Hello Sha-kitty-peare?

: Shakespeares Cutified in Japanese

Anime Imagination

Ryuta Minami

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 16, Number 3, Summer
2016, pp. 116-137 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2016.0024

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/644116

[ Access provided at 16 Apr 2020 22:42 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

 Hello Sha-­kitty-­peare?
Shakespeares Cutified in Japanese Anime Imagination

ryuta minami

abstract

The first decades of the twenty-­first century witnessed a great proliferation of partial adaptations
of and references to Shakespeare and his works in Japanese manga comics and animation films.
Such heterogeneous and fragmentary pieces of Shakespeare range from literal or visual quota-
tions from his plays to sacrilegious cute recreations of the playwright himself. This essay not only
analyzes the diverse ways of animating Shakespeare’s texts seen in two recent animated
films, Romeo x Juliet (2007), and Zetsuen no Tempest [“The Blast of Tempest”] (2012), but
also considers transmutations of Shakespeare himself in animated films such as Romeo x Ju-
liet and Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere (2011), where the playwright is both demystified
and cutified in the current fashion of manga-­animation characters. This essay also explores the
ways in which the fans of such manga comics and animated films (are often expected to) collabo-
rate and interact with each other to recognize and interpret Shakespearean texts in those works
via blogs and fan sites on the Internet. How Shakespeare haunts the contemporary Japanese
imagination is expounded through the analyses of manganized and animated texts that bear “the
signature of the Thing ‘Shakespeare’” (Derrida 25).

The animated work becomes that thing, the Thing that, like an elusive
specter, engineers [s’ingénie] a habitation without proper inhabiting, call it
a haunting, of both memory and translation. A masterpiece always moves,
by definition, in the manner of a ghost.
—­Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Shakespeare is the very basics for all of us, isn’t he?

—­Yes! PreCure 5 Go-­G, Episode 12, “Mimino Kurumi Has Come!”

the journal for early modern cultural studies

vol. 16, no. 3 (summer 2016) © 2016

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 117

Shakespeare, Thou Art Animated!

Shakespeare is prevalent in Japanese animated films called anime. Even
Pokémon, a globally well-­k nown anime series, has Shakespearean episodes:
in the 42nd episode of Pocket Monster Advanced Generation (2002–06), for
example, you will find the love of two “pocket monsters” being frustrated by
their owners (called Romeo and Juliet) because they are not on good terms.1
Another Japanese anime series, Futari wa PreCure (2004–05), also has an
episode that centers on a school production of Romeo and Juliet performed by
its leading magical schoolgirls (“A Stage Debut!”). The target audiences of
these anime are mostly preteen and early teen boys and girls, respectively,
and obviously these Shakespearean episodes have no aesthetic or literary
merits at all, nor do they expect those target audiences to have any (pre-­)
knowledge of Romeo and Juliet. Here Shakespeare is appropriated neither for
the legitimation nor for the upward cultural mobility of anime. In these epi-
sodes of Pokémon and PreCure, Shakespeare’s plays are merely adapted to the
formats of each animated TV series: the two pocket monsters’ frustrated
love or the stage performance of Romeo and Juliet interrupted by evil
monsters.
When Shakespeare is transferred onto popular media platforms such as
anime, manga (graphic novels), and video games, references to Shakespeare’s
plays are fragmentary, heterogeneous, and obscure, yet still recognizably
Shakespearean. This means that any alterations are acceptable or sometimes
even preferable in the anime-­manga imagination as long as the media object is
recognizably Shakespearean. Such an attitude towards transmedial reposi-
tioning of Shakespeare has brought about “cute” Shakespeares on various
media platforms, as we will see in the following pages. Here a quick look at the
illustration of a very unlikely looking Shakespeare will demonstrate how cute
the playwright himself can be in the playful imagination of contemporary Jap-
anese popular culture (see fig. 1).2 Wearing a pink tiara with heart-­shaped
stones in it, this doe-­eyed Shakespeare is writing LOVE in pink ink with a pen
reminiscent of the magical wand of a magical girl in anime or manga. Yet the
hairstyle, the doublet, and the pen indicate that the figure depicted is unmis-
takably Shakespeare, even though cutified and feminized.
Such a cute-­kawaii transfiguration of Shakespeare owes much to the recent
popular ways that character-­oriented stories have been re-­created across media
platforms, and here both kawaii and character-orientedness play crucial roles
in the proliferation of cute Shakespeare in Japanese popular culture across

