‘DEEP READING’: SHAKESPEARE TRANSLATION IN HEISEI JAPAN

     The current Heisei era has seen a remarkable growth in the field of Shakespeare translation, especially since the translations of Matsuoka Kazuko (b. 1942) started to be published by Chikuma Shobo in 1998 (1). The long history of Shakespeare translation in Japan, stretching back to the 1880s, was discussed by Anzai Tetsuo (Anzai 1989) in terms of a dialectical series of responses to the immediate circumstances of the recipient culture, with one translator superseding another as those circumstances have changed. Even if Matsuoka has not entirely superseded her predecessors in the bookshop or theatre, she has translated over thirty of Shakespeare’s plays, and is arguably the most theatrical of Shakespeare translators to have emerged in the history of Shakespeare’s reception in Japan. To put it another way, Matsuoka seems central to the remarkable creativity of Shakespeare performance over the last twenty years under Ninagawa Yukio and other directors, and to exemplify the stage translator David Johnston’s view that

The collaboration of translation and the theatre is one of many contemporary challenges to the notion of Shakespeare’s authority, whether of his texts or his world view, and thus relativize the dichotomies that have tended to characterize Shakespeare’s reception in Japan. The narrative outlined by Anzai at the beginning of the Heisei era, although historically accurate, would seem to be less relevant twenty-five years on.

     It would be a mistake to assume, however, that Matsuoka’s predecessors were any less concerned with Shakespeare’s creativity, since like them Matsuoka has herself sought primarily to replace obsolescent translations with contemporary linguistic usage. In the post-war era, the classic Taisho and early Showa translations of Tsubouchi Shoyo remained popular among professional and amateur groups through to the 1960s but fell out of favour due to the perceived difficulty of their linguistic style. Tsubouchi had always intended his translations to sound archaic, but with the gradual replacement of classical inflexions and vocabulary both before and after 1945, the differences had become impracticable, although archaism may still be a valid strategy for the translator in context. Following Tsubouchi, the 1950s saw the rise of arguably the most intellectual of Japanese Shakespeareans, Fukuda Tsuneari, but Fukuda translated only fourteen of the plays, and mainly for the small-scale shingeki theatre. His approach to Shakespeare was typical of the orthodox realism that was challenged by the radical underground theatre (angura) of the 1960s, and although Shakespeare was marginal to these movements, Shakespeare production was to benefit hugely from the creative talent that emerged from the 1960s, from individuals such as the translator Odashima Yushi and Ninagawa, as well as from the growth in expendable incomes during the 1970s and 1980s and the development of new performance venues and technologies.

     Fukuda’s translations became popular as reading texts but it is Odashima’s translations that have survived as stage texts. Whereas Fukuda sought to dramatize Shakespeare’s language as consequential speech acts (2), Odashima’s success lay in making the language immediate and poetic in a way that communicated the feeling as well as meaning of the original. Partly as a reaction against the obfuscations of militarist rule, Fukuda was influenced by the speech act theory of his generation, and clearly regarded Shakespeare’s texts as a collection of meaningful speech acts. For the angura generation, that approach put too much pressure on actors ‘to perform the utterances’ and ‘to mean what they said’, thereby suppressing the mythic, poetic dimension that was so important to angura, while Fukuda apparently regarded Shakespeare’s poetry as untranslatable, which is not to suggest that his translations are unpoetic. Fukuda’s prime interest was in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, whereas Odashima’s translations are more poetic, communicating Shakespeare’s meanings in a rhythmical, euphonious style that was easy enough to follow, an intimation of Shakespeare himself, and for that reason they have been criticized for making Shakespeare ‘too easy’: for not leaving enough to the audience’s imagination (Pinnington 1995, 217). Matsuoka is motivated to produce translations that are both poetic and dramatic.

