One of the most influential works of Shakespeare criticism in Japan since the 1960s has been Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which was published initially in Polish in 1962 and in Japanese in 1968 (1). Kott does not have a lot to say about humour as a phenomenon or cultural trait but where he has been influential is in realizing the tragic potential of Shakespearean comedy: that Shakespearean comedy devolves on human emotions which can just as easily lead to tragic outcomes. His essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘Titania and the Ass’s Head’, in its attention to the erotic undertones and animalistic imagery of the language, deromanticized the Dream in a way which understands that it is first and foremost about dramatic change. He writes that

Finally, he concludes that, ‘The world is mad and love is mad. In this universal madness of Nature and History, brief are the moments of happiness.’ (190)

     Kott’s assertion of the transience of human happiness represents a natural point of contact with traditional Japanese culture, while the sexualized danger of the comedy is reflected in the kabuki and bunraku traditions at least, and the comparison does not stop there (2). Yet the view that Shakespeare can be naturally appropriated by the various genres of traditional Japanese drama is an elusive one, fraught with difficulties; James Brandon (Brandon, 47) maintains that the use of kabuki actors in mainstream Shakespeare productions has caused real harm to the native tradition, and even the more ephemeral use of traditional techniques in the commercial theatre has come under criticism (3). Intercultural drama of this kind can also be said to raise expectations of critics and audiences, assuming comprehension of both Shakespeare and the native tradition. While I retain a belief in the interest of intercultural drama as a drama that raises insights and experiences new to performance within a native culture, I recognize the need to proceed with caution. This essay, therefore, discusses a kyogen adaptation of Shakespeare as one where the relative straightforwardness of the kyogen format might allow for a more integrated assimilation of Shakespeare than is possible in larger, more complex formats such as Noh and kabuki.

     Shakespeare has been mainly received in Japanese culture through the medium of literal translation, whereas adaptation is more open to the mediator’s interpretation. Whilst offering greater creative license, adaptation exposes the adaptor to accusations of betrayal by acolytes of Shakespeare and the native tradition alike (although it has to be said that in a performative theatre like Japan’s such accusations have been aimed mainly at directors rather than translators or actors). Shakespeare’s contemporaries in contemporary Japan strive towards a greater autonomy from both the foreign and native traditions; the relatively unambitious format of kyogen adaptation is a more realistic arena for the fulfillment of this ambition. Kyogen does not demand expensive sets, large casts, or even ranks of shamisen players, and its scripts are comparatively short and straightforward. Moreover, it has traditionally occupied a secondary or supportive role in Japanese drama, in other words one more equivalent to the position of Shakespeare as a foreign playwright. Kyogen adaptation can release a certain spirit from the original plays which more ambitious approaches may obscure.

     Kyogen Shakespeare in the 1990s – not to mention the continuing impasse between Shakespeare and traditional Japanese drama to which Brandon refers – takes place after more than a century of reflection on the translation, production and reception of Shakespeare’s meanings in Japanese culture. Such reflection is inevitably two-faced as critics seek to locate Shakespeare in both his original contexts and their own. In this regard, Fukuhara Meitaro (a leading Shakespearean of the 1950s and 60s) is typical in suggesting a dichotomy based in Japanese culture, and therefore all the more useful for offering a comparative perspective:

Taki goes on to place these two characters at opposite poles of a comic spectrum. Bottom is the eternal optimist, one whose dream ‘hath no bottom’ (4.1.215). His humour is such that his vision places no real demands on him in either the Athens of Theseus (where his role is proscribed) or the wood outside Athens (where he can become almost anything), and that he rides through a series of potentially threatening situations unflummoxed (5). He is a parody of those figures of authority, such as Theseus and Oberon, who are empowered in real life or fantasy to recreate the comic vision. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been described by translator Odashima Yushi as ‘a giant meat dumpling of a man concocted equally of realism and humour’ (Odashima, 44). This is the humour of self-love: the adult baby who knows that he is unlikely to hurt anyone by sitting still and calling for wine, so long as he does so with plenty of brave words. Ultimately, Falstaff’s self-love gets the better of him as he is rejected by the new king at the end of King Henry IV, Part 2 (5.5.47): ‘I know thee not, old man.’

