Shakespearean comedy and Japanese (wo)men's Shakespeare: A refraction for the twenty-first century

Contemporary Japanese Shakespeare translation and ‘hot’ Shakespeare ¹

In the history of Shakespeare's reception in Japan, translation is sometimes seen to play second fiddle to production values, even in contemporary terms to take the heat off ‘hot’ Shakespeare with its focus on the minutiae of the original texts. ² This is to say that Japanese stage directors and academics have generally preferred ‘unadulterated’ translations in an accessible contemporary register to anything more experimental or arcane. In this connection, Minami Ryūta comments that

[w]hilst many of Japan's modern Shakespeare productions in the last few decades boasted their visual versatility, they are almost always conservative in their linguistic styles, and thus they, whether explicitly or implicitly, almost always reaffirm the conventional literary status as well as the set images and values of the Bard in Japanese translation. ³

While (as Minami suggests) Japanese Shakespeare translations tend to adopt a conservative style of modern Japanese that does not take the risks that Shakespeare himself took, this is hardly exceptional, exemplifying Gideon Toury's maxim that ‘in translation, items tend to be selected on a level which is lower than the one where textual relations have been translated in the source text’. ⁵ At the same time, translators such as Tsubouchi and Matsuoka are demonstrably interpretive and creative, drawing on their native rhetoric to create meaningful effects that can hardly in any case be exactly equivalent to what Shakespeare is doing; and even if their decisions end up being stylistically conservative, they may still aspire to recreate what Anzai Tetsuo called ‘the theatrical experience embodied there’. ⁶ This act of recreation might manifest itself just as much in small, apparently insignificant details as in anything ‘hotter’.

Whether ‘hot’, ‘cold’ or (more likely) ‘tepid’, Japanese Shakespeare translations are shaped above all by their recipient culture, and this culture is far from being homogeneous. Not only is the society itself less homogenous than is sometimes supposed, ⁷ but within the sphere of Shakespeare's reception in Japan there are considerable differences between the groups that compete (and sometimes collaborate) in influencing the way that audiences read the works: between the academic and the theatrical, the commercial and aesthetic, the humanist and postmodern, and between English language teachers and those who believe that Shakespeare's reception in Japan serves a purpose that is greater or other than the historical demand for English education. ⁸ College educators may insist that their students read the plays in Shakespeare's original English, and auteurs such as Ninagawa may make the greater popular impact, but it is arguably individual translators that, more than any other single player, transcend the differences between groups in providing the raw material for both the study and performance of Shakespeare's plays.

The two productions discussed in this article of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night by the Studio Life company adapted translations that Matsuoka had written originally for publication by Chikuma Shobō and production in Ninagawa's commercial theatre. The nature of the Studio Life productions can be summed up by a blog the author wrote after seeing another of their Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in 2008:

Arriving late, it wasn’t until I was able to purchase a programme in the interval that I realized the true nature of this production. I should have guessed from all the women around me, but Hayashi Yusuke's deliciously husky Titania had me completely taken in, and this was strictly a boys’ Dream. Shinjuku's Sun Mall theatre is just off Tokyo's main gay district, although this one struck me as more platonic than camp. To say that it had most of the clichés I would expect of a Tokyo Dream, above all the obsession with fairy magic, is not a criticism but rather recognition that they had driven their dream almost to perfection. It was an artificial dream for an artificial city but also beautiful to look at and fun to listen to, as much of it was song, and at a pace which kept us in our seats for a full and pleasing three hours.

Ninagawa's audience was predominantly female, and like Studio Life Shakespeares may have been driven by a feminised idealism that was in fact less interested in the homoerotic potential of all-male casting than in a more traditional type of subversion. Regarding their Much Ado, Conor Hanratty comments:

By playing the women straight and maintaining the play's focus on the importance of women's virtue (and the insistence that men should eventually get married), the audience all but forgot that the actors were all men. When the story did end with a prolonged kiss between Beatrice and Benedick, the actors’ gender was entirely secondary to those of their characters. For all that, it was still a provocatively long kiss between two men, who had just agreed to get married in a country where same-sex marriage is still not legally recognized. ¹⁰

Public interest in LGBTQ rights has risen considerably in Japan over the last two decades, yet in 2010 Ishihara Shintarō, Tokyo's nationalist governor at the time of the all-male Shakespeares, stated his view that gays and lesbians were ‘deficient somehow’, ¹¹ while attempts to enact legislation permitting same-sex marriage have so far faltered due partly to the difficulty of obtaining a consensus within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. ¹² Ninagawa's position as Japan's leading stage director, honoured by both the British and Japanese governments and with his main theatre in Saitama Prefecture just outside Ishihara's Tokyo, could only have added clout to his productions’ apparent questioning of gender roles, even if they were in their way as conservative as they were innovative, combining Ninagawa's rather traditional Japanese aesthetic with one of the original conditions of their performance in Shakespeare's theatre; that is, without female actors.