     Unlike the traditional Japanese arts, especially kabuki drama, where the skills necessary for success are often inherited, the skills of the Shakespeare translator are acquired through higher education, and therefore – in the nature of university life – are often discovered by accident. Tsubouchi initially intended to be a novelist, Fukuda started to translate D.H. Lawrence and to write his own plays before turning to Shakespeare, and Odashima majored in engineering. Matsuoka studied English at Tokyo Women’s University, where a chance invitation to play Bottom in a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduced her both to acting and to Shakespeare. After graduation, she spent a year as an intern at Fukuda’s company Subaru before going on to graduate studies under the renowned Shakespeare scholar and translator Ozu Jiro at the University of Tokyo. In 1982, Matsuoka was appointed assistant professor, and later professor, at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, where she published studies of drama and Shakespeare performance (e.g. Matsuoka 1993), as well as translations of plays by Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams. In 1997, she took early retirement to work full-time on her Shakespeare translations under the auspices of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series, the project initiated in 1998 by Ninagawa to stage all thirty-seven of the canonical Shakespeare dramas at the Sai no Kuni Saitama Arts Theatre, just outside Tokyo. To date, Matsuoka has translated twenty-eight of the plays under Ninagawa’s direction, and her translations (in addition to being readily available in bookshops) have also been used by semi-professional companies such as Ryutopia and Studio Life (3).

     The Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series is a new kind of theatrical community that draws on Ninagawa’s success as an international director but also on a wide range of theatrical talent, including stars of stage and screen such as Karasawa Toshiaki and Otake Shinobu and the costume designer Lily Komine (4). Although obviously not as well established as Noh and kabuki families that date back 600 and 300 years respectively, or of cultural institutions founded in the early 20th century, such as the Shochiku production company and the Takarazuka Revue, it is now at sixteen years something of an institution in itself. Tsubouchi, Fukuda and Odashima all translated for specific theatres with small, if loyal audiences; the Matsuoka translations have been carried out in the context of a much larger, more economically viable enterprise, with regular opportunities to tour Japan and overseas, and can therefore be said to represent a more complete and professional rendition of what has come before. Matsuoka’s predecessors were also immersed in the theatre, Odashima especially is remarkable for his prolific writings on drama and Shakespeare and for translating other playwrights in addition to Shakespeare (including, with Kishi Tetsuo, the complete plays of Harold Pinter), but what makes Matsuoka unique is her greater exposure to Shakespeare performance in Britain and the United States (which was less feasible in the 1960s, when Odashima started translating Shakespeare) and personal acquaintance with British directors such as John Caird and David Leveaux (who have both directed her translations in Japan), and above all her involvement in the rehearsal process, attending rehearsals, talking to Ninagawa and to the actors, and making adjustments to her translations when they do not sound right (5). Odashima, when he was translating the Complete Works for Deguchi Norio in the 1970s and 1980s, would simply hand Deguchi the completed translation (which in many cases had already been published by Hakusui Books), and then come back a few weeks later for the first night.

     Matsuoka’s Shakespeare translations unquestionably belong to a particular moment in Japan’s recent cultural history, and are rooted in the histories of Japanese Shakespeare studies and the modern Japanese theatre, but it is rather more problematic to argue, for example, that they are the product of Japan’s ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s or of the ageing society, or even that they represent a postmodern blurring of the boundaries of traditional and popular culture. If, however, one were to assimilate the differing fields of Shakespearean drama, translation studies, and contemporary Japanese drama and society, then one common theme might be that they share common myths of inclusivity and exclusivity.

     The duality of inclusivity and exclusivity indicates the broad relevance of Shakespeare’s theatre to the context in which it is received in Japan, and can be understood both historically and synchronically. Growing tensions between the inner and the outer create a demand for new styles and practices, and so in the history of Shakespeare translation, we can see how in the late 19th century Tsubouchi’s belief in Shakespeare’s ‘hidden ideals’ represented an alternative to the redundant Confucianist empiricism of the feudal era, how in the early post-war era the modernism of Fukuda found in Shakespeare a substitute for the lost subjectivity of the Imperial Way, and how at the height of the period of rapid economic growth the pragmatism of Odashima served to liberate symbolic structures (6).