     Of these two characters, Bottom is probably the better known in Japan, if only because the play itself is so much better known in Japan than any of the three in which Sir John Falstaff appears (King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor). I have yet – with the possible exception of Tora-san (6) – to discover any comic type or character with which Bottom is directly comparable, from which I conclude that he is perceived as a kind of everyman who belongs to the realm of popular fantasy (for which the play is appreciated in Japan) (7) rather than to any specific context. Bottom is too earnest to laugh, although he might be associated with the spontaneous, momentary laughter of the chonin, the townsmen or merchants at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Falstaff, on the other hand, is one of a handful of Shakespearean characters (including Lear and Hamlet) to have been taken up quite vigorously. The location of Falstaff’s comedy in a Japanese context is complicated by the fact that he is a knight – one, indeed, with aspirations – who mixes with the lower end of the hierarchy. The question of whether he is capable of the sustained laughter or even dramatic smile of the samurai will be a sign of his actual identity in both source and adaptation.

     As is well known, the greatest threat to the traditional culture came with the opening of Japan in the 1860s following 250 years of isolation and the subsequent influx of foreign ideologies and cultures. The culture was invigorated by this influx but also tested in many of its assumptions, and one of the numerous aesthetic categories to have been questioned during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) was that of humour (warai). Reformers such as Tsubouchi Shoyo realized that the anarchic, often sexually obscene humour of novelists such as Ihara Saikaku in the 18th century and Bakin in the early 19th offended standards of Victorian taste, and wondered aloud whether the continuation of that tradition was commensurate with Japan’s ambitions to become a modern state (8).

     Shakespeare, in particular, proved useful in providing aesthetic standards that predated Victorian moralism but which were still alive in Western culture. One defender of Japanese culture in the Meiji era was novelist Natsume Soseki, who had studied English literature in London under W.J. Craig, the first general editor of the Arden Shakespeare. Soseki insisted that he was not so much interested in Shakespeare’s ideas as in his technique, and in a lecture on humour published in 1909 he had clearly realized that there was much within English literary tradition that contradicted Victorian moralism (9). As Marguerite Wells explains in her book on Japanese Humour (1997),

Soseki’s appreciation of Falstaff was a textual one, since he died in 1916 and the first production of a complete, unadapted translation of any of the Falstaff plays did not appear until 1937.

     The 1937 Merry Wives is significant in the history of Shakespeare of Japan for introducing a radical alternative to the pragmatism of the Meiji Shakespeareans. Director Senda Koreya was a Marxist and Brechtian who wanted to make Shakespeare relevant to contemporary social problems and saw in this social comedy a parallel between the emergent bourgeoisie of Shakespeare’s day and the bourgeoisie of 1930s Japan. Falstaff was portrayed as a comic grotesque in the tradition of Rabelais and Bakhtin, and Senda’s translator, Mikami Isao, took the exclusively prose format of Shakespeare’s play as further grounds for developing a colloquial and contemporary translating style (Arai, 296-9). They rejected the classical style that had dominated Shakespeare production up to that time through the Shoyo translations and forged a new approach to Shakespeare that is still influential (10). Mikami later revised the translation, and this new version was performed by the Haiyuza company in 1952 and 1957. Since then, the play has been staged with relative infrequency, although it was one of two plays (along with The Winter’s Tale) that the Royal Shakespeare Company performed when they first visited Japan in 1970, under the direction of Trevor Nunn. Falstaff in Japan is a subversive character, obviously suited for a subversive genre like kyogen.