The Studio Life Shrew and Twelfth Night were musical adaptations of one of Tokyo's so-called ‘little’ theatres and marketed to a loyal fan base who knew what to expect. Studio Life was founded by its artistic director Kurata Jun as a mixed company, but when an experimental all-male production of one of Kurata's own creations (White, 1988) attracted an unexpected rave response, the company went ‘all male’, while Kurata remains its only female employee. ¹³ Studio Life's continued success can at one level be explained in terms of the idealised androgynous aesthetic that has become one of the most powerful expressions of contemporary Japanese pop culture. Several Studio Life actors, such as Funami Kazutoshi who played Olivia in the Twelfth Night and Daisy Meredith in the company's staging of Denise Deegan's classic Daisy Pulls It Off (set in an English girls’ boarding school), have the typical feminine features of bishōnen that are said to appeal to young Japanese women because of their sexual ambivalence, or in other words, detachment from heteronormative patriarchy. Yet Studio Life differs from kabuki tradition and the much better known all-female Takarazuka Revue in that individual actors can be cast in both male and female roles – for example, Yamamoto Kazuki played Viola in the 2009 production and Petruccio in 2010 – and the company sometimes employs temporary ‘guest’ actors such as Sakamoto Gakudai, who played Malvolio and Hortensio.

The company's aestheticism is geared towards a pleasing final product that, strung together by musical numbers, is less eclectic than the Ninagawa style, which brought together experienced Ninagawa hands with celebrity actors. The motive for staging four Shakespeare plays in the period from 2007 to 2010 (starting with Romeo and Juliet in 2007) was that Studio Life wanted to mark its twentieth anniversary with something more ‘serious’ than its typical fare of manga adaptations. This commitment to ‘seriousness’ is also evident in its acting styles where, notwithstanding the traditional demand for physically attractive actors in roles such as Olivia and Viola, ‘[p]hysical beauty is [in fact] remarkably unimportant.’ ¹⁴ Two actors of the same sex may kiss realistically on stage if that is what the play demands, but as the blogger goes on to explain, ‘Female mannerisms and physical attributes set aside, the [Studio Life] actor focuses his energy entirely on bringing the character's intricate psychology to life’, and indeed

Studio Life productions portray male and female characters as more similar than different, fostering body positivity and acceptance of non-binary gender presentation as well as queer identity. ¹⁵

Studio Life Shrew (2010)

In this kind of popular middle-brow Shakespeare, translations have an obvious role in enhancing the narrative and rhetorical coherence of the finished product: they need to be speakable (and perhaps singable) and deflect potential obscurities. Both the Studio Life Shrew and Twelfth Night adapted Shakespeare's plot but – especially in the case of the Shrew – not Matsuoka's translation. As I have argued elsewhere, Matsuoka's experience of translating for Ninagawa's theatre, often attending rehearsals and working directly with actors, combined with her commitment to translation as an exploratory process, or what she calls ‘deep reading’ (fukayomi), to produce speakable stage scripts with a lively awareness of Shakespeare's subtexts that may also be germane to the Studio Life acting style outlined above. ¹⁷ Her rendition of Petruccio's initial, memorable encounter with Katherina (2.1.210–11) can be considered one example. That Matsuoka is inevitably characterised as a feminist translator also made her translations of the two comedies the obvious choices for Studio Life's relatively subversive treatment: ¹⁸ PETRUCCIO

Come, come, you wasp, i’faith you are too angry.

Oi oi, kimi wa suzumebachi ka, mattaku okorippoin dakara.

This level of innuendo can be said to reflect a tendency for shōjo manga comics to be sexually suggestive without necessarily being explicit, ¹⁹ and it also supported Kurata's main framing device. The Induction scenes of the source with the drunken tinker Christopher Sly were replaced with a prologue centred on Lizzy, a failing, presumably American actress, who observed by a mysterious middle-aged lady, comes onstage with ‘Dan, a producer, with a bottle of whisky in one hand. The two are drunk. Dan tries to touch Lizzy, but she shakes him off’. LIZZY

You liar! You said you’d give me a part.

