Between Theatrical “Truth” and Historical “Fact”: The Question of Female Love in Miyagi’s Noh Rendition of Othello

Tomoka Tsukamoto* and Ted Motohashi**

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Othello has been staged overwhelmingly through the racial relationship between the two protagonists, Othello and Iago, at the expense of another protagonist, Desdemona, because of the prominence of racial and military perspectives in European modernity, and of Desdemona’s relatively scarce textual presence. Despite the influential contributions of feminist criticism to rectify the imbalance, this female protagonist has been enclosed in the realm of a patriarchal framework that divides women between “chaste wife” and “villainous whore.” Satoshi Miyagi’s production of Miyagi-Noh Othello, was a remarkable attempt to address this issue by transforming the whole play into a memory recollected and enacted by the Ghost of Desdemona through adapting the Japanese “Mugen-Noh” format, which is somewhat echoed in the Kafkaesque dramaturgy of transposing the dead into the living by crossing the boundary between the material and non-material, human and the non-human. The authors of this article argue that in this play, through the employment of his unique dramaturgy—the “division of speech and movement” method—Miyagi succeeded in recovering not only Desdemona’s truthfulness regarding her affectionate relationship with Othello but also multiple women’s “her-stories” marginalized by colonial histories authorized by the Venetian ruling class. A thorough examination of Miyagi’s innovative production would provide valuable insights into the often-overlooked dimension of Othello as an alternative narrative that explores how collective suffering can lead to spiritual atonement. This interpretation highlights the enduring presence of “true love” even within a society fractured by racism, sexism, and militarism, which Kafka has depicted in his uniquely tragi-comic oeuvre.

Keywords: Miyagi, Shakespeare, Noh, Othello, gender

Miyagi-Noh Othello and the Truthfulness of Female Love

Shakespeare’s Othello has been staged mostly through the racial relationship between the two protagonists, Othello and Iago, at the expense of another protagonist, Desdemona, because of the prominence of racial and military perspectives in European modernity, and of Desdemona’s relatively scarce textual presence. Despite the influential contributions of feminist criticism to rectify the imbalance, this female protagonist has been enclosed in the realm of a patriarchal framework that divides women between “chaste wife” and “villainous whore.”

Miyagi-Noh Othello. Photo: Miura Koichi

Satoshi Miyagi’s production of Miyagi-Noh Othello, first staged in Shizuoka, Japan, in 2018, for the Shizuoka Performance Arts Center, was a remarkable attempt to address this issue by transforming the whole play into a memory recollected and enacted by the Ghost of Desdemona through adapting the Japanese “Mugen-Noh” format. By employing his unique “division of speech and movement” method, Miyagi succeeded in recovering not only Desdemona’s truthfulness regarding her affectionate relationship with Othello but also multiple women’s “her-stories” marginalized by colonialist histories authorized by the Venetian ruling class.

A thorough analysis of Miyagi’s innovative production could shed new light on the often-overlooked elements of Othello, presenting it as a narrative that transforms collective suffering into a journey of spiritual atonement. This interpretation highlights the enduring presence of “true love” even in a society plagued by racism, sexism and militarism.

This paper does not specifically address the adaptation of Kafka’s works into a theatrical format; however, it aims to illuminate the significance of theatrical “truth” in an increasingly tragic contemporary landscape marked by regional conflicts and environmental degradation. While the subsequent analysis of Miyagi-Noh Othello may not overtly exhibit Kafkaesque qualities, the invocation of the term “grotesque”—often associated with Kafka’s literary oeuvre—provides an intriguing lens through which to examine the prevailing critical perspective that positions Othello and Iago, rather than Desdemona, as the central protagonists. This interpretation, at the very least, invites scrutiny, and this paper represents a modest endeavor to address this critical imbalance.

Miyagi Satoshi’s Method of Dividing Speech and Movement

In a “Director’s Note” for his The Winter’s Tale, Miyagi explains his original motives in having devised the “two in one” method where one character is represented by two performers, a speaker and a mover:

“I think words bring a tremendous feeling of disjunction into human bodies: words cut apart the natural flow that bodies desire, and consequently become the enemy of physiologic pleasure. . . . Human beings are vessels in which bodies and words fight against each other. If that is the case, the actor on the stage should reveal that struggle rather than conceal it, I thought. That is why I came upon the idea of the “two actors in one role” method.”[1]

It is partially correct to say that this method is an appropriation of the Japanese traditional puppet theatre (Bunraku), where Joruri chanters describe the story and sentiment of the characters embodied by puppets which are skillfully manipulated by silent puppeteers. However, Miyagi’s dramaturgical strategy goes much deeper than pure exploitation of the traditional Japanese theatre. Its overall aim is to deconstruct and reinvestigate the 2,500-year tradition of Western theatre in which coordination between the actor’s physicality and psychology should be overlooked in the audience’s appreciation of his/her skills. Miyagi’s strategy in dividing one role between a mover and a speaker is centered on his attempt to make the audience question the apparently transparent relationship between language and body.