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Fig. 1: Cute/kawaii Shakespeare? © Tomeo Morita

media. The word kawaii is a rather ambiguous word with a range of meanings
wider than those of its English counterpart cute, for kawaii “is synonymous
with beautiful, lovable, suitable, addictive, cool, funny, ugly but endearing,
quirky and gross” (Okazaki and Johnson 6). Kawaii, in other words, could
mean anything from “baby and infant cuteness”; to “teen and young cuteness”;
to “adult, sexy or even pornography cuteness”; according to the contexts in
which the word is used.3 This is why the variegated transfigurations of Shake-
speare to be discussed in this essay appear kawaii in somewhat different ways:
some are cute in a manner that conforms to conventional imagery and others
are associated with cute factors that arouse moe, a feeling of love for a fictional
character, to be discussed in the third section of this essay.
What is also to be noted is the marketability of cuteness or the rise of a cute
cultural economy through characters and figures in anime and manga. As
Anne Allison and Christine R. Yano argue, Pikachu of Pokémon and Hello
Kitty have become cultural capital to be globally circulated and consumed in

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 119

the form of cute characters. And a distinct idea of character in the Japanese
culture of cuteness is key to understanding the commodification and prolifera-
tion of cute Shakespeare in popular media in Japan. Unlike “transmedia story-
telling,” a process that lays emphasis upon the integrity of a story to be
dispersed across media, a Japanese way of repositioning a text across media
centers around the transmedial recreation of its characters separated from
their original textual or narrative contexts.4
While anime has become one of the notable “spreadable” transnational
media platforms (Jenkins et al. ch. 7), anime is also a platform that often serves
to initiate intermedial translation of extant media objects/texts into other
platforms such as manga and video games, and the other way round. The dy-
namics of such reciprocal repositioning of texts and characters has changed the
ways of creating and appreciating them. This essay aims to illustrate how
Shakespearean fragments, including characters, are transfigured as kawaii-­
cute commodities in textual or visual terms on anime-­related media and how
fan communities respond to such cutified Shakespeares, thus demonstrating
how fans’ responses function as an indispensable part of producing cute Shake-
speares. Intermedial transferring of Shakespeare either ends up with character-­
oriented narratives without any overall stories, or sets Shakespearean
characters free from their original contexts and makes them quirky and cute in
the manner of Japanese anime. With the globalization of anime, manga, and
video games, Shakespeare cutified is appearing on diverse media platforms and
is becoming a globally available commercial cultural commodity just like Hello
Kitty.

Creating Manga/Anime with Shakespeare

Before going on to discuss the cutification of Shakespearean texts and charac-
ters, it will be necessary to illustrate how Shakespearean texts are being frag-
mented without regard for the integrity of their original narratives. Zetsuen no
Tempest (“The Blast of Tempest,” 2012–13) is a notable example of Shakespear-
ean anime based on the manga of the same title, which makes adroit use of
quotations from Hamlet and The Tempest. The show’s official website features
an introductory page with a quotation from Hamlet: “The time is out of
joint—­O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!,” and the opening
page of its official website illuminates the significances of Shakespeare in visual
terms (see fig. 2). On the yellow bands running across this picture, Miranda’s
lines and the Player Queen’s lines are inscribed as if to suggest Shakespearean

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 120 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 16:3

