The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

1. Translating the Alien: Tsubouchi Shōyō and Shakespeare

C H A P T E R 1 T R A N S L A T I N G T H E A L I E N Tsubouchi Shòyò and Shakespeare Perfecting my cold dream Of a place out of time, A palace of porcelain —Derek Mahon If what we call “objective reality” is a series of more or less persuasive descriptions proposed by various languages, translation is the most fundamental and philosophical of all activities. To translate then is not only to experience the difference that makes each language distinct, but equally to draw close to the mystery of the relationship between word and thing, letter and spirit, self and the world. To translate is to awake and find oneself in the universal house of mirrors. —Charles Simic O neofthemostsignificanteventsinthehistoryofmodernJapanoccurred in 1854 when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Edo accompanied by a powerful naval fleet with the express mission of opening Japan to the West. The last in a long line of Western attempts to prise open Japan to Western trade and commerce, it can easily be surmised from the well-armed vessels under Perry’s command that he was determined to achieve this objective, and as later history has demonstrated, he succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of most citizens of the West at the time. Thus the “alien” was manifested in tangible form for one of the few times in Japanese history: in a very real sense the alien was within, both within the body politic, which was provoked by Perry into a series of far-reaching political changes, as well as within the physical reality of Japan itself. Contact with the West exposed Japan to the foreign in its purest form, that is, to the Other that was Western culture. A flood of translations from Tsubouchi Shöyö and Shakespeare • 11 Western languages followed the arrival of Perry and the other foreign envoys, which consisted mainly of political and technical works written by such authors as John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer, and Samuel Smiles.1 John Mertz has identified 1878 as the year when “a breakthrough” occurred inJapanese-languagetranslationsofWesternworks.2 Unlikethebookspublished in the years immediately following Perry’s arrival, the translations published in this and succeeding years were often literary works and offered readers, Mertz argues, “the sweet pill of civilization . . . the lure of Western flavors.”3 Prominent among the works translated in 1878, for example, were novels like Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers and Alice. Jonathon Zwicker also remarks that “from the 1870s into the 1890s, the [Japanese] market for translations is almost entirely dominated by British and French novels. . . . [I]n the 1890s the market fractures. There continues to be an almost unending stream of spy and detective novels, of sentiment, melodrama and adventure fiction but these are soon joined by the Romantics, Shakespeare, the great Russian novelists—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev.”4 For Japanese at that time the most powerful expression of the Western tradition was found in British civilization, the culture of the dominant imperialist state of the day. So it is no accident that many of the authors translated were British. The most famous English author of the time, probably of all time, was William Shakespeare, and, as Zwicker notes, Shakespeare was among the first authors to be translated into Japanese. The history of Japanese translations of Shakespeare will be discussed later, as a prelude to a detailed assessment of the translations of Tsubouchi Shöyö (1859–1935), Japan’s greatest and in many ways most influential translator of the Bard. But first it is necessary to make some preliminary remarks on Shakespeare translation in general, especially as this applies to Asia, and specifically Japan, since Shakespeare is arguably more alien to Asian indigenous traditions than European. For instance, the “German Shakespeare” has taken on an existence independent of the English original, though apparently just as significant for German culture.5 Just how the alien dramatist became Japanese, a process paralleled in the European absorption of Shakespeare, is therefore the subject of this chapter. Shakespeare, Japan, and Tsubouchi Shōyō In James Brandon’s influential 1997 article “Some Shakespeare(s) in Some Asia(s),” the author proposes a threefold division of Shakespeare adaptations. 12 • Chapter 1 He is here writing primarily of stage adaptations, not Shakespeare as text. The first category Brandon calls the “canonical Shakespeare—an...