaos’ but it can mean ‘civil war’ as well) the climactic battle is based on the historically famous battle of Nagashino in 1575, when the army jointly led by Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu, armed with muskets, wiped out the Takeda clan. Kurosawa had recalled this momentous battle in Kagemusha, as a kind of rehearsal for the climactic slaughter of the army of Jiro, the second son of Hidetora, in Ran. And yet, although this scene of slaughter is visually stunning, it also shows how, as the great English documentary ﬁlm-maker John Grierson once observed, ‘When a great director dies, he turns into a photographer.’ One of the lessons we learn from King Lear is that things can always be worse. At least this scene spares us the horror of seeing Tom Cruise emerge from a heap of corpses as the sole survivor. But the ridiculous feature of Kurosawa’s scene is that there are no corpses. Each time the forces ride into this deadly green space we see musket ﬂashes coming from the woods behind, and then see countless men and horses falling. But where do these bodies go? This question is important because the ﬁeld is clear each time the forces ride in again, and get mown down again. Presumably they would never do anything so silly or suicidal if they could see the ﬁeld littered with bodies. In Kurosawa’s great early ﬁlm The Seven Samurai, the samurai who die are all shot, and the battles are intensely involving because we care so much about what happens to the samurai, as well as to various farmers and peasants. However, Dr Johnson’s famous judgement on Paradise Lost applies far more appropriately in our view to the long battle scenes in Ran: ‘The want of human interest is always felt.’ It is indeed sad to think of Kurosawa planning this work through ten long years when ﬁnance was not available, and producing paintings of the different scenes instead of storyboards. 142

Shakespeare and Japanese Film

But the creative urgency that produced Kumonosujo and Donzoko in less than a year had also gone, along with many of Kurosowa’s most invaluable collaborators and actors, like Mifune Toshiro. Once the American money for Ran was available, Kurosawa required master tailors in Kyoto to spend another three years making the 1400 costumes, imported 52 horses from Colorado and so on. Although the ﬁlm was generally acclaimed, and although Kurosawa himself declared several times that Ran is his greatest work, it is the work of a frustrated old master who has pondered his material so long and so self-indulgently that he will not let anything go. The result is an inﬂated but hollow magniloquence, which is especially inappropriate to a ﬁlm that would pass itself off as a version of King Lear. The earlier scene in which the First Castle is destroyed provides another example of this humanly impoverished magniloquence. The ‘Lear’-ﬁgure, Ichimonji Hidetora, opens the wooden door of the donjon and stands at the top of a ﬂight of steps, which is blocked by soldiers wearing yellow banners to show they belong to the army of Taro, the rotten oldest son. Hidetora strikes one of the soldiers, breaks his sword and retreats back into the donjon – suddenly followed from behind by half a dozen of his surviving knights. The knights (who later appear to be killed many times over) simply appear behind Hidetora. Just where Taro’s soldiers disappeared to, and how Hidetora’s knights took their place on the steps in a few seconds, is not made clear. The point is not that this is a merely local lapse of logic, where something unaccountable seems to happen off-screen; rather, the screen has become a mere frame for chilly ‘old master’ compositions in which Kurosawa’s concern with the people who move in and out of the screen is merely formal, or compositional in a sadly reduced sense. When we see the mad Hidetora picking ﬂowers like Lear, the ﬁlm still has more than an hour to run, and that time is largely given over to empty spectacle, and the destruction of characters we do not know and cannot care about. The much-touted relation with King Lear turns out to be tenuous, intermittent and merely plotty. As Kawachi Yoshiko observes, even the storm ‘is merely a backdrop’,22 and the ﬁrst scene, in which the kingdom is divided between three sons, has as much or more in common with the ﬁrst scene of Gorboduc. The scenes involving the vengeful Lady Kaede are very powerful 143