Fig. 2: The opening page of the official site of Zetsuen no Tempest. It reads, “Is
this a romantic comedy that determines the fate of the world?” Quotations
from The Tempest and Hamlet are displayed on the narrow yellow bands run-
ning across the picture. © Aniplex

quotations are a key to understanding this anime.5 Interestingly, fans’ websites

list all the Shakespearean lines quoted in both the anime and the manga, as if
to confirm their importance.
The Blast of Tempest starts with a young witch being expelled and left alone
on a deserted island, suggesting an apparent similarity to The Tempest, while
the first episode of this animated TV series starts and ends with the quotation
from Hamlet, “The time is out of joint—­O cursed spite, that ever I was born to
set it right!” Over the course of the story, the leading characters repeatedly
quote from Hamlet and The Tempest.6 Such quotations provide its recipients
with keys to understanding those characters. As the story unfolds, it turns out
that the relationship between the three leading characters (Yoshino, Mahiro,
and Mahiro’s sister Aika) resembles that of Hamlet, Laertes, and Ophelia,
while at the same these Japanese characters sometimes display correspon-

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 121

dences with other Shakespearean characters such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and

Prospero respectively.
A scene from the 21st episode of this anime offers a very good example of
how Shakespearean quotations influence its audience’s appreciation. Aika, a
strong witch, quotes some lines from Hamlet and then The Tempest before she
kills herself.7 She mentions the plays she is quoting, tacitly encouraging the
audience to read the plays and find out why she has chosen certain lines:

Oh, dear. Things will never go as one wishes.

“There are more things between Heaven and Earth, Horatio.
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Oh, this is Hamlet’s line. Yoshino would get offended at Hamlet’s words.
Here I should be quoting from The Tempest: “At picked leisure,
Which shall be shortly, single I’ll resolve you,
Which to you shall seem probable, of every
These happened accidents; till when be cheerful,
And think of each thing well.”
Please do understand me, Yoshino-­san and Mahiro.8

The plot of The Blast of Tempest, like a whodunnit, centers on the leading char-
acters’ investigation of the murder case of Aika. The lines above are spoken as a
soliloquy to show her interiority. Soon afterwards, Aika kills herself, thus
solving her own murder case. The words of Hamlet here reflect Aika’s angst
and her awareness that neither her stepbrother Mahiro nor her boyfriend
Yoshino would understand her. The quotation from The Tempest, on the other
hand, foretells the ending of this anime, where her video message left for Ma-
hiro and Yoshino clears up the mystery of her death. Quoting from Shake-
speare’s plays, Aika and other leading characters utilize not only the literal
meanings of the lines but also their contextual meanings so as to reveal their
interiorities with a minimum of verbal or visual explanation.
In The Blast of Tempest, all the characters are required to choose a tragic or
comic ending following either Hamlet or The Tempest. The Blast of Tempest,
which unfolds as an attempt to identify the murderer of Aika, is also presented as
a story of Yoshino and Mahiro’s attempt to revenge Aika. In the course of the
story, the leading characters become aware that their fate has already been writ-
ten and limited to two possibilities: they can only choose one of two options—­
either a Hamlet-­like tragic ending or a Tempest-­like comic one with reconciliation.
What is intriguing here is the responses that fans make to these Shakespearean

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 122 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 16:3

plays: fans repeatedly ask questions on the Internet about which Shakespearean
play they should read to appreciate this anime, whether they should read both of
them, and they ask whose translations of the plays are used in the manga and
anime. This not only shows how fans would engage with anime in general but il-
luminates the interpretive practices of avid anime fans known as otaku.

Shakespearean Characters Repositioned and Otaku’s Responses

Otaku refers to people who have strong or even obsessive interests in particular
anime, manga, or video games. They are well-­equipped with research skills like
academics, and they conduct comprehensive research on anime so as to fully
appreciate each scene or word in it.9 What is remarkable about otaku is that
they pay obsessive attention to minute details of each frame and verbal expres-
sion in an anime, and the producers and creators, being aware of their aesthetic
penchant for details, tacitly expect and deliberately encourage them to carry
out painstaking research. In other words, otaku go “frame by frame to observe
the jet trails of missiles or the space battles of giant robots” and “their obsessive
attention to detail, with little regard for overall story, is representative of a par-
ticular approach to aesthetics” (Condry 199).
This can be illustrated by the use of Shakespeare in Sakura-­so no Petto-­na
Kanojo (“A Pet-­Like Girl in Sakura-­so Dormitory”), a novel that was trans-
lated to manga and anime.10 In the novel, Sorata, a leading character, finds a girl
reading a play and asks her what she is reading. In the original novel the scene
goes as follows:

Sorata finds on a table a program of the mid-­term assembly for perfor-

mances by drama students.
“Ah, this? We are going to give a stage performance for the mid-­term as-
sembly at our voice acting school.”
“Anime?”
“No, ordinary drama [ . . . ] a stage play.”
“Really.”
“You have heard of Shakespeare, haven’t you?”
Though he knows only the names of Romeo and Juliet, Sorata nodded
with pretended confidence. (Kamoshida 147–48)

In the manga version (2013), readers only find the words “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream by William Shakespeare” written on the cover of the book without any
verbal references. In the anime of Sakura-­so (2012), there is a one-­second shot

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 123

which shows a script of Othello opened on a table. The page shows the scene
where Iago says, “O beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-­eyed monster
which does mock / the meat it feeds on” (3.3.163–74). Neither of the characters
mentions the name of the play or reads the lines from the play, and we only have
a glimpse of the lines taken from Othello in Japanese translation. Yet naturally
enough, some otaku spotted the play and started discussing the “meanings” of
Othello in this anime over Twitter and blogs: they ask themselves why the girl is
studying the role of Iago, and they do this because the screen shot shows that
all the lines of Iago’s are highlighted in yellow. They conclude that this one-­
second visual quotation suggests a possible triangular relationship involving
Sorata and the girl. As the extant media text moves from one medium to an-
other, the play mentioned becomes less familiar to Japanese young readers in
general: almost everyone knows of Romeo and Juliet, and many have heard of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream as it is one of the most frequently performed of
Shakespeare’s plays, yet Othello is less well-­known than the others. This illus-
trates how otaku’s communal intelligence as well as their individual knowledge
helps them discover and explore the possible meanings of a scene or the inter-
textual references made in an anime, and how the creators manipulate the
otaku’s responses by giving them limited information.
Romeo x Juliet (2007), a sci-­fi anime re-­creation of Romeo and Juliet, is an-
other good example of how such otaku’s obsessive attention to details works
with little regard for the overall story and how creators respond to their aes-
thetics through transmedial repositioning of anime texts. This TV anime is set
in a city called Neo Verona and the credit roll at the very beginning of each
episode shows “William Shakespeare” in English as the author of its original
source. The Neo Verona depicted behind the credit roll looks like Verona in
Italy, not only implying the anime’s faithfulness to the original play and giving
a kind of authenticity to this anime recreation but also satisfying the otaku’s
interests in details. Otaku and general audiences will easily find that many
characters in this anime are taken from other Shakespeare plays: they encoun-
ter Portia, Antonio, Tubal and Lancelot, Cordelia, Regan, Emilia, Hermione,
Camilo, Ariel, Francisco, Curio, Titus, Conrade, Petruchio, Benvolio, Baltha-
zar, Ophelia, and so on. Obviously the creators introduced these characters to
add some Shakespearean atmosphere to their counterparts in this Shake-
spearean anime, expecting otaku to do research on the anime and share the
significances and significations of these Shakespearean characters in Romeo x
Juliet on Internet sites and blogs. Some fans went on to read those plays by

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 124 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 16:3