     Soseki and Senda are modernist in their influence on the modern culture, whereas the adaptation discussed in this article is distinctly postmodern in its framing of modernist concerns within the kyogen genre. This is Horazamurai – ‘The Braggart Samurai’ – a kyogen adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Professor Takahashi Yasunari (11). Takahashi’s adaptation was staged by Mansaku no Kai (the Mansaku Company), the Nomura line of kyogen actors which dates back to the 18th century and has been at the forefront of the internationalization of kyogen performance over the last forty years. After a première at the Tokyo Globe Theatre in May 1991 for participants in the 5th World Shakespeare Congress, ‘The Braggart Samurai’ was staged the same year at the Mermaid Theatre in London as part of the Japan Festival (12).

     The Takahashi adaptation goes somewhat further than Soseki in its treatment of Falstaff’s morality, while the language of kyogen is already as colloquial as that which Senda Koreya envisaged, certainly in contrast to Noh and kabuki (13). Moreover, it is one in a trickle of kyogen adaptations, beginning with a version of The Taming of the Shrew in 1976 (14), that have used Shakespeare as a vehicle for promoting the kyogen tradition; kyogen has enjoyed increasing independence as a genre since 1945 but is at the same time under continual threat of declining audiences. The intention was not to undermine the feudal culture in which kyogen originated but rather to manifest kyogen as an art capable of containing a subversive but not necessarily iconoclastic interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare has many friends in Japan but for the plays to be more fully accepted within the native culture, it is expedient for their resilience to be tested within the framework of a traditional genre.

     The heroic lords and warriors of the Noh become the vain and gullible dupes of kyogen, which is comparable to Shakespeare’s transformation of the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle into the boozy Falstaff in the sense that Lollard ambitions for a private religion may be deliberately misinterpreted as less honourable ambitions for a private morality as well (15). Kyogen has always relied on the colloquial language – larded with various kinds of sophisticated wordplay – and in contrast to the tragic idiom of the Noh, kyogen actors accent the initial rather then later syllables in the phrase. This gives their style of speaking a comic feel similar to Shakespearean trochaic metre, where it is also the initial syllable which is stressed. What kyogen acquired from the Noh is a respect for the boundaries of taste. As Ortolani explains in his account of Okura Toraaki, the 17th century theorist of kyogen,

     The danger of mainstream Japanese productions of these plays is that the humour of Falstaff can be all too easily lost amid the welter of words, with their numerous references to English culture and history, so that Falstaff himself is rendered as some ill-defined stage drunk that can only offend the taste of those Japanese audiences who have been taught to respect Shakespeare. Toraaki’s influential theory of kyogen, however, offers a precedent for a keener abstraction of the humour of the character, one that might fulfil the purpose of the genre as Toraaki perceived it:

     When ‘The Braggart Samurai’ was first performed to a mixed audience of Japanese and non-Japanese scholars in 1991, it is abstractness of a rather different kind of which they would have first become aware: the stage area was circumscribed with metal spikes in place of the wooden pillars used in conventional kyogen performance, and the rear of the stage was overshadowed by a geometrical and monotone representation of a pine tree. This latter device was a dually abstract representation of the pine tree used in traditional kyogen and of Shakespeare’s Herne’s Oak, and they both served to suggest from the start that the adaptation would be taking a pragmatic approach both to Shakespeare and the kyogen genre and that a more authentic approach would have restricted the freedom of the adaptation.

     These devices were only preliminaries to what Takahashi had done to the play itself. (See Takahashi 1998a., 214-225, for Takahashi’s own account of the adaptation.) He had reduced it in length from 2½ hours to just one hour, and the storylines of the original had been even more curtailed by the reality that kyogen performance is inevitably taken at a slower pace than is usually the case with modern drama. Shakespeare’s total twenty-three scenes are telescoped into just six, and likewise the twenty-three plus characters listed in Shakespeare’s dramatis personae also reduced to six. The sub-plots involving Justice Shallow, the Welsh parson Evans and the French physician Doctor Caius are completely cut, and Falstaff’s three sidekicks, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol, recreated as the two comic servants of kyogen tradition, Taro Kaja and Jiro Kaja.