Shakespeare in Japan

indeed, but they have nothing to do with King Lear. The most obvious and disturbing difference between Lear and Hidetora is that Hidetora is a monster who has been as bad as or worse than any of the evil characters in Shakespeare’s play. So, for example, he himself has butchered Sué’s family, while contenting himself with blinding her brother (the nearest, but very distant parallel with Gloucester’s blinding). As Saburo, the third and good son, says in the ﬁrst scene, Hidetora-Lear cannot expect anyone to be ‘loyal and feeling’ when he has himself spilt an ‘ocean of blood’. But this leaves us all the more unable to make out why Saburo and Tango and even Sué herself are ‘loyal and feeling’ to this old monster. In these circumstances it becomes pointless to try to ‘see’ Saburo as Cordelia or Tango as Kent. Having entered these reluctant reservations we should emphasize that Ran was enthusiastically received. Perhaps this was due to the visually impressive (if empty) nature of the ﬁlm, which is all the more impressive in the new, beautifully restored DVD version. Kurosawa, rather like Ninagawa, wanted to be a painter when he was young. Unlike Ninagawa, however, he was exceptionally meticulous about the visual effects of his works, and until late in his career, he refrained from using colour. All his earlier masterpieces including Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well are in black and white, but Ran is overwhelmingly ‘colourful’, as if we were instructed not to pay too much attention to drama. Kurosawa’s ﬁrst ﬁlm in colour, Dodeskaden, was far more expressionistic and original; although its commercial failure led Kurosawa to attempt suicide, it was probably his last major ﬁlm. Still Kurosawa’s reputation as an artist who interpreted Shakespearean drama in Japanese terms will be supported by Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well for many years to come.

Notes 1. New York Times, 23 November 1961. 2. ‘Shakespeare on Three Screens: Peter Brook Interviewed by Geoffrey Reeves’, Sight and Sound, 14 (1965), pp. 66–70. 3. Interview with Peter Hall, The Sunday Times, 26 January 1969. 4. Irving Ribner, ‘Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (Spring 1959), pp. 147–59. 5. John Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of ‘King Lear’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), p. 195.

144

Shakespeare and Japanese Film 6. Paul N. Siegel, Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise: A Marxist Study (New York: New York University Press, 1957; reprinted by University of America Press, 1983), p. 155. 7. Pauline Kael, ‘Killers and Thieves’, New Yorker, 47(51) (5 February 1972), p. 76. 8. See Stephen Booth, ‘King Lear, Macbeth, Indeﬁnition and Tragedy’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), especially pp. 90 –105. 9. Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 230–231. 10. Translations of the screenplay are included in Niki Hisae, Shakespeare: Translation and Culture (Tokyo: Kenseisha Ltd., 1984) and in Akira Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays (London: Faber and Faber, 1992; trans. Donald Richie). 11. Frank Kermode, ‘Shakespeare in the Movies’, New York Review of Books, 18(8) (4 May 1972), pp. 18–21. 12. See note 16 to Chapter 1. 13. Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 128. 14. Quoted in Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, p. 117. 15. In Something Like an Autobiography (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) Kurosawa also explains how the screenplay of Kumonosujo was modelled on the Noh play with its three-part structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kyu (haste); p. 193. 16. On the Art of the No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, translated by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 58. 17. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1951 reprint of second edition (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 341. 18. Giuseppe Verdi, letter of 8 February 1865, quoted and translated in David Rosen and Andrew Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 99–100. 19. See Tetsuo Kishi, ‘Japanese Shakespeare and English Reviewers’, in Takashi Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 110–123. 20. Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, p. 144. The best study by far of this ﬁlm’s relationship to Shakespeare is Kaori Ashizu, ‘Kurosawa’s Hamlet?’, Shakespeare Studies, 33 (Shakespeare Society of Japan, 1995), pp. 71– 99. After an extensive survey of various errors or omissions in Western accounts of this ﬁlm and in the English subtitles, Ashizu observes that there is no Western account of the scenes in question (not only the volcano scene) ‘which gets the relevant details right’ (p. 73). 21. Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 183. 22. Yoshiko Kawachi, Shakespeare and Cultural Exchange (Tokyo: Seibido, 1995), p. 87.

145

Further Reading

Bradshaw, Graham, and Kaori Ashizu. ‘Reading Hamlet in Japan’, in Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (eds.), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 350 –63. Brown, John Russell. New Sites for Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1999). Dawson, Anthony B. ‘International Shakespeare’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174–93. Kawachi, Yoshiko. ‘Gender, Class, and Race in Japanese Translations of Shakespeare’, in Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (eds.), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 390 –402. Kawachi, Yoshiko. Shakespeare and Cultural Exchange (Tokyo: Seibido, 1995) (NB: approximately one-third of the contents of this book is in Japanese). Kennedy, Dennis. Looking at Shakespeare (2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kennedy, Dennis (ed.). Foreign Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kinoshita, Junji. Requiem on the Great Meridian and Selected Essays (trans. Brian Powell and Jason Daniel; Tokyo: Nan’un-do, 2000). Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘ “Bless Thee! Thou Art Translated!”: Shakespeare in Japan’, in Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer and Roger Pringle (eds.), Images of Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988) 245–50. Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘ “I Know Not What You Mean by That”: Shakespeare in Different Cultural Contexts’, in Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells (eds.), Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), pp. 223–28. Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘When Suicide Becomes an Act of Honour: Julius Caesar and Hamlet in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan’, in Peter Holland (ed.),