     As I have suggested, Matsuoka’s opportunity may simply be to produce Shakespeare translations that are more poetic and more dramatic than those that have come before. In my own reading of Matsuoka’s statements on Shakespeare translation, including her programme notes, I have never once come across an overtly ideological remark. Tsubouchi fretted about the purpose of literature, Fukuda controversially supported the United States-Japan Security Treaty, and Odashima is associated by default with the post-shingeki movement, but this is not to suggest that Matsuoka lacks a point of view. With the help of a CD-ROM published in 2003 by Shinchusha (and for which she served on the editorial board), Matsuoka diligently consults previous translations, and in one interview criticizes the Fukuda translations for being too much about Fukuda (Matsuoka 2004, 18). She praises Odashima for the sound of his language (mimi no ii honyaku, ‘translations that are good on the ears’) and overriding excellence (ichiban sugoi, quite simply ‘the best’), although is less keen on his occasional lapses into ‘bad taste’ (samui dajare).

     Matsuoka’s comments are typical of all Shakespeare translation since Tsubouchi, and can presumably be linked to her preference for contemporary Japanese playwrights who stimulate the imagination (ibid., 12), such as Kara Juro, Matsuo Suzuki and Nagai Ai (7). Unlike most of her predecessors, Matsuoka does not seem to have an axe to grind, but – like Odashima – to be driven by an enthusiasm for Shakespeare and the theatre, and this position could reflect any of a number of factors: increased ideological apathy in Japanese society as a whole, the decline of angura and the political detachment of Ninagawa’s style of theatre, the influence of the humanistic view of Shakespeare, Matsuoka’s personal reluctance to make political statements, and so on (8).

     Although it may be difficult to locate Matsuoka on the path of any defined trajectory of Shakespeare translation, one obvious point of departure is that she is the first female Shakespeare translator after Oyama Toshiko (who produced academic translations of nine of the plays for Shobunsha in the 1960s and 1970s), and the first woman to attempt to translate the Complete Works. Matsuoka has, on occasion, called herself a feminist translator, offering numerous examples of how as a woman she interprets the language of Shakespeare’s female roles (9). Yet the feminist label is a complex one, since not only is Matsuoka differing between the gendering of Shakespeare’s language and her own, but also Japanese feminism has developed at some distance from its Western other.

     Kondo Hiroyuki (Kondo 2010) detects a discrepancy in Matsuoka’s approach between a traditional feminine reserve toward her status as a Shakespeare translator and an agenda that acknowledges the contemporary woman’s point of view. No doubt part of the problem is that Shakespeare’s texts are also ambiguous, as Matsuoka indicates in one anecdote. At the beginning of Titus Andronicus, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, is dragged on stage in chains, the prisoner of Titus himself. Tamora kneels before Titus and his brothers to beg that her eldest son Alarbus be spared execution: ‘Stay, Roman brethren!’ (1.1.104) As she notes (Matsuoka 2004, 13), where previous translators had registered this line simply as a plea for mercy, Matsuoka instinctively felt that there was pride at stake as well, revulsion that she had been reduced to this lowly state, and so translated the line quite brusquely: Mate! Omae wa … (‘Wait, you!’).

     Translations such as these may fulfill a certain stereotype of the assertive woman (especially in the style it was played in Ninagawa’s production by Asami Rei) (10), but whether they make Matsuoka ‘a feminist translator’ is less apparent. Kondo argues that the modesty of Matsuoka’s ambition to translate Shakespeare in a straightforward style that communicates the plays to the hearts of Japanese audiences puts her at odds with the less diffident rhetoric of mainstream feminist translation (Kondo 2010, 7-8). I find this argument unconvincing, however, both because Kondō does not summarize mainstream feminist translation practice, citing only one theoretician in evidence (Barbara Godard), but also – more importantly – because it does not refer to the context of Japanese feminism.

     Matsuoka has never claimed to be a card-carrying feminist, and in fact the above example seems more typical of what she repeatedly calls ‘her discoveries’ (11) suggesting that she tries to approach the task of the translator with an open mind. Moreover, Matsuoka’s alleged ‘modesty’ may well make rather more sense in native feminisms, such as that advanced by Ueno Chizuko (Ueno 1997, 278) (12), who has radically questioned the stereotype of Japanese women as ‘meek and submissive’ in comparison to American women.