Shakespeare to which the anime alludes. They do this in order not only to con-
firm the references and associations between the anime and Shakespeare’s
tragedy, but also to read between the lines or find out further possible hidden
significations of the Shakespearean characters in Romeo x Juliet. Ophelia in
this anime takes care of Escalus, Neo-­Verona’s Tree of Life; and Ophelia’s
flowery and vegetational images might suggest some debts to John Everett Mil-
lais’s famous painting of Ophelia as well as the original character in Hamlet.
Also in the anime, Cordelia, who looks after Juliet, is presented as an honest
girl with a keen sense of justice, and Hermione is the patient fiancée of Romeo.
Romeo x Juliet, an animated work, becomes the originating text for its de-
rivative audio-­CD drama and Internet radio programs, neither of which have
anything of Romeo and Juliet in them. When the anime was broadcast weekly,
the weekly radio program RomeJuli x Radio was broadcast on the Internet, in
which the voice actresses who dubbed the parts of Juliet and Cordelia talked
about Romeo x Juliet, its behind-­the-­scenes stories, and Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet. An audio drama (Romeo x Juliet: Special Drama CD) based on this
anime was also released with some of the leading characters placed in a new
context. This audio drama explores a narrative possibility by creating a possi-
ble world constructed around Romeo, Juliet, and Hermione, with the three
characters in a triangle relationship. These derivative works, as well as manga
and novel versions of Romeo x Juliet, illuminate how extant media content
spreads transmedially and how interactions between these iterations affect re-
cipients’ understanding of each text.11 This intermedial translation of Romeo x
Juliet from one media platform to another depends upon a fairly new idea of
character generally shared by both anime creators and otaku, because anime
and manga that are easily spread across media are not story-­centered but
character-­centered. Hence characters are thought to be removable from their
original settings and contexts so as to create a new derivative work featuring
the characters, whilst still retaining some shades of their original contexts.
Yet it must be noted that such characters are not of a fixed nature: they
function somewhat like an empty container in which you can put any character
elements in order to revise, renew, or simply re-­create a new character with the
same name. In Romeo x Juliet, for example, Juliet is presented as having popular
character elements taken from conventional heroines in anime such as “beauti-
ful fighting girl” (Saito).12 The audience is expected to see Juliet as a composite
of various features commonly found in heroines of popular anime in the past.
In his book on popular youth culture in Japan, Azuma Hiroki discusses this

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 125

Fig. 3: The CD cover for RomeoJuli x Radio ©Gonzo

Fig. 4: The CD cover for a derivative drama ©Gonzo

phenomenon in terms of the “database.”13 This database model of consumption

and creation helps us understand the construction of characters and stories in
Shakespearean anime as well. A character in anime is composed of diverse
character elements taken from several databases, and when creating a new
manga or anime referring to, quoting from, or simply using Shakespeare’s
plays, the creator will combine fragments and elements taken from a Shake-
spearean database along with other databases of characters, episodes, appear-

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ances, scenery, and so on. In other words, each character is the end product of
the arbitrary permutations and combinations of diverse character elements
collected from various databases. Though Zetsuen no Tempest is framed in the
overall narrative based upon The Tempest and Hamlet, it is also character-­
oriented in that the leading personae are composites of popular character ele-
ments such as “magician,” “beautiful fighting girl,” “red hair,” and so on.14
Hence Shakespearean characters could retain almost nothing of their origi-
nating character except for their name, because it is neither the consistency nor
the internal logic of an overall story but the momentary interactions of fasci-
nating characters that are prioritized in creating derivative-­spreadable media
content.

Shakespearean Characters Set Free

Romeo and Juliet are widely recognizable as archetypal lovers, and any refer-
ence to one or both of them suggests an impending tragedy of star-­crossed lov-
ers. “Romeo and Cinderella,” sung by Hatsune Miku, a humanoid voice
synthesizer with an anime-­like avatar, was dubbed, covered, and circulated in
various languages on the Internet. The song starts with the phrase, “Please
don’t let my love turn out to be such a tragedy as Juliet’s,” thus introducing a girl
who wishes her love to be happily fulfilled like Cinderella, not Juliet. The
spread of “Romeo and Cinderella” illustrates what Henry Jenkins calls media
convergence: “the introduction of a much broader array of new media technol-
ogies that enable consumers to archive, annotate, transform, and recirculate
media content” (Fans 155). Here the media content is “Romeo and Cinderella,”
but with this song being globally covered and re-­played on the Internet, Romeo
and Juliet is reimagined and recirculated across the cultural, national, and me-
dial boundaries, with Juliet being replaced by Cinderella.15 Here, only rem-
nants of the original star-­crossed lovers are traceable.
The character Juliet could be a replaceable or deletable character in some
Romeo-­and-­Juliet-­inspired contents in spite of, or because of, her too-­well-­
known name. Romeo vs. Juliet (2013) and its sequel Romeo & Juliet (2014) are
video games of a type generally known as otome game (“maiden’s game”) for
Sony’s PlayStation Portable. The overall framing narrative of these games is
set in an imaginary country called Verona where human beings and vampires
have been fighting with each other for ages. In these games, Romeo is a prince
of vampires, and Juliet is the head of the vampire hunters’ family. Romeo and
Juliet are recreated as characters that contain popular character elements