146

Further Reading

Shakespeare Survey 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 108 –14. Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘Shakespeare in Japanese’, Shakespeare Review 38(3) (The Shakespeare Association of Korea, 2002), pp. 721–33. Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘ “Verse or prose, that is not the question”: Translating Shakespeare into Japanese’, in Graham Bradshaw, John M. Mucciolo, Tom Bishop and Angus Fletcher (eds.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook 3, (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), pp. 329–35. Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘ “Our language of love”: Shakespeare in Japanese translation’, in Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004), pp. 68 –81. Minami, Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (eds.). Performing Shakespeare in Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Sasayama, Takashi, J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewing (eds.). Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Shibata, Toshihiko, ‘Voices and Silences in Shakespeare’s Plays: A View from a Different Cultural Tradition’, in Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells (eds.), Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), pp. 216–22. Uéno, Yoshiko (ed.). Hamlet and Japan (New York: AMS Press, 1995).

147

This page intentionally left blank

Index

1. Titles of books, plays, etc. are followed by the name of the author in brackets. Film titles are followed by the name of the director. 2. Japanese names are in keeping with the Japanese order, that is, a family name precedes a given name. accents of English 34–5 of Japanese 37–8 Actor’s Company (Haiyu-za) 30, 74–5 Akechi Mitsuhide (Fukuda) 46–9, 129 Akutagawa Hiroshi (actor) 31 Akutagawa Ryunosuke (novelist) 31, 109, 128 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 92 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 70 Atsumori (Zeami) 9–11, 15 Bad Sleep Well, The (Kurosawa) 136–41, 144 Bando Tamasaburo (Kabuki actor) 75 Barton, John 70–2 Basho (haiku poet) 39 Battenhouse, Roy 127 Beckett, Samuel 61, 127 Bell, John 104 Benthall, Michael 45, 74 Berman, Ingmar 96, 103 Booth, Edwin 4 Booth, Stephen 127

Bradley, A. C. 98, 102–4, 110, 135 Branagh, Kenneth 132, 134 Brecht, Bertolt 6, 12, 74 Brook, Peter 96, 126, 128, 130 Bungaku-za see Literary Company Bunraku 4, 6–8, 11–12, 14, 47, 61 Burbage, Richard 4 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 12 Chaucer, Geoffrey 4, 9, 12, 35, 62 Chikamatsu Monzaemon 11–14, 61–2 Claudius’s Diary (Shiga) 23, 49, 99–100, 106, 108–13, 141 Clouds (Kumo) 44–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3, 98 Corneille, Pierre 61 Crowther, Bosley 126–7 Danby, John 126 Dawson, Anthony 104 Dazai Osamu 49, 99, 115–21, 123, 128, 141 Deguchi Norio 60, 68, 75, 92–6 Dench, Judi 127 directing Shakespeare Deguchi Norio on 95–96

149

Index Fukuda Tsuneari on 31–33 Ninagawa Yukio on 78–80, 85 Dodeskaden (Kurosawa) 144 Doi Shunsho (actor) 21, 101 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen) 22, 130 Donne, John 36, 38–9, 105 Donzoko (Kurosawa) 130, 143 Dover Wilson, John see Wilson, John Dover Doyle, Patrick 132 Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) (Kurosawa) 132 Eliot, T. S. 8–9 Elliott, G. R. 127 Euripides 87–8 Faucit, Helen 135 Forbes Robertson, Johnston x Free Theatre Company (Jiyu Gekijo) 22, 130 see also Osanai Kaoru Fukuda Tsuneari vii–viii, xi, 25, 27, 29, 31–4, 39–49, 51–4, 56–8, 67, 71, 74, 98, 129, 140 Gadamer, Hans-Georg ix Gascoigne, George 35, 38 Gorky, Maxim 2, 30, 129–32 Greenblatt, Stephen 102 Greg, W. W. 99, 105–6 Haiyu-za see Actor’s Company Hall, Peter 99, 102, 104–5, 126 Hamlet (Branagh) 132 Hamlet (Shakespeare) ix–xi, 3, 7, 17, 21–2, 25, 29, 31–4, 44–5, 48–50, 54, 57–8, 60, 73–5, 79, 98–125, 129–30, 136, 140–1 Hamlet (Zefﬁrelli) 103 Hamlet: A User’s Guide (Pennington) 99 Hamlet’s Diary (Ooka) 49, 121–5 Han’s Crime (Shiga) 109 Hawkes, Terence ix Hawthorne, Nigel 81–4 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 38