   One of the inevitable losses in the adaptation is the play on national and local identity so central to the original, as illustrated in this encounter between Caius, Evans and the English Host of the Garter Inn, Windsor (3.1.73-103):

The comic banter conceals a serious sub-text. These educated Renaissance men are welcomed by the bourgeois innkeeper for their professional skills. They are central to the offensive against Falstaff, since Falstaff’s refusal to be labelled with any fixed identity is potentially a grave threat to the bourgeois strictures of business and marriage. Although Takahashi might have discovered equivalents in his own culture, there is just too much material here to remain credible in adaptation.

     Bardolph, Nym and Pistol follow Falstaff from the Henry plays, and are presented as stereotypes of English common sense. Their rhetoric is heavy-handed, comically awkward (1.3.81-100):

The pair resent being forced to play their master’s games once too often, and thus spill the beans on Ford, honest citizen of Windsor and intended object of Falstaff’s trickery. The parallel with those disgruntled servants Taro and Jiro Kaja is clear enough.

     It might be thought that all this cutting could have left little of the original Shakespeare, whereas in fact the main criticism levelled at this style of adaptation is that it is kyogen not Shakespeare which is the loser. Takahashi himself admits that ‘you cannot Kyogenise Shakespeare without at the same time Shakespeareanising Kyogen’ (Takahashi 1998a., 215). Other kyogen adaptations (for example by the Izumi troupe) (16) have been framed more squarely within the kyogen format, while Takahashi’s recent adaptation of The Comedy of Errors extended to a full 1¾ hours, which is a length unusual in kyogen tradition. Yet what I witnessed in both Horazamurai and The Kyogen of Errors (17) is a conscious dialectic of Shakespearean and kyogen elements; I use this word 'dialectic' to describe a search for some truth about Falstaff’s character, which is revealed in the play’s dénouement.

     How this dialectic reveals itself can be grasped at least by an analysis of Takahashi’s translation of his adaptation (Takahashi 1998b.). Falstaff becomes an elderly ronin, or 'masterless samurai', called Horata Sukeemon, who has reduced himself to bankruptcy by his fondness for drink and lechery. In The Merry Wives, Falstaff is introduced by reputation – by the gossip of Shallow, Slender and Evans – but in ‘The Braggart Samurai’, he is allowed to introduce himself. This liberty seems typical of kyogen, where character is less ambiguously defined by dramatic role, except that this Falstaff appears in bushy black beard (untypical of any Japanese drama) and his opening monologue is full of Shakespearean references:

This last reference to Lady Macbeth (18) is a free translation of the word ninjo (‘human feelings’) in the adaptation, Ninjo kami no gotoshi wa, kono koto ja (Takahashi 1991, 336) (literally, ‘Human feelings are just like paper.’) The association of mother’s milk with the bottle is suggested by the context.

     The contrastive style of Horata’s speech is repeated in the stylized (and onomatopoeic) way in which Taro Kaja gives his master drink – Dobu, dobu, dobu (Takahashi 1998b., 227) (19). The servants resent the fact that their status has suffered along with their master’s, and their decision to outwit him in his scheme to seduce two ladies of good reputation and so extort their money is the hinge on which the rest of the plot develops. What seems Shakespearean about this opening scene is Horata’s imaginative disregard for standards of taste. What seems like kyogen is the ambition of all three characters to recover their former status, in other words to live up to the roles that their titles imply. Tarō Kaja rejects Horata’s orders to help him in his illicit affairs as dishonourable, at which Horata brings in Falstaff’s speech on honor from King Henry IV, Part 1 (5.1.129-41):

     The word that Takahashi chooses for his adaptation of this speech is meiyo, as in meiyo kyoju (‘emeritus professor’):

There is, incidentally, at least one use of this word in The Merry Wives of Windsor, as when Falstaff vows to woo Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, he says that ‘Falstaff will learn the honour of the age’ (1.3.79), which is dramatic irony.