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 127

Fig. 5: The cover of Romeo vs. Juliet. ©Gonzo

such as “vampire,” “feminine handsome,” “beautiful fighting girl,” and “nun-­

like costume” (see fig. 5).16 Obviously, the games are influenced by popular
Western narratives such as Twilight (novel, 2005; movie, 2008), The Twilight
Saga (novel, 2006–08; movie, 2009–13) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–
2003) as well as Japanese manga/anime including Vampire Knight (manga,
2005–13; anime, 2008), which features a girl vampire’s relationship with two
handsome vampires.
The story of the games starts with the reconciliation between the two con-
flicting factions, vampires and humans. In the games, as the role of Juliet is that

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Fig. 6: Booklet accompanying the PlayStation Portable video game Romeo &
Juliet (2014). ©Quinrose

of the game’s player, the roles of the other characters are spoken by professional
voice actors. Like other maiden’s games, the main goal of these games is to de-
velop a romantic relationship between the female player character (Juliet) and
her male love interest (Romeo). In achieving that goal, the player of Romeo vs.
Juliet can choose an ending of her own choice, whether tragic or not, regardless
of the original plot of Shakespeare’s play. In Romeo & Juliet, the sequel to
Romeo vs. Juliet, the players of the game are able not only to change the leading
character’s name, but also to end the game by building a romantic relationship
with characters other than Romeo, thus allowing the player to delete both
Romeo and Juliet from a world based upon Romeo and Juliet.
Interestingly enough, both Romeo vs. Juliet and Romeo & Juliet have various
derivative manga, short stories, and audio drama CDs accompanying the
games. In these derivative manga and short stories, the players/consumers of
these games encounter narratives about leading characters such as the love be-
tween Juliet and Tybalt, Romeo’s dark past, William Shakespeare’s secret love
for Juliet, and so on. In these narratives, Romeo is often marginalized or even
deleted, and relationships between Juliet and the male characters other than
Romeo are described as possible stories in the accompanying booklet. “Mercu-
tio,” for example, presents an episode of Mercutio and Juliet’s romantic rela-
tionship with only a few passing references to Romeo as Mercutio’s colleague,
and “Laurence” depicts Juliet before her marriage to Laurence without refer-
ring to Romeo at all (Romeo vs. Juliet 56–76, 78–96). Such narratives, which are

