Pathway to Japanese Literature
Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.
← Back
HamletAuthor: Hisao Jūran
| Original Title | ハムレット |
|---|---|
| Author | 久生 十蘭 |
| Genre | Popular Fiction |
| Author Type | Male Author |
| Summary | In a mist-shrouded Japanese highland resort after WWII, an enigmatic foreigner captivates gossip circles. Crowned with snow-white hair and dressed in antiquated British tailoring, this sixty-year-old specter moves through larch groves with his brooding companion Sofue, shunning society while radiating an aura of tragic grandeur. His anachronistic manners—ordering obsolete "spiter" for lunch, eating Renaissance-style with salted pork wrapped around his finger—hint at displaced time rather than madness. When pressed about Japan's recent wars, he stammers like a man awakening from decades-long slumber.\nAs Sofue reluctantly unveils their shared history, a darker tapestry emerges: a 1917 avant-garde *Hamlet* production where ambition and artistry collided catastrophically. The threads connect to a noble family’s buried crimes, a lover’s betrayal preserved in mothballed Elizabethan costumes, and a decades-long performance blurring sanity and survival. Through fragmented revelations—a phantom Ophelia statue, coded wall carvings, midnight burials during air raids—the truth coils like fog through mountain pines: some tragedies outlive their players, resurrecting as vengeful shadows in postwar Japan’s uneasy peace. The final act lingers unwritten, its players bound by secrets thicker than Karuizawa’s eternal mists. |
← Return to List← Return to TOP