     Scene 2 discovers the two ladies Omatsu and Otake (Lady Plum and Lady Bamboo) reading aloud the two identical letters which they have received from Horata, but which they already know from his servants to be falsehood. They make a mockery of his Shakespearean language in a parody of the loyal Japanese wife, since the play that Horata wants to play is Romeo and Juliet: in production, the kyogen flute plays the love theme from the 1967 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The comic contrast between Zeffirelli’s young lovers and the lust of ‘this greasy samurai’ (Takahashi 1998b., 230) is an obvious one to make but is heightened by the elaborate language and kyogen intonation. The irony is captured in Takahashi’s translation of the phrase from the letter, inochi no yorokobi wo ajiwai tsukusazaru bekarazu (Takahashi 1991, 339) – ‘... tear our pleasures through the iron gates of life' (Takahashi 1998b., 230). The phrase is taken from Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681, lines 41 to 46):

     The scene is, in fact, quite a close adaptation of the ‘letter’ scene (2.1), especially in its references to the braggart’s belly. Otake declares that ‘With all that plentiful extra flesh on his bones, I’m sure he’ll make a good bonfire’ (Takahashi 1998b., 230) – Are hodo tappuri aburami ga tsuite oreba, sazo, yo moemasho zo (Takahashi 1991, 339). Compare this with Mrs. Ford’s line ‘I think the best way were to entertain him with hope till the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease’ (2.1.64-66). In both the original and the adaptation, we have the makings of a classic comic duo: Falstaff/Horata, fat and lecherous; Ford/Yakibei, thin and jealous. If nothing else, the two plays will serve to redistribute some of that corporeal energy.

     By Scene 3, we know once and for all that we are in The Merry Wives as Yakibei, the ‘Ford’ alias and husband of Omatsu, pays Horata to test his wife’s fidelity and thereby cuckold him. Horata has got just what he needs to save him from bankruptcy, but Yakibei exclaims,

This is Shakespearean language, and again is completed in production by the kyogen style of delivery.

The scene corresponds with Act 2, Scene 2, of Shakespeare’s play, when Ford visits Falstaff in disguise and offers him money to cuckold him, although Takahashi does not even try to match the dramatic irony of the scene, let alone the intensity of Ford’s envy.

     Scene 4 descends into pure farce as the basket scene from The Merry Wives is played as kyogen michiyuki. Michiyuki is the comic, often circular journey around the stage undertaken by objects of kyogen ridicule, punishing them for all the confusion they have wrought. Horata has been interrupted in his advances on Omatsu by the unexpected arrival of Yakibei. He is hidden in an imaginary laundry basket and carried round the stage by his servants before being dumped in the river. As Jiro Kaja explains,

Taro Kaja adds an onomatopoeic word that describes sinking into water:

Botchaan, as well as being onomatopoeia, is homophonic with a word meaning ‘spoilt brat’, and is just one of a number of name plays in this adaptation which could refer equally to Shakespeare and to kyogen tradition. For example, Yakibei disguises himself in Scene 3 as another merchant, Mochibei; yakimochi literally means ‘cooked ricecake’ but idiomatically it refers to ‘a jealous husband’.

     The michiyuki refrain refers to the witches’ chorus at the beginning of Macbeth (1.1.11-12):

In the adaptation, the lines are developed as follows:

... and repeated. This is a joke, of course, on the 'foul linen' in the basket but it also gives a cruel, even demonic tinge to the adaptation, which is its richest feature, since Horata’s crime has been to deny all those realities about age, proportion, character and so on, which hold the bourgeois society together; in that sense the interpretation is quite close to the original. In the original (3.3), Falstaff is concealed in a basket and hastily removed, but his unceremonial dumping in the River Thames happens off stage. In the kyogen adaptation, this scene is represented by the performative tradition of michiyuki. Shakespeare’s humour springs from the text, whereas in kyogen the text is secondary to the actors’ repertoire of comic gestures, closest of all to the continental traditions of commedia dell’arte and harlequinade (20).