What Ueno is implying is that just because there has yet to be a woman prime minister in Japan does not necessarily mean that Japanese women cannot wield extraordinary power as mothers, wives, daughters, clerical staff, school teachers and so on, partly through their competence at performing mundane but essential tasks but also through their influence on their male others, for example by giving and withholding affection (13). Thus, although Matsuoka may adopt a modest approach, for Ninagawa and his actors she is preparing the food that they need to perform; she is at the heart of a production process.

     This kind of feminism is representative both of the dichotomy of inclusivity and exclusivity and of her community. Matsuoka’s community is centred on the executive committee of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series, headed by Kawai Shoichiro and to which both Matsuoka and Ninagawa belong, on regular performers such as Yoshida Kotaro, on technical staff and less regular performers (including guest stars), on regular audiences such as members of the priority booking scheme, and then the wider community of academics and students who consult her translations, and not forgetting the considerable number of non-Japanese people who have seen Ninagawa’s productions on tour. As Kondo notes (Kondo 2010, 14), Matsuoka’s translations of ‘bigger’ plays such as Hamlet and Othello have been paired with essays (kaisetsu) by established male scholars such as Kawai and Nakano Haruo, while the essays for so-called ‘lesser’ plays such as As You Like It and The Merry Wives of Windsor have been contributed by a lone female scholar, Maezawa Hiroko. This deference to ‘male authority’ may be accused of merely replicating the heterosexual norms of contemporary society, although in line with Japanese feminism, Matsuoka may also be the female authority to which her male colleagues defer. This sharing of roles seems typical of the dually inclusive and exclusive field in which she operates.

     Matsuoka’s reputation as an uncomplicated translator who works proactively with actors and directors to create the desired effects seems more plausible than the feminist label, which is partly because the feminist tinge of any given production is so much more in the hands of the director. Yet the label of ‘simplicity’ can seem pejorative, and deserves unpacking in the light of contemporary translation theory. To start with, simplicity does not necessarily preempt effort. Ernst-August Gutt (Gutt 2000), for example, maintains that the greater the effort a translator makes to understand a text in its context – including the effort accrued from previous translations (the translator’s ‘experience’) – then the more relevant will the current translations become to its target culture. The appeal of Gutt’s argument is its concept of translation as an automatic process that does not have to be too scrupulously mapped. The greater the knowledge and sensitivity the translator shows for the rhetoric of the source the more easily is it translated, and since drama is inherently rhetorical then under Gutt’s argument the old worries about the indeterminacy of theatre translation disappear (14); theatre translation is valid and determinate because it happens anyway. He writes that (ibid., 164)

     Gutt’s notion of ‘implicature’ recalls the way that Shakespeare’s poetic dramas have been appreciated universally: the lines are rich with possible meanings that, in performance, may be interpreted to respond to given situations and to create new ones. The notion too of translation as a process is close to Matsuoka’s repeated ‘discoveries’ about how to translate any given phrase or subtext of a dialogue. What Matsuoka is seeking to communicate to readers and audiences is not the message or even meaning of Shakespeare’s lines but rather ‘simply’ the pleasure of discovering for themselves what the lines mean. Her quest, therefore, is not for some ideal translation, or for what Susan Bassnett (1998) has called ‘gestic subtexts’, hidden templates that reveal how Shakespeare intended his scenes to be performed.

     A second dimension of theatre translation is speakability, which includes such features as rhythm and the potential for rhythmic variation, pauses for breath, euphony, and the stress given to key words and images. Yet as the French Shakespeare translator Jean-Michel Déprats insists (Déprats 2004, 66), speakability does not mean dumbing down the content of the original, but rather appropriating it to the vocal styles of actors.

A signal example of Matsuoka’s speakability would be her translation of King Lear’s first soliloquy on the heath (3.2.1-6) (15). Lear is not necessarily mad at this stage, but he is behaving irrationally, and his speech can be read as an inconsolable rage that finding no relief to his anguish will tip eventually into genuine madness.

This is a speech that is often shouted or exclaimed against theatrical sound effects, although of course it can also be spoken softly and reflectively. The challenge for Japanese translators, therefore, is to produce a loud translation that manages to convey the lexical diversity of the original, the cataracts and hurricanes. Matsuoka’s version (Matsuoka 1997, 120) is striking for the range of its rhetorical effects (16).