In this sense, it would be fair to say that Miyagi’s “two in one” dramaturgy reflects Kafka’s literary instinct in representing the western modernity as the entity torn between language and body, inside and outside, the conscious and the unconscious.   

As Miyagi sees it, there is a disjunction between human desire and language as a means of expressing what is inside the human body, and the “division” method serves to illuminate that rupture. In Miyagi’s theatre, this breach is highlighted as well as contained by the percussion music played by the actors, who alternately take the part of speakers, movers and musicians. Through the incessant exchanges of fragmentation and integration overriding our hearing and vision, we are led to be more aware of the friction, a fault line that we are not conscious of in our daily lives, making the overall theatrical experience uncannily vibrant.

The “division” method does not necessarily liberate the speaker from the action, or the mover from the speech. Both, the speaker and the mover, being forced to respectively endure immobility and silence, bear a more substantial burden than actors who follow the conventional “one actor in one role” (“one in one”) method in modern European theatre. When the “division” method functions on the stage, the audience perceives a heightened physical energy in the performance and notices a more complex linguistic structure in the movement, captivated by the dynamic interplay between the two distinct yet deeply interconnected theatrical mediums. To borrow Miyagi’s words, “multiple languages are flying around one actor who speaks lines without moving, and another actor who moves without speaking.”[2]

Miyagi creates a uniquely theatrical beauty on the stage by prohibiting the performers from either speaking or moving. By questioning the transparent relationship between language and body, the “division” method directly puts focus on the inherent function of human linguistic and bodily communication.

Othello and Reinvention of Her-stories Through “Mugen-Noh”

As we have suggested, Miyagi’s adaptation of Othello is an attempt to narrate this tale not through the black and masculine perspective, which has been common modes of presentation in the performance history of this play, but through the collectively female perspective of Desdemona and her fellow women estranged in Cyprus. How can we make Desdemona the principal character of the play? Miyagi’s answer to this question is to appropriate a Mugen-Noh style.

In Mugen-Noh (phantasmal Noh-play), “Waki” (a bystander or mediator usually represented by a Buddhist priest) encounters “Shite” (principal, the ghost of a dead person, frequently personifying one who begrudges her past). The Shite’s memories (usually painful and poignant) are evoked through Waki, who recognizes the sheer otherness of the former. Waki is a character who has typically lost his family members or become tired of his profession, wandering through life without any purpose. As someone who carries a profound emptiness within his psyche, he is able to assist a ghost within the Shite, who is consumed by deep-seated resentment. In other words, Waki embodies a state of “in-between-ness,” acting as a bridge between this world and the gods or spirits of other realms. In Noh theatre, the Waki serves as a mediator between the audience and the tradition, but only to the extent that he distances himself from the Shite and relinquishes any claim to ownership over the other’s cultural memories.

We have to emphasize at the outset that this production, even if it adopts the traditional Japanese theatrical format of Mugen-Noh, does not intend to appeal to the spectator’s exoticism (regardless of his or her ethnic origin) towards Orientalism. Instead, we would argue that by manipulating a particular dramaturgy based on Miyagi’s theories on language and body, this production attempts to problematize the conditions behind successful Shakespearean productions in translation.

The cross-cultural negotiation in theatrical productions such as this will unsettle the (un-)translatability of the original dramatic language, not through the overt rendition of outer forms but through the inner thematic and communicative reconsideration of political and theatrical conventions, which can be meaningful only at the site of actors’ coeval interventions. As we will analyze several scenes in Miyagi-Noh, these interferences, creating and containing frictions between linguistic speech and bodily action, are what make Miyagi’s mimetic dramaturgy with the “division” method so infallible in materializing dormant features in Shakespeare’s original, which the usual “one actor in one character” presentation may well have suppressed. By adapting the Mugen-Noh format, this production intriguingly breaches, in an almost Kafkaesque fashion, the normally accepted boundary between the dead and the living, dream and reality, the human and the non-human.