150

Henry V (Branagh) 132, 134 Henry V (Olivier) 134 High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku) (Kurosawa) 132 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 39 Horatio’s Diary (Fukuda) 49–51, 98 ‘Hour and the Ghost, The’ (Rossetti) 118 Ibsen, Henrik 1–3, 6, 22, 32, 74, 129–30, 132 Ichikawa Sadanji II (Kabuki actor) 22 I-novel (watakushi shosetsu) 99–100, 112, 115 Irving, Henry 4, 22 Jacobi, Derek 99, 104 Jespersen, Otto 36 John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen) 22, 130 Johnson, Samuel 23, 142 Jones, Ernest 107 Jonson, Ben 61, 77, 105 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 4–8, 12, 14, 22, 26, 37, 41–3, 56–7 Juvenal 24 Kabuki 2–4, 11, 14–8, 22–3, 26–7, 45–7, 49, 56, 60–2, 64, 70, 73–5, 85–6, 90, 129, 133 Kael, Pauline 127 Kagemusha (Kurosawa) 133 Kara Juro (playwright, director and actor) 96 Kemble, John Philip 135 Kennedy, Dennis viii, 77 Kermode, Frank 128 Kinoshita Junji vii–viii, xi, 25, 27, 44, 53–65, 67, 71 King Lear (Shakespeare) 75, 81–4, 88, 95, 128, 142–4 Kobayashi Hideo 49, 99, 112–5, 121 Kott, Jan 127–8 Kozintsev, Girgori 103 Kumo see Clouds Kurosawa Akira viii, 49, 109, 126–36, 138–44

Index and Kabuki 129 and Noh 133, 136 Kurozuka (Anonymous) 136 Kyogen 15, 61–2, 64 Lady Aoi (Aoi no Ue) (Zeami) 11 language of Bunraku 6–8, 12–14 of Noh 9–11 language of Shakespeare 25, 65–7 Natsume Soseki on 23 Ninagawa Yukio on 77 Suzuki Tadashi on 90–1 Lawrence, D. H. 100–1 Literary Society, the (Bungei Kyokai) 1, 8, 20–2, 26, 100, 130 see also Tsubouchi Shoyo Literary Company (Bungaku-za) 29, 44, 46, 92 Looking at Shakespeare (Kennedy) 77 Love Suicides at Amijima, The (Chikamatsu) 12–3 Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The (Chikamatsu) 13–4 Lower Depths, The (Gorky) 130–1 Macbeth (Polanski) 127, 134 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 32–3, 47, 49, 59–60, 65–8, 70–2, 75–80, 84, 90–1, 126–30 Macbeth (Verdi) 135 McKellen, Ian 127 Marlowe, Christopher 35–6, 38, 55 Mason, Brewster 104 Masumi Toshikiyo (director) 75 Matsumoto Koshiro VIII (Kabuki actor) 45–6 Merchant of Venice, The 16, 21–2, 73 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 44, 94 Mifune Toshiro (actor) 131–2, 143 ‘Mousetrap’ (in Hamlet) 99–105 A. C. Bradley on 101–2 Dazai Osamu and 118 John Dover Wilson on 101–2 Ooka Shohei and 123 Shiga Naoya on 99, 109 W. W. Greg on 99