     Scene 5 is a short, transitional scene in which Horata receives an apologetic, feigning letter from Omatsu inviting him to join her that night in an annual festival ‘in the grove on the outskirts of the town’ (Takahashi 1998b., 237). Other references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream include Horata’s aside that ‘I’m not above scratching your back if you are willing to scratch mine’ (Takahashi 1986b., 236) (21). Yet although the scene is only transitional, it provides the strongest example of the servant-master relationship as it is found in both Shakespeare and kyogen: Falstaff/Horata with his wild dreams and unthwarted pride, Nym etc./Taro Kaja with that cheap wisdom that comes from knowing that whatever their master does will turn out wrong. To give one example, Horata comments on the letter he has received from Omatsu as follows:

Just as I was about to touch those white pearly breasts with this hand of mine, that stupid green-eyed monster of a husband ...

Yet this banter can only continue for so long, and it falls to Taro Kaja to put a temporary end to the clichés and allusions with his parting quip, ‘As the old saying goes ... alas, I’ve run out of old sayings’ (Takahashi 1998b., 237) – Iya wa ya, furui kotowaza ni iwaku – iya, mo kotowaza ga shugire ni natte gozaru (Takahashi 1991, 346). There is also a sly reference to Hamlet: ‘As some philosophical coward said, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’’ (Takahashi 1998b., 236) – Okubyo koko made kuru to, rippana mono ja. Furui kotowaza ni iu, yuki naki wa toki ni yuki aru ni nitari (Takahashi 1991, 345). This scene has no equivalent in The Merry Wives.

     In Scene 6, Horata has his tryste with Omatsu but they are surprised by the remaining four characters disguised in masks, who then humiliate Horata into repentance before revealing their identity. Of all six scenes, this one corresponds most closely with the Shakespeare, where Falstaff is tricked into visiting Windsor Great Park disguised as the legendary horned spirit (and figure of lechery) Herne the Hunter. He is surprised by the ensemble disguised as fairies, who burn him with tapers and sing a song about him under the leadership of Mistress Quickly. Having revealed themselves, they castigate Falstaff for his sins against the Garter (22), and Falstaff’s repentance is genuine (5.5.162-5):

Horata also repents at first but as soon as the four have removed their masks, he recants unambiguously:

Horata’s speech presents the truth that this play has been looking for but which has been known all along: that he himself cannot change without the comic vision of this genre being fundamentally altered. His rotundity is a trope for a totally social universe in which comedy is possible because it is shared, or as Michael Shapiro defines it, ‘the use of kyogen’s particular brand of metatheatrical play blurs the boundaries between different levels of illusion and thus achieves a kind of ontological destabilisation.’ (Shapiro, 83)

     This ‘kind of ontological destabilization’ is no doubt best appreciated in live performance, but refers to that universal space between traditionally Shakespearean and traditionally Japanese notions of theatrical illusion. Takahashi’s academic approach to the problem of discovering and occupying that ‘empty space’ is complimented by the practical experience of Nomura Mansaku and the troupe and tradition that stand behind him. Shapiro even argues that Takahashi’s adaptation decentres the moralistic ending of Shakespeare’s play, although this is a judgment which depends on our interpretation of Falstaff’s humiliation at Herne’s Oak as a defeat also of character. Yet, in an adaptation where the rhetoric of the original is all but lost and which relies so much on kyogen performance, it seems only natural that Horata should be allowed a final flourish, and at least the number of people whom he can now deceive has been reduced by three.