To assess the magnitude of this reinvention of an alternative her-story, we should closely follow the action of Miyagi-Noh, which consists of three parts, “Mae-ba” (Fore-scene), “Ai-kyogen” (In-between play) and “Nochi-ba” (After-scene), but, because of space limitations, we will concentrate on “Mae-ba” and “Nochi-ba.”

Mae-ba: Concord Between the Ghost of Desdemona and the Italian Women

The setting of Miyagi-Noh is the island of Cyprus under Turkish rule some fifty years after Desdemona’s death. The play opens with a Venetian Pilgrim, who visits the island as a tourist enjoying its exotic landscape. The stage imitates the conventional Noh set with “Hashi-gakari” (bridge path) on the left (where the ghost enters and exits), “Butai” (stage) at the center (where actions take place), “Nochi-za” (back area) at the back (where musicians play music) and “Ji-utai-za” (chanters’ area) on the right (where a group of chanting singers speak the characters’ lines or narrate the story). Desdemona’s Ghost (Shite, the principal), who has been hiding among the musicians, now moves forward and approaches the Pilgrim, trying to talk to her.

The critical points here are that Desdemona’s Ghost assumes the shape of an older woman, and her utterances cannot be recognized as articulated words but as non-meaningful sounds. As a consequence, the Pilgrim cherishing the exotic landscape does not notice her presence at all. Miyagi, in a way, deconstructs the convention of the Mugen-Noh format in which the ghostly Shite is always-already visible to the visiting mediator, Waki as a Buddhist pilgrim, by making the ghost invisible to the bystanders as in a general conception of the deceased. By doing so, Miyagi paradoxically succeeds in questioning our conception of the ghost in terms of its (non-)visibility and (non-)audibility. Desdemona is not invisible or inaudible because she is a ghost; rather, her ghostly invisibility and silence arise from the Pilgrim’s failure to hear her voice or acknowledge her subaltern presence, as if she were an overlooked, marginalized character in a Kafka novel—ignored and rendered uncanny by those around her

When then does the Pilgrim become aware of Desdemona’s entity in the Miyagi-Noh? The moment she is brought about by the three Italian women, who also appear as old women, each carrying a heavy jar on their head containing local goods to sell. As these women are not ghosts but Venetian-born women who speak the same language as the Pilgrim, the latter tries to get some local information from them. However, the women become upset by some insolent remarks by the Pilgrim, and are about to exit via the “Hashigakari” bridge. At this very moment, Desdemona’s Ghost intervenes and introduces their telling of “her-stories” in a collective “call-and-response” fashion.

Desdemona and the Italian women: Desdemona’s Ghost (Shite)=Mikari; the three Italian women (Tsure) 1= Terauchi Ayako, 2= Kataoka Sachiko, 3=Sakurauchi Yu. Photo: Miura Koichi

It is noteworthy here that Desdemona’s Ghost (Shite) and the three Italian women (Tsure) are conjoined and orchestrating each other in what we call a mimetic dramaturgy devised by Miyagi’s “division” method. Let us explain in detail.

When the three women are about to exit the stage, the Ghost stops them to say the first line (“On our haggard bodies, the wrinkles deepen”), pointing to the “wrinkles” on her cheek. Then, the women imitate the action, wondering what this might mean; therefore, their mimetic utterances, “On our haggard bodies, the wrinkles deepen,” are spoken in a question form. Interestingly, since Shite is Desdemona’s Ghost, she cannot be an actual woman who has “haggard bodies” and “deepened wrinkles.” Nevertheless, when the Ghost initiates this action, it is bodily transferred to Tsure, the three women, making them aware of their present status. Tsure also repeat the Shite’s second utterance (“Our sins from the past deepen”), imitating the same gesture of the Ghost, but this time with more conviction. As these mimetic gestures inevitably evoke the memories suppressed within the women’s bodies, their inner voices suddenly burst out, ripping their bodies (“Our bodies now are slaves”), as though they now realize their present status as “slaves” who should be responsible for their miseries (“Our motherland betrayed us”).