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 129

based upon the possible worlds of the video games, may seem ridiculous and
irrelevant, yet they show how the idea of characters or character-­orientedness
in anime-­manga imagination functions in creating such transmedial texts.
Since character-­oriented transmedial repositioning of a text does not require
one ruling overall narrative, we get a collection of distinctive transmedial sto-
ries with a variety of different personalities just as you often find in fan fiction,
though in this case the manga and short stories were created by professional
artists and writers.17
Among such narratives that exploit the possibilities of another world of the
games, the audio dramas on CDs that accompany the games reveal a similar
but slightly different feature of derivative media objects in that Juliet is less
frequently mentioned or completely deleted in them. The audio drama accom-
panying Romeo vs. Juliet features Laurence, Paris, and Tybalt and thus com-
pletely deletes Romeo as well as Juliet from the possible world of Romeo vs.
Juliet, while in the other CD dramas Romeo, Mercutio, and Laurence appear
but not Juliet. This is partly because no voice actress plays the role of Juliet in
the games. Juliet, as mentioned above, is the role the target female players/con-
sumers are expected to play. As is often the case with maiden’s games, the num-
ber of female roles in these games is kept to a minimum: usually there is only
one heroine with one or two subordinate minor characters. The narratives of
such games center on the heroine’s/player’s responses and choices. Yet in their
derivative narratives, which often feature various possible relationships be-
tween the male characters, the consumers/players would ally themselves with
the heroine if she appeared in it, yet, unlike the games, the consumers/readers
are not in a position to change or develop a narrative in the world of such deriv-
ative manga, short novels and audio drama. They are expected to observe how
good-­looking male characters interact with each other. This is why maiden’s
games that are marketed exclusively for the consumption of women always em-
phasize the voice acting of male characters and computer-­generated images of
good-­looking male characters.18 Hence it is also likely that Juliet will be deleted
from the derivative texts of Romeo vs. Juliet and its sequel Romeo & Juliet. Al-
though the world of the games is borrowed from Shakespeare, Juliet is nothing
more than a silent, easily replaceable or dispensable character for the players/
consumers of these video games. And this also indicates how the media define
the contents, as the short stories and manga assume that their female readers
would take up the narrator’s (Juliet’s) viewpoint if she appeared in those deriv-
ative narratives, while the audio drama CDs assume that their listeners will

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 130 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 16:3

merely observe the drama from an outsider’s point of view because the heroine
without a voice actress will have no role to play in such possible narratives.
The male characters in Romeo vs. Juliet might look feminine or far from
masculine for Western readers, which illustrates the cutification of good-­
looking men and boys as part of the convention of Bishonen (“beautiful boys”)
or Biseine (“beautiful young men”) as a popular character type in anime,
manga, and video games. Such cutification and feminization of male charac-
ters, which are common in character-­oriented derivative media texts/objects,
could also apply to re-­creations of Shakespeare the dramatist himself.
Shakespeare himself appears in Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere (2011), a
sci-­fi anime based on a novel that depicts humankind’s attempts at retracing
and recreating a world history in the very distant future.19 In Horizon in the
Middle of Nowhere, Shakespeare is presented as one of the indispensable his-
torical figures in re-­doing humankind’s history, although this Shakespeare is
transfigured into a female character called Thomas instead of William (see
fig. 7). Along with passing references she makes to Macbeth and Hamlet, she is
regarded as a person who inherited the literary and cultural values of William
Shakespeare. Just like other Shakespearean characters in anime-­related media
texts, Shakespeare in Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere is an empty container
holding character elements such as “bespectacled” and “lovey-­dovey” taken
from a database of cute moe elements. Moe is an obsessive love for a fictional
character, and moe elements are expected to evoke such moe feelings in otaku,
but “feeling moe for a character has little to do with your feelings for the work
the character appears in” (Galbraith 173).20 As all the character elements, in-
cluding names, are treated as independent elements, even the conventional as-
sociation of name and sex is denied, and hence a character called Thomas can
be a girl. Accordingly, a character that represents Shakespeare does not neces-
sarily have to be named William or male as long as he (or she) is called “Shake-
speare” and can represent the English playwright in the imaginary world.
Here it must also be noted that Shakespeare is merely one of the databases
for creating Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere. There are other historical fig-
ures that appear in the novel and anime, including Robert Dudley, William
Cecil, Ben Jonson, Walter Raleigh, and Frances Walsingham. All of these
characters can be regarded as collected in an English history database, while
they are also composites of divergent character elements taken from different
databases. Some characters, such as Robert Dudley, Frances Walsingham, and
William Cecil, are presented as female characters in spite of their names, just

