[Refereed Article] Reception of Strindberg's Works Staged at the Tsukiji Little Theater

Japanese Translation and Performance through Retranslation

抄録

In what might be seen as a rebellion to the “Good Wife and Wise Mother” – role reserved for them, a new way of being woman emerged in the 1910s – the New Woman later succeeded by the Modern Girl of the late 1920s. Despite being a very limited, urban phenomena, Japanese young women trying to look like Gloria Swanson, and defying feminine ideals of the day, stirred much commotion. In the light of the influence of American popular culture in general (movies, jazz and baseball) of the times, it is intriguing to examine the reception of modern Western theater in the same period. This paper investigates the reception of the plays by August Strindberg set up at the Tsukiji Little Theater in 1924-1925 and how the content of the texts was transformed in the process of retranslation from the Swedish originals and its performance. August Strindberg is famous for having reformed the Swedish language, with the motto of “write as you speak”. The dialogue in his plays is characterized by a direct, straight communication in a language spiced with interjections. How does this relate to the language that the Japanese audience were exposed to? Translation is sometimes characterized as a manipulation of the original text, perhaps even more so here as Mori Ôgai and other translators had to do with German or English translations of the Swedish original. Strindberg’s drama focuses on the battle between the sexes, the stage setting often being the bourgeois home. Considered an ideological construct of Western modernity, the leaders of Japan in the midst of a nation-building process readily embraced the moral importance of the home. The beginning of the 20th century witnessed the import en masse of Western literature, in the mid-1920s the Tsukiji Little Theater opted for a repertoire consisting of only translated drama in the first years of its existence. The plays by Strindberg were not translated from Swedish but via a relay translation from German with Mori Ôgai and Kusuyama Masao being the main translators.