We should also remind ourselves that this dramatic interaction between Desdemona’s Ghost and the three surviving women is here carried out by the “division” method, in which the Ghost’s words, spoken by her speaker, are mimetically underlined by her mover, while the three women’s words uttered by a group of female voices are also mimetically confirmed by their movers. In Miyagi-Noh, because of the Mugen-Noh format whereby a group of Ji-utai chanters chants the women’s words describing their feelings and memories, the relationship between speech and movement is not in a one-to-one correspondence but a collective unison. Furthermore, as we have analyzed above, the mimetic interaction between the Ghost of Desdemona and the three Italian women is carried out without their possessive desire. The women’s memories are evoked through the Ghost’s initiative, and the “division” method serves to highlight the passive mode of their actions and the temporal gap between the Ji-utai chanters’ speech and their bodily movement.

Desdemona and the Italian Women

Whereas Shakespeare’s Othello ends with the tragedy of Desdemona and Othello, Miyagi-Noh indicates a historically unaccounted number of tragedies that have happened since. In this sense, too, Miyagi’s Noh rendition of Othello reflects the Kafkaesque world-view in which the Western modernity has been constantly suppressed the multiple voices of the unnamed and unrecognized. Similar to Kafka’s works, while these minor figures have their own names and histories worthy of recognition, they go unacknowledged because the dominant part of society fails to hear or see their voices and existence.

Following the collective narration and dance of the Ghost and the three women, we witness a dramatic change: after the Italian women depart, the Pilgrim asks the solitary Ghost of Desdemona who she is. The mediatory presence of these women finally makes Desdemona visible to this bystander. In order to re-weave their small histories suppressed by the “official” History, Miyagi-Noh unravels entities and stories hidden under the surface of Shakespeare’s Othello. Its unprecedented achievement does not lie merely in employing the Mugen-Noh format, but in realizing the mimetic dramaturgy supported by the “division” method to modernize this conventional format. According to Miyagi, the cause of Othello’s and Desdemona’s tragedy was the historical denial of these nameless and marginalized stories and entities. What is contained in the jars held by these Italian women are their memories. Their songs and dances expressed through their silent bodies evoke their sorrows and regrets, which have not been heard. In the “division” system, they listen to their own voices through the Ji-utai chanters’ singing. Miyagi-Noh Othello highlights their subaltern plight of not being able to speak or be heard but, at the same time, redeems them with the help of speech distant from their own bodies through the “division” system.

Let us now move on to the scene in which Desdemona’s Ghost reveals her identity. To the querying Pilgrim, she replies, “I’m ashamed to say.” This scene mainly attracts our attention because Shite, against the convention of keeping silence, uses her own voice to speak these lines. Furthermore, her first real utterance is somehow stifled as if she has finally spoken after the long silence since her death. To be more precise, the Ghost’s first words directly aimed at the Pilgrim (representing the audience as a whole) are shared between her speaker and her mover as if neither claimed ownership of this utterance. When the speaker says the line, the mover moves her mouth, and we sense that although the mover does not produce any sound, her breath conveys what the speaker utters (“I’m ashamed to say”). This very “shame” (revealed and muffled at the same time) co-possessed by the two women (the speaker and the mover) is what makes this declaration of the Ghost’s identity so disturbing. Their cooperative disclaimer of the right of possession of this humble speech will lead us to probe our involvement in the power structure behind this talker-hearer relationship, inviting us to ask ourselves, “If she has spoken, have we listened to her?” We suspect that this subaltern Ghost has spoken but has not been heard. In this delicate and tortuous declaration by the Ghost, it is Miyagi’s mimetic dramaturgy employing the “division” method that at once declares and disclaims her right of possession to her own body and speech. After this initial strenuous effort, the “Shite” finally produces her own voice to reveal her full identity, “I’m ashamed to say, but I’m the soul of the noble Moor Othello’s wife, Desdemona,” making this scene so problematic as well as memorable.

Desdemona’s Ghost revealing her identity: Desdemona’s Ghost (Shite)=Mikari; Pilgrim (Waki)=Honda Maki. Photo: Miura Koichi
Nochi-Ba: Desdemona’s Presentation of Alternative Their-Stories

After the “Ai-kyogen,” Desdemona reappears, as if she were alive again, in a magnificent white robe reminiscent of her wedding costume. Desdemona and the Pilgrim enter into conversation, the former in the “division” method, the latter in “one in one” style. It is noteworthy here that Desdemona does not want to tell the Pilgrim of her resentment or remorse at being unjustly killed, but “return[s] to tell the tale of a man trapped in a delusion.” Again, it is Miyagi’s mimetic dramaturgy that highlights Desdemona’s intention to tell Othello’s true story, in a call-and-response manner.