Matsuoka comments that in translating this speech she deliberately avoided using Yamato kotoba or native Japanese words, which can sound diffuse, but used Sino-Japanese or kanji compounds (jukugo), as underlined above. These are words that are emphasized naturally in Japanese speech, and therefore help the speaker to bring out the underlying image of natural cataclysm. The fourth line is especially striking, as Matsuoka avoids some confusingly literal rendition of ‘sulph’rous and thought-exceeding fires’ with a four-character idiom that would be understood immediately by Japanese audiences. In fact, Matsuoka’s usage of the idiom (denko sekka) is inaccurate, since it means ‘with lightning speed’ rather than to refer to actual lightning, but this misappropriation can be justified for two reasons: first, because Lear’s thinking is highly confused at this point, confusing the storm with his mental disturbance, and (as he says) the lightning is ‘thought-exceeding’, or beyond his own mental capacity, and secondly, as translation theorist Lawrence Venuti argues, because the translator has a licence to reproduce the strangeness of the original (and Lear’s speech is undoubtedly ‘strange’) (17).

     At a more discrete level, the translation is speakable for the way that it begins with an open vowel (a- in arashi), through the use of alliteration and assonance in the third line (Sobieru to wo suibotsu sase), and through the change in pace from the short, invocatory phrases of the first two lines to the more sustained rhetoric of the final two. The cadence in rakurai no sakibure yo (‘vaunt-couriers of […] thunderbolts’) is also striking in that just as English-speaking audiences would recognize ‘courier’ but probably not that in medieval warfare ‘a vaunt-courier’ was a herald sent in advance, Japanese audiences might also be unaware that in feudal Japan sakibure were sent along the road to prepare accommodation for the lords and officials traveling behind them. The power these messengers represented could, in the feudal context, be compared to thunderbolts, and thus to Lear’s lost power (and concomitant rage), although the modern sense of sakibure is simply that of a sign or forewarning, in this case the lightning that precurses the thunder. The cascade of images still makes this a difficult speech to utter in English as well as Japanese, but Matsuoka strives to help the Japanese actor through both her choice of vocabulary and her prosody.

Matsuoka’s ideal (ibid., 200) is to find translations that combine the semantic, prosodic and metaphorical elements of the source, but she writes (ibid., 216) that in the case of Lear’s ‘mother’ she found that impossible, and translated the lines as follows (Matsuoka 1996, 97).

     A third dimension to simplicity in Shakespeare translation is that it is often the little things that matter most, the small details that stand out against the welter of narrative and dialogue. In a discussion of her translations of Romeo and Juliet and Othello (Matsuoka 2011, 108), Matsuoka picks on the archaic pronouns, ‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’, and ‘thine’, which are used in Shakespeare’s plays to address persons of inferior status, and sometimes friends and lovers; ‘you’ and so on were used, as nowadays, to address equals. For Shakespeare translators since the Meiji era, the main problem has simply been that of translating Shakespeare’s pronouns, which are more or less obligatory in the original but tend to be avoided in Japanese. In many cases, translators can get away with omitting the pronoun, but Matsuoka has expressed an interest in how the difference between the archaic and modern pronouns might be registered in Japanese (ibid., 109-124), commenting through a comparison of translations by her mainly male predecessors that they have tended to register the difference through the use of honorifics that imply a formality or emotional distance that is not necessarily present in the source. The example given is from the balcony scene (2.1.184-190), which she uses as the example for her quotations from the other translators. Romeo and Juliet have just affirmed their love for each other, and vowed to marry the next day. Matsuoka’s translation (ibid., 114) (18) is striking for its use of anata, an acceptable collocation for ‘you’, albeit somewhat old-fashioned now, used by wives to address their husbands as ‘darling’ although usually not the other way round, and like other pronouns is avoided if the context allows it.