Nakamura Kanzaburo XVII (Kabuki actor) 45–6 Nakano Yoshio (scholar and translator) 42–3 Natsume Soseki 23–4, 105, 130 on Shoyo’s production of Hamlet 23, 130 New Hamlet, The (Dazai) 115–21, 141 Nigel Hawthorne on Stage (Riley) 83 Ninagawa Yukio viii, 25, 75–88, 90–2, 95–6, 136, 144 Noh 3–4, 9–11, 13, 15–16, 19, 56, 60–2, 64, 70, 85–6, 89–90, 128, 132–4, 136 Nonaka Shigi (director) 92 Nunn, Trevor 127, 134 Odashima Yushi (scholar and translator) 2, 60, 67–8, 71, 92, 94, 140 Olivier, Laurence x, 102 Ooka Shohei 49, 99, 121–5 Ophelia’s Testament (Kobayashi) 113–15 Osanai Kaoru (director) 22, 130–1 Othello (Shakespeare) 3, 40–1, 45–6, 54–5 Pasco, Richard 70 Peer Gynt (Ibsen) 84 Pennington, Michael 99 Phelps, Samuel 135 Players of Shakespeare 5 (Smallwood) 82, 84 Playing Shakespeare (Barton) 70–71 Polanski, Roman 127–8, 130, 133 Pope, Alexander 24 Pound Ezra 9, 23–24, 131 Prince, Stephen 139 Racine, Jean 61, 116, 134 Ran (Kurosawa) 132–3, 142–4 Rashomon (Kurosawa) 109, 128 reformation of Japanese theatre 15–20

151

Index see also Suematsu Kencho and Toyama Masakazu Requiem on the Great Meridian (Shigosen no Matsuri) (Kinoshita) 63–4 Ribner, Irving 126 Richardson, Tony x Richard II (Shakespeare) 38 Richard III (Shakespeare) 45–6, 81 Richie, Donald 131, 138–9 Riley, Kathleen 83 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 45, 75, 80 Rossetti, Christina 118 Royal Shakespeare Company, the 69, 81 Sanders, Wilbur 127 Sato Masaru (composer) 132 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 34, 135 Senda Koreya (director and actor) 74–5 Seven Samurai, The (Kurosawa) 142 Shakespearean Tragedy (Bradley) 101, 135 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott) 128 Shakespeare Theatre Company, the 92 see also Deguchi Norio Shaw, George Bernard x, 2–3, 6, 22 Shiga Naoya 23, 49, 99–102, 105–13, 115, 118, 121, 141 Shigosen no Matsuri see Requiem on the Great Meridian Shiizaru Kidan (Shoyo) 4–8 Shingeki 2, 29–31, 45–6, 49, 51, 56, 60, 62, 68–9, 74–5, 86, 92, 129–31 Siegel, Paul 127 Sonnets (Shakespeare) 35 Staple of News, The (Jonson) 77 Stewart, Patrick 99, 102, 104 Suematsu Kencho (politician) 15–20, 25 Suzuki Tadashi 69, 75, 86–8, 91–2, 96

152

syntax, Japanese 39–41 Takada Sanae (educator) 19 Takahashi Yasunari (scholar and critic) 89 Takemitsu Toru (composer) 133 Tale of Lear, The (Suzuki) 88–90 Tale of the Heike, The (Heike Monogatari) 63 Tempest, The 80, 84–5 ‘Three Voices of Poetry, The’ (Eliot) 8 Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) 49, 126–32, 143–4 Tieck, Johann Ludwig 34 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) 93 Togi Tetteki (actor) 100 Tokyo Shakespeare Company, the 92 Toyama Masakazu (educator) 15–8, 25 translating Shakespeare Fukuda Tsuneari on 39, 41–4 Kinoshita Junji on 54–60 Natsume Soseki on 23 Tsubouchi Shoyo on 26–7 Trojan Women, The (Euripides) 88 Tsubouchi Shoyo (also Shoyo) vii–viii, xi, 1–4, 6–8, 11–2, 14, 19–22, 24–7, 29, 37, 42–4, 58, 67, 72, 74, 100, 105–7, 130, 140 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 92 Twilight in Italy (Lawrence) 100 ‘Vanity of Human Wishes, The’ ( Johnson) 24 Verdi, Giuseppe 135 verse, English 35–6 verse, Japanese 36–9 Walker, Roy 127 Warner, David 99 Welles, Orson 132, 134 What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (Wilson) 99, 101, 124 Wilson, John Dover 99, 101–2, 104–7, 124

Index Wirth, Peter 103 Wright, George T. 38 Yamada Isuzu (actor) 131 Yamamoto Shuji (scholar and critic) 31, 34

Yoshida Kotaro (actor) 93 Zeami 3–4, 9, 61, 85, 133 Zefﬁrelli, Franco 103

153