Desdemona’s Ghost revealing her identity

Recognizing Desdemona, the Pilgrim asks whether the rumor about Othello and Desdemona that had spread in Venice is true or not: “I guess you’ve come to tell me that the dark Moor was a traitor and colluded with the Turks?” The presence of this rumor suggests the Venetian ruling faction’s desire to settle the incident as a private affair involving a misguided marriage rather than a consequence of social discrimination. That is to say, the Venetian society has applied Iago’s version of the story in order to deny its social collusion that led to the victimization of marginal entities such as Othello and Desdemona.

Significantly, Miyagi-Noh uses subtitles twice in this crucial scene. First, when the Pilgrim utters the keyword “Ingin” (Collusion), the Chinese characters “慇懃” appear on the screen in calligraphic writing. This particular word has an ambiguous meaning. When this word is uttered for the first time by the Pilgrim, who believes in the rumor representing the dominant view of Venetian society, it means connivance or complicity. However, “Ingin” also means reciprocity or comradeship; that is, being in amicable and fraternal relationships with others. As the same word “Ingin” signifies conspiracy (according to Venetian racist ideology), on the one hand, and affectionate intercourse (within Desdemona’s tender memories), on the other, Miyagi’s adroit use of the handwritten subtitle for this word demonstrates that meaning depends fundamentally on context—who speaks and who hears.

Then, while the screen still shows these letters, Shite Desdemona starts to tell her own version of this “collusion” by saying, “Although it was long ago, alas, I shall speak,” in the “division” method; namely, Ji-utai chanters utter this sentence, and the mover moves. Moreover, to the audience’s consternation, this speech from Desdemona turns the whole meaning of the word “慇懃” around into the erotic and lovely intercourse between Othello and herself. The Ji-utai chanters then come in emphatically to describe the love affair between Othello and Desdemona.

Through a run-after repetition manner, this scene turns Iago’s pejorative description of the Moor (“thick lips,” “A black ram”) into the beautiful recollections of “that spring night.” Through reading the lines/watching the mover/listening to Ji-utai chanters/hearing and watching Desdemona in this order, the audience is invited to notice how they have been forgetful about the blissful time Othello and Desdemona must have spent together, as they have been confined within Iago’s and the Venetian dominant society’s racism. It is again the “division” method within Miyagi’s mimetic dramaturgy that enhances our re-appreciation of the lovers’ happy days. By imitating past events, Miyagi’s mimetic dramaturgy succeeds in restituting the “truth” of Othello and Desdemona’s love affair. Mimesis is not a reproduction of copies; instead, it aims to restore original and temporal entities which are fundamentally dependent on memories, individual as well as collective.

The pinnacle of her-story telling comes when she stages the killing of herself by Othello. Imitating the Mugen-Noh convention, Shite Desdemona represents this particular event by herself. She puts her right hand into a jar at the back of the stage, and when she takes it out, it is fitted with a replica of Othello’s arm protector. With that brown hand, Othello’s as well as Desdemona’s, she then strangles herself, as we hear these lines:

Chanter: Skin whiter than snow.
Chanters (multiple male voices): For a chrysanthemum whiter than snow, one’s scissors would hesitate to cut it.
Shite: My body hesitated . . .
Chanters: Yet she knew her life must be cut short.
A candle . . .
As the candle’s light is extinguished, so is the light of her life.

In Shakespeare’s Othello, Othello suffocates Desdemona with a pillow. Therefore, the two do not face each other. Othello chooses to kill her in such a manner precisely because he cannot look at her face when suffocating her. In Miyagi-Noh, by contrast, at the time of Desdemona’s death, the two lovers watch each other’s face closely. Miyagi writes in his “Director’s Note”: “Though Othello and Desdemona have not known each other well so far, at the final moment, namely, the moment when he is about to strangle her, they are closer to each other than ever” (2–3). One may well wonder how they can look at each other, as there is only Shite Desdemona on the stage. To our surprise, however, at the moment just before Shite strangles herself, she drops to her knees on the stage, then looks at the floor: at this very moment, her facial features include Othello’s “visage,” and the spectator feels the presence of Desdemona in front of that gaze. This is the moment when Desdemona’s remark in Shakespeare’s original, “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (1.3.252) is rehabilitated in dramatic fashion; no method other than the “division” method pulls this off. “Othello’s visage,” on the one hand, and Desdemona’s upright face when being strangled, on the other—the two images interlace in Shite’s doubled performance, representing Othello and Desdemona at the same time.