As Matsuoka notes (ibid., 108), relationships between lovers in Shakespeare’s plays are not always expressed in equal terms (taitona kankei), but she is surely right to insist that this is an equal situation, and that anata is therefore an appropriate collocation for Juliet’s ‘thou’. In fact, most of Matsuoka’s predecessors do use anata. The truly significant difference is that they all use the formal –masu inflexion, whereas Matsuoka is the only translator to use the colloquial dictionary form suru: for example, Fukuda translates ‘good night indeed’ as honto ni owakare shimasu (‘truly I part from you’) (ibid., 112), whereas Matsuoka uses what is now the standard colloquial expression among intimates, honto ni oyasumi (rather than the more formal oyasuminasai). Nevertheless, Matsuoka’s repeated use of anata might still sound stilted, even if it does express the equality of their relationship, but is justified by the unusual dangers and intensity of the lovers’ relationship, the need for trust and loyalty, and simply because this is a translation. Matsuoka does not admit as much but the three uses of anata could also imply the three words Juliet mentions in her first line. What Juliet probably does not mean to utter are the three words ‘I love you’, but Matsuoka’s translation does imply a strong subtext: anata no ai (‘your love’), anata no tokoro (‘your place’), and anata no ashimoto (‘at your feet’). These three references underscore the three dimensions of their relationship as it has developed so far: mutual attraction, the feud between their two families, the Montagues and the Capulets (the two houses or places that divide them), and the ideal of courtly service expressed in the sonnet they share when they first meet at the Capulet ball (19).

     Anata is also a word that resounds throughout her Othello, where the tragedy is Othello’s failure to believe in the innate equality that resides in his legal, Christian marriage to Desdemona. This is surely the subtext that Matsuoka picks up in her version of the following memorable exchange (3.4.32-37) (ibid., 132-133)

Othello addresses his wife respectfully as okusama as a prelude to his grotesque parody of the marriage ceremony, ‘Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.’ Othello’s suspects infidelity in the moist hand: that, as Iago has tricked him into believing, she has been seeking excitement elsewhere. It is not until much later that Desdemona becomes aware of the nature of her husband’s accusation, and so her response at this stage is defensive but playful: ‘It yet has felt no age, nor known no sorrow.’ In Matsuoka’s translation, Othello’s line is literally inscribed with jealousy, since the Japanese word shitto is echoed both in shittori and shite iru. Desdemona’s response is also inscribed, with the pun on her name (te desu mono), but this seems no more than a playful echo of her husband’s word play, a subliminal response (20). For Matsuoka, however, the more crucial decision was that of how to translate Desdemona’s ‘my lord’ and ‘my good lord’. In the published version she translates the appellation as dannasama (‘honourable husband’) in response to Othello’s okusama, but in the 2007 Ninagawa production, in which the model and film actress Aoi Yu played Desdemona against the 48-year old Yoshida Kotaro’s Othello, she changed it to anata. In this charged context, anata arguably better captured the underlying tensions of the dialogue, particularly beween Desdemona’s real innocence and youth and Othello’s worst fears and her submissive respect for her husband and desire to be treated fairly. Moreover, as a lone word used twice in the dialogue and coming at the end of each sentence, it could carry a slightly cautionary tone, as if to warn Othello to think of himself as well. This too seems to me an example of how Matsuoka accommodates contemporary usage to her ‘deep reading’ of the source text.

The examples cited so far have all been of plays known in Japan since the early 20th century, and yet Ninagawa and Matsuoka have set themselves the task of producing all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s canonical dramas, including the ten history plays, which apart from Richard III are relatively unknown in Japan. Historical drama has long been a staple of the Japanese theatre, going back at least as far to kabuki period plays (jidaimono), while samurai dramas and dramas that recall the heady rush of Japan’s modernization in the pre-war era remain perennial television favourites, and yet it must be a rather different matter to convey the fascination of medieval English history. In 2009, Uyama Hitoshi mounted his production of the three parts of Henry VI (total running time ten hours) at Tokyo’s New National Theatre, using the old Odashima translation (1983), followed the next year by Ninagawa’s production of the trilogy in Matsuoka’s new translation. This achievement is rare enough in the British theatre, but was quite unprecedented in Japan theatre. Both productions were well received, with Uyama’s reaching an audience of 20,000 and receiving an award from the Minister of Education. For Uyama, there were striking similarities between Shakespeare’s medieval world and the present (Government of Japan 2009).