Studio Life Twelfth Night (2009)

The Studio Life Twelfth Night touched on an even more fundamental reality of the Japanese experience; namely, the vulnerability to seasonal typhoons, equivalent to ‘the wind and the rain’ of Feste's ballad in the final scene of the source, and the traditional Buddhist acceptance of impermanence that copes with that reality. The song was rewritten for its Japanese setting and, like ‘Girls Are Scary!’, sung at the beginning and the end, both times by Feste, but with a more dogmatic message than in the source: Life is wind and rain, grey clouds overhead. Days of wind and rain, every day. Sunny days last only for a moment. Clouds never go away, bringing days of rain and wind. That is life. The final verse of Feste's ballad in the original play is both more enigmatic and more archetypal in tone: A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that's all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day. (5.1.398–401) In Song 5 (there are 13 altogether), the theme of precipitation became a boisterous drinking song, ‘Life Has Its Ups and Downs’, between Sir Toby Belch and his companions: Exchanging cups and drinking Happily from noon till night, This is the life! Give yourself to the wind, Life has its ups and downs. To forget everything is the joy of this world. Keep afloat while you’re drifting Between life's rollers. More than Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which nowadays is read as a play about desire and sexual identity, the Studio Life version seemed to define love as an acceptance of impermanence, the threat of ‘rainy days’ (although the image of company men drinking away their sorrows had perhaps dated compared to a Japan of previous generations). The all-male casting also made for some striking innuendo. Sir Toby's quip about Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair in Act One – ‘Excellent, it hangs like flax on a distaff, and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off.’ (1.3.98–100) – was cut, but the innuendo in Malvolio's speech in the gulling scene fully realised: MALVOLIO

By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's. It is in contempt of question her hand.

Nanto, ojōsama no hisseki, kono C, U, T, sore ni kono ōmoji no P no kakikata. Machigainai, ojōsama no ji da.

The Studio Life Malvolio came across more as a weary victim of circumstance than the tragic outsider of twentieth-century criticism, and joined in an extended riff on Sir Toby's baldness that was almost a complete addition to the source: TOBY

Oh, how dreary! I’ve lost all my hair.

Inin metsumetsu. Kami no ke zenmetsu!

The riff on Toby's baldness is playful in a way that Malvolio cannot be, for example, the puns around goma, meaning ‘sesame seed’, which is another joke about baldness. This technique of linear rhyming, called goro awase in Japanese, was a feature of Odashima Yūshi's translations in the 1970s, and given Sir Toby's intentions it may even be echoing the word for ‘condom’, gomu. These rhymes generate a metatextual level of signification, the festive atmosphere that was appropriate to Kurata's musical adaptation, and can extend across the text. For example, the word ‘cut’ occurs only once in the adaptation, but pronounced katto in Japanese can refer also to haircuts and wage cuts, and (as the latter) may connote the fear of losing his job that drives Feste in the revenge sub-plot against Malvolio. Similar to the coincidental pun on shita in Matsuoka's Shrew translation, the word kami can mean ‘hair’ written with one character, as when Sir Toby complains he has none, and also ‘paper’, as for example the paper on which the letter is forged tricking Malvolio and on which he will later write to Olivia from his prison begging for help. Song 9 has the title Jinsei wa kami hitoe, literally ‘Life is a piece of paper’, but with the idiomatic meaning ‘There's a fine line between x and y’, in this case between happiness and misery, as Feste sings at the door of Malvolio's prison: There's a trap somewhere At the gateway to heaven. There's a hole gaping open And in that hole is hell.

Malvolio's literalism has sent him to his temporary hell, even if in his musical role he seemed rather more of the Phantom of the Opera than one who has been ‘most notoriously abused’. Much more than in the source, this adaptation was Feste's play, since as well as ending it he got the ball rolling with his song of ‘wind and rain’; he personified the frivolous, festive spirit that is both his name and the feast of Twelfth Night, as he explained in a prologue for the benefit of his Japanese audience:

It's been twelve days since Christmas. Today's the last day, and it's a festival. There’d be no reason to celebrate if every day were a festival, and by the same logic since today is a festival, it must be a long, dark winter's day. Today is Twelfth Night, the last night of the festive season. I’m not sure whether you’re going to like this, but for today's entertainment we’re going to go a bit over the top. We’re going to have some fun, have a laugh … who knows what will happen!

The prologue gave way to a lengthy storm scene – another addition to the source – and Orsino's opening monologue (‘If music be the food of love’) was replaced by another song (‘Futile Love’); this adaptation left little doubt that music was ‘the food of love’. Like Ninagawa's kabuki Twelfth Night, which was based on the Odashima translation but adapted to the traditional language of kabuki, Studio Night Twelfth Night made rather free use of Matsuoka's translation, which in many places disappeared altogether. The fussy rhetoric and plot details of Shakespeare's Shrew play seemed important to the humour of the Shrew adaptation, since perhaps one of the things that both Kate and Lizzy needed to learn was to look for the bigger picture beneath the welter of detail (which therefore had to be kept for the effect to work), ²⁶ whereas an excessive concern with the details of Twelfth Night (a highly referential play) might have risked the hellish trap of literalism.