     In any case, the choruses at the end conclude (in reference both to Jacques’ speech (23) and the song at the end of As You Like It (24)) that (25),

Unlike other Shakespeare comedies, this Falstaff is not excluded from a world he has made his own (26). The last laugh is on Horata, and – in this town at least – he has managed to regain his original role as samurai. The act of exchange is completed as Horata teaches the chonin the value of the jest and the chonin teach Horata the value of the gesture; both humour and proper acting are essential to maintaining the civilized society.

     Despite the allusions, Takahashi’s ending of the play is not Shakespearean, but rather he looks to Samuel Beckett for a third point of reference. Horata’s final speech refers directly to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:

What Pozzo actually says to Estragon is that,

     Horata’s statement is at once the most sensible thing he says in the whole play and the most absurd, and it provides Takahashi with an exit from the impasse of Shakespeare with kyogen. As a Beckett scholar, it is hardly surprising that Takahashi should have chosen this route, but it is also suggestive of the kind of drama he has created. Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd struggles with the meanings of words, reducing drama to a series of terse, poetic statements that beg the question of what we mean by anything at all. Beckett is interested in the fundamental questions of life and death, and therefore with the beginnings and endings of plays. He is in that sense an abstraction of Shakespeare (like the Takahashi adaptation itself) and Shakespeare too wordy for Beckett. It is arguably Beckett whom we end up with when we impose Shakespeare on a medieval dramatic form like kyogen.

     How does Horazamurai relate to the kyogen tradition itself? Even the reduced cast of six and simplified plot seem quite complex compared to one-act kyogen plays such as Kanaoka and Bo Shibari. Yet there are useful parallels. For example, the conflict between the worldly power of the master in Kagyu (The Snail) with the spiritual power of the yamabushi (‘mountain hermit’) is comparable to the conflict between the mercantilism of Yakibei and the cocksure instinct of Horata Sukemon. The master requests Taro Kaja to find him a snail (kagyu). Taro Kaja discovers a snail-like object on the ground, in fact the yamabushi sleeping with his conch shell. He wakes the yamabushi, who quickens to the joke and manages to convince Taro Kaja that he is indeed a snail. A hilarious scene follows in which the two dance a song to the snail.

Finally, the master turns up and alerts Taro Kaja to his madness. The play ends with the two of them chasing after the yamabushi, but not before he has had time to play a few more practical jokes.

     The similarity with Horazamurai is that both the yamabushi and Horata use their special powers to gain advantages for themselves and both are eventually found out. Another correspondence might lie in what Karen Brazell describes as

The two choruses in Horazamurai have the potential to evoke that kind of response but in Kagyu, the dance originates more coherently in the central motif of the play; as with other kyogen dramas based on word plays, such as Wakame, where the acolyte comes home with a young woman (wakame) rather than the seaweed (also wakame but written with different characters) his master had asked him to get, the play is a nonsense drama but an artfully executed one that brings English nonsense writers like Lewis Carroll to mind (28). As Martin Esslin explains,

For all its witticisms, Horazamurai does not achieve the degree of mystical jouissance achieved by pure kyogen drama.

     The Shakespeare plot exerts too tight a hold on Horazamurai for roles and relationships to be challenged to the extent that they are challenged in pure kyogen. Instead, it is in the generic identities where the power of Shakespeare’s ‘mad words’ are most deeply felt. Takahashi touches on the madness of intercultural experimentation: that refusal to be tied down by cultural context. Such madness is inevitable as language transcends its cultural boundaries and pushes individuals into outward trajectories in search of alterity. Takahashi accommodates this interculturalism in new generic structures that are neither one nor the other. The experiment is as transient as human happiness, but succeeds so long as the vision of alterity is sustained, and in this sense the kyogen Shakespeare is a typically theatrical experience. Takahashi plays with the audience’s familiarity (and unfamiliarity) with the two genres in a fusion that draws them to the heart of the theatrical experience and thereby enables them to make their own comparisons.