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My decision to re-locate the story to Japan allows magnificent subtleties, poetry and mystery, vicious violence, new truth, freshness and spontaneity. Nitobe, in his book Bushido, The Soul of Japan continually draws parallels between Shakespeare’s tragic characters and verses in the Bard’s poems that reflect the same philosophy that guides the samurai and Japanese peoples. Also, the haiku poetry, that of Basho in particular, has the same power, the same beauty, the same genius, as that of Shakespeare.
It is important to explore a playwright like Shakespeare from many angles, not simply from a traditional view… The solipsistic philosophy of Japan allows us to re-discover Shakespeare’s observations of basically good people consumed with cupidity, quietly and gracefully; violence screaming its horrors beneath the fragrant cherry blossoms.
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