Grave Relations: Hamlet,Jyuran Hisao's ‘Hamuretto’,the Emperor and the War

Abstract

The popular Japanese writer Jyuran Hisao (1902–57) published two responses to Hamlet in the form of novellas: ‘Shikaku’ (‘Assassin’, 1938) and ‘Hamuretto’ (‘Hamlet’, 1946), the latter a rewritten version of the former. Both are about a Japanese man, Komatsu, who comes to believe that he is Hamlet, and the stories draw extensively and revealingly on the dramatic and thematic content of Shakespeare's play. ‘Hamuretto’ becomes, too, a response to World War II and aligns Komatsu/Hamlet with Emperor Hirohito, while also revealing a surprisingly cosmopolitan, flexible and liberal attitude to this famous tragedy, coming from a country that Japan had come to consider its enemy.