One line that was kept from the translation was Matsuoka's visceral rendition of Feste's final put-down:

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Kakushite inga wa kururi to meguri, koitsu wa shikaeshi saretan da. ²⁷ (5.1.369–70)

Malvolio's retort was also given some rhetorical padding:

I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!

Fukushū shite yaru, doitsu mo koitsu mo! ²⁸ (5.1.371)

The phrase ‘inga wa kururi to meguri’ for ‘the whirligig of time’ describes the Buddhist cycle of cause and effect (karma) spinning and turning like a top. Koitsu, ‘that thing’, in the second half of the line relates ‘the whirligig’ to the main verb ‘shikaeshi saretan da’, or ‘is avenged’, and is picked up by Malvolio in ‘doitsu mo koitsu mo’, a pejorative expression for ‘every one of you’. As the overall master of ceremonies of the Studio Life adaptation, one might argue that this Feste had had his hand on ‘the whirligig of time’ all along, and likewise the reference to inga locates the adaptation in the loosely native context of Buddhist impermanence that I have mentioned. In contrast to the source, where his humiliation is alleviated by the noblesse oblige of the countess, Malvolio's transgression appeared no more than foolish, and he was shooed off stage by a chorus of ahōdori, literally ‘foolish birds’ but also the name of the short-tailed albatross in Japanese; they had been onstage for the show's duration, shifting scenery and joining in the songs. Ahōdori takes their Japanese name from their habit of ignoring terrestrial predators in the way perhaps that Malvolio seems to regard Sir Toby and his companions as a greater threat to his lady's honour than Viola/Cesario.

Conclusion

The two Studio Life productions succeeded as refractions of a writer who can, as in any culture, fall flat on his face, or – perhaps to preempt such a possibility – be rendered untouchable; the Shrew located the play in contemporary feminist discourse and the Twelfth Night more firmly in the popular culture of the target language. In other words, they can be said to exemplify André Lefevere's basic definition of refraction as ‘the adaptation of a work of literature to a different audience, with the intention of influencing the way in which that audience reads the work’. ²⁹ Lefevere's concept of refraction is presumably true of much of the history of Shakespeare in Japan, with its various ideological and pedagogical agendas, but where Matsuoka differs from (for example) the conservatism of a Fukuda Tsuneari ³⁰ is in the particular niche she has created for herself as a Shakespeare translator.

This article has not analysed Matsuoka's translating style, which with respect to Shakespeare can be assumed mainly to affirm Shakespeare's ‘conventional literary status’, but in her statements on Shakespeare’s translation it is her writerly rather than political role that she has tended to emphasise. While she no doubt stands too much in Ninagawa's shadow to challenge the historical primacy of original author over translator, ³¹ it is significant that as she completed her translation of the 37 plays with All's Well That Ends Well in 2021 (and the next year was awarded the prestigious Asahi and Tsubouchi prizes), ³² Matsuoka has been the subject of a number of media profiles that, rather than arguing a case for her as a feminist translator, have focussed on her life story and translator's lifestyle, her work in Ninagawa's theatre, and above all the particular literary challenges of Shakespeare translation, presenting her first and foremost as an individual creative writer. ³³ Having first translated plays in the 1980s, Matsuoka has surely benefitted from her position straddling the pre-computer age when translations were written mainly by hand and the navigability and range of reference afforded by online technology. When translating a Shakespeare play, she would always start by copying out and translating the opening of the play by hand before transferring it to her computer, believing that this approach enabled her to discover the play more authentically as a writer and wanting as much as possible to free herself from preconceived notions. ³⁴

The two translations discussed in this article contributed to Studio Life's refractions as sophisticated responses to the source texts that could either be left as they were or else become the base of Kurata's adaptations. This collaboration may also exemplify what Michael Cronin has identified as the benefits for translators of digital technology, such as conviviality and progeneration. ³⁵ Shakespeare’s translation seems well suited to the original utopian conception of the internet as a place of connection and possibility, for example through the opportunities for rapid connections with other practitioners (conviviality) and by contributing to ‘the emergence of new forms of expression and engagement’ (progeneration). ³⁶ Moreover, just as the Studio Life adaptations can be said to have made the chauvinistic aspects of Shakespearean comedy more palatable to a more female audience by having men – bar Kurata – do all the work and make fools of themselves, Matsuoka's lasting achievement may be that she has shown that a Japanese woman can indeed ‘become’ Shakespeare through her close reading and ‘rewriting’ of the 37 plays over the last three decades. ³⁷