This highly original new book by a leading Shakespeare expert and
cultural critic argues controversially that the 'samurai Shakespeare' of
the Japanese cinematic and theatrical masterpiece-makers Akira Kurosawa
and Yukio Ninagawa represents the greatest achievement of Japanese
Shakespeare reproduction. Holderness argues that 'samurai Shakespeare'
is both consistent with our own western engagement with Japan, and true
to the spirit of Japanese culture. / Shakespeare was an exact
contemporary of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yet when he was first imported into
Japan, in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the plays were
performed in contemporary dress, not in the conventional British
historical styles, and received as the modern counterpart of Ibsen and
Shaw, Gorky and Chekhov. / Today in Japan the Edo past is lovingly
preserved, reproduced and displayed. Almost 30 million international
tourists enter Japan each year to visit the old capitals of Kyoto and
Nara, drawn by the magic of Edo castles, ancient temples, swords and
samurai, geishas and sumo, maple leaves and cherry blossom. At the same
time Japan represents itself as a society of ultra-modernity, free from
the burdens of the past. This book examines why and how early Japanese
Shakespeare was assimilated to the modernising and westernising
tendencies of the Meiji regime, and kept well away from that very recent
but dangerous feudal past of Edo Japan to which at least some of the
plays should surely have been seen to belong.