Desdemona strangling herself: Desdemona=Mikari. Photo: Miura Koichi
From an Atonement to “True Love”

Miyagi-Noh makes Desdemona, whose words were not listened to while she was alive, Shite. By doing so, it does not merely change the protagonist of the play from Othello and Iago into Desdemona, but it re-narrates the story in those alternative versions for those “nameless” women such as the three Italian women who cannot convey their individual stories. However, these women are not really nameless; it is simply that nobody has asked their names. Perhaps one of them might have been called “Bianca,” who is in love with Cassio. Although the Pilgrim does not inquire about their names, they do have their own names. It is just that we are not concerned with their names. We are even unaware of our own ignorance and are simply not interested in their presence. However, they have their names and stories to tell, and that is what Miyagi-Noh brings to life in the similar manner Kafka employs in his works where the grotesque and the uncanny are capitalized to reveal the gap between the dominant and the marginalized.

Desdemona strangling herself

We cannot over-estimate the contribution of feminist criticism to reappraising Othello from women’s point of view, but it has tended to emphasize either the “chaste wife” (Desdemona), the “liberal wife” (Emilia) or the “rebellious whore” (Bianca). As a result, the distinction between these three types of women has reinforced the Venetian patriarchal ideology. Through a detailed analysis of the staging of Miyagi-Noh, this paper has tried, while endorsing the feminist criticism that has proclaimed women’s resistance, to reach beyond the Venetian power structure based on genderism, racism and militarism, by attending to the presence of these “nameless” Italian women. In the Pre-scene, they are encouraged by Desdemona’s Ghost and dance with her, and in the After-scene, they support her atoning dance with their music. Their entities mediate between remorse and the pain of all those who have suffered, not only Desdemona and themselves but also those countless victims of the Venetian patriarchy, including Othello, Iago, Cassio and Roderigo.

Miyagi-Noh depicts a story of pain that cannot be divided between black and white. Pain is somehow akin to a ghost: it is invisible and soundless, yet it exists. Through his innovative mimetic dramaturgy, Miyagi restores Othello not as a play signifying tragedy of the individual lovers but as an alternative “her-story” of transposing everyone’s suffering into spiritual atonement within a world fractured and divided by racial, economic and gender discriminations. His approach echoes the themes of Kafka’s works, which dramatically expose the arbitrary power structures underlying such divisions, prompting us to question the power dynamics that shape these boundaries. By reviving the “true love” that has always already been present even in this grotesque and tragic Kafkaesque world where the human compassion towards otherness is required more than ever, Miyagi-Noh Othello rekindles the audience’s love of theatrical “truth” hidden behind the historical “fact.”


Endnotes

[1] Authors’ translation.

[2] Spoken at a post-performance talk, 12 February 2018, at Shizuoka Arts Theatre.

Bibliography

Miyagi, Satoshi. “A Director’s Note.” Theatre Culture: The Winter’s Tale, SPAC Autumn-Spring (2016–2017), pp. 2–3.

Shakespeare, William. Othello, edited by M.R. Ridley, Methuen, 1984. 


*Tomoka Tsukamoto is a theatre critic and currently the General Secretary of the Japanese branch of the International Association of Theatre Critics. She received her MA in Drama Studies from Nihon University in 1996. Her publications include a book on Miyagi Satoshi’s theatre (in Japanese) and, most recently, two essays on Miyagi’s works, “Aural/Oral Histories of Pain and Trust in Miyagi Satoshi’s Révélation” (Critical Stages 24, December 2021), and “Gender, Ecology, and Theatre of Catastrophe: The Apocalyptic Vision and the Deconstruction of Western Modernity in Satoshi Miyagi’s Demon Lake,” (Critical Stages 26, December 2022), both with Ted Motohashi. 

**Ted Motohashi is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Tokyo University of Economics and currently serves as the President of the Japanese branch of the International Association of Theatre Critics. He earned his DPhil in Literature from the University of York, U.K., in 1995. His body of work includes numerous books on drama, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies, with his latest publication being “‘Our Perdita is found’: The Politics of Trust and Risk in The Winter’s Tale” featured in Shakespeare and the Political (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is also a prominent translator into Japanese of notable works by authors such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy, among others.

Copyright © 2024 Tomoka Tsukamoto and Ted Motohashi
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411

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