One might add that Shakespeare’s historiography, with its complex dichotomy of providential and humanist influences, may have offered Japanese audiences fresh insights into understanding their own history in terms of dual internal and external factors, but since these three plays were among the first that Shakespeare wrote, for Matsuoka they held a more technical interest as to understanding his early development as a writer (Matsuoka 2011, 45-78 passim), in particular the correspondences drawn between the courtly tropes of wit, wooing and combat.

     The classic example of wit is Richard’s wooing of the Lady Anne in Richard III. Anne hates Richard’s family (the House of York) for having killed her husband, Edward of Lancaster, but is won over by Richard’s clever but comically insincere pleas of love. As if perhaps to highlight the interest of the lesser-known history plays, Matsuoka gives an example of Edward IV’s wooing of the widowed Lady Gray (Elizabeth Woodville) from Henry VI, Part 3 (3.2.66-74; 100-101) (ibid., 75-78). Edward, famous in history as a womanizer, needs a woman fast. Lady Gray has just lost her husband in battle; Edward presents himself as the man of the moment.

Matsuoka translates the ambiguity of the Lady Gray’s ‘loss’ to mean that she does not feel like buying back the lands to the extent that she would surrender her chastity. In fact, the subtlety of her translation lies elsewhere. The gist of Edward’s argument lies in visual or cognitive perception: he asks the woman to perceive his mind, aims to sleep with her as if he was aiming his longbow high in the sky, and threatens her with the loss of territory and her children’s wrath (which as an outsider is something he could only visualize). This aspect is registered by Edward in the visual (and inevitably sexualized) idiom tanto chokunyu, literally ‘short sword straight in’ meaning ‘to put it bluntly’, and in the idiom tsurai me ni awaseru, which means ‘to give someone harsh looks’. As king, and especially in the context of Shakespeare’s medieval kingship where image and spectacle are paramount, Edward pays most attention to what he sees happening beneath him and to how things appear, whereas the Lady Gray seems more sensitive to sound in Matsuoka’s translation. For example, whereas the key word of her first utterance is probably ‘never’, emphasizing her determination, in the translation the stress comes in the gerund kanaeru koto (‘grant’) with the bright k- alliteration. This alliteration is repeated a few lines later, and with equal determination, in the phrase kaimodosu ki (‘feel like buying back’). Edward’s style is blunter, and in the final line Matsuoka correctly registers his ‘thee’ as anta; he is talking to an inferior. The answer to Matsuoka’s query about Shakespeare’s early style is that it was highly patterned, but that the key to both dramatic and stylistic development lies in the capacity to break out of patterns.

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     Matsuoka Kazuko’s central position within contemporary Shakespeare translation and performance can hardly be questioned, and yet it seems harder to understand what her translations mean in the contexts of ‘Heisei Shakespeare’ and the history of Shakespeare translation in Japan. Yet, as I have suggested, Matsuoka’s feminism should not be taken lightly, and can even be seen as a natural succession to her distinguished predecessors, Fukuda Tsuneari and Odashima Yushi. Matsuoka’s position as a woman translating the 400 year old works of a male playwright who wrote for male actors is comparable to the distance that Fukuda felt as he confronted those works in the 1950s, and sought to make them cohere within the logical structures of the modern Japanese theatre. Fukuda’s modernism is countered by the postmodernism of the post-shingeki theatre of the 1970s and 1980s, which in terms of translation may mean a dual acceptance of limitations and possibilities that rings especially true of the female translator; postmodernism combines a range of perspectives in order to question so-called ‘established truths’. In this connection Carolyn Shread writes that

This paradigm accords with Matsuoka’s feminized view of herself as ‘a discoverer’ of the Shakespearean text, and suggests that what she is communicating to her audiences in the contemporary Heisei society that is all too well educated in Shakespeare thanks to the achievements of Matsuoka’s predecessors is no more than a spirit, or epistemology, of ‘discovery’.

List of new Japanese translations of Shakespearean works published since 7th January, 1989 (the first day of the Heisei era).