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 131

Fig. 7: A cute female Thomas Shakespeare. The shape of eyes, clothes, ribbon,
hair style and facial expressions as well as the paper bag serve to define what
kind of “cutie” this character is. ©Sunrise

like Thomas Shakespeare. This is because the originating novel and its deriva-
tive anime and manga target primarily the male otaku market, where cute fe-
male characters are much more popular than their male counterparts. Over
the last few decades in Japan, the feminization of historical male figures is
common in video games and manga as a way of enhancing the marketability of
media texts. Hence when there is no overruling narrative as a framework for
defining the gender of the characters in media texts/objects, characters in ex-
tant media texts/objects can be easily transfigured or feminized when they are
appropriated for another media platform such as video games and card games.
Now Shakespearean characters can be found even in mobile adventure
games like Divine Gate (2013) and Monster Strike (2013). Divine Gate has a col-
lection of Shakespearean characters called “Scripts of Sacred Drama” includ-
ing Macbeth, Othello, Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and Shakespeare (see fig. 8). As
was the case with the “Shakespeare” in Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere, Mac-
beth and Shakespeare are presented as female characters, and these six charac-
ters are difficult to visually recognize as Shakespearean without their names.
Yet the information available on the Internet makes them sound more Shake-
spearean than they appear. The female character Macbeth, for example, has
skills called “Walking Shadow,” “Scottish Play,” and “Non Woman-­Born”; the
female character Shakespeare has skills called “Hathaway,” “Tempest,” and

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 132 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 16:3

Fig. 8: “Plays of Sacred Drama” from Divine Gate. There are six Shakespearean
characters in the mobile game. ©GungHoOnlineEntertainment

“Shake Scene”; and Othello has skills called “Kill White,” “Death Black,” and
“Desdemona.” Monster Strike also has Shakespearean characters like Romeo,
Juliet, Othello, and Macbeth, and interestingly enough, while most of these
Shakespearean characters do not have any associations to the original works
beyond their names, “Evolved Othello” is called “Othello, the Incarnation of
Jealousy” and one of the game guide websites on “Evolved Macbeth” provides
brief information about the real name of the historical Macbeth “Mac Bethad
mac Findlaich” and about Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well (“Evolved
Macbeth”).
The Shakespearean names and references of these characters have some of
their original significance in these games, yet these Shakespearean associa-
tions lead to nowhere in the collection of unrelated small stories that unfold
within the simple narratives of these mobile games. In these games, Shake-
spearean characters, or Shakespearean names, only provide creators with
handy excuses to create composites of various visually attractive moe character
elements such as “maid,” “fairy,” “red hair,” and “zombie,” to note a few. Those
elements are utilized to recreate existing historical, mythical, or literary char-
acters and episodes that will be cute enough to attract consumers’ attention.
Additional Shakespearean references associated with those Shakespearean
characters are meant to satisfy the interests of otaku players who prefer to learn
details about each character, even though knowledge of such details might not
be useful when actually playing the games. Yet it is crucial indeed to make such

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 133

characters visually fascinating or cute enough with attractive character ele-

ments to encourage otaku to pursue their obsessive research. Just like Japanese
anime, these games are character-­oriented in that their diverse narratives de-
velop depending upon which characters players use. Shakespearean characters
in these mobile games have nothing but a Shakespearean name, but associa-
tions conjured up by their names invite players to find out those characters
possible significances in the games, and thus giving more depth to the other-
wise shallow or simple narratives. An easily recognizable Shakespearean char-
acter can become an empty but visually attractive box with a Shakespearean
name tag, for the name would suffice to awaken various associations and make
the characters cool or intriguing.

Haunted by Shakespeare?
The proliferation of Shakespearean anime and manga owes much to interac-
tive digital communities, which provide recipients of Shakespearean texts not
only with handy and comprehensive information necessary to appreciate the
texts, but with sites where they can share impressions and opinions about spe-
cific episodes and the characters who appear in them. This is also true with
Shakespearean characters in mobile games, for there are many official and
unofficial sites where players of those games can acquire or exchange informa-
tion about Shakespearean characters as well as the core game elements.
Shakespearean media texts are mostly produced around and appreciated
through character-­centered stories. As Shakespearean anime and manga be-
come more character-­centered, the presence of Shakespeare in the digitalized
popular imagination gets more and more nominal because a character in
anime and other transmedial texts functions as an empty container that can
accommodate diverse character elements with little Shakespeareness in it. In
short, the Shakespearean presence is getting more visible and easily recogniz-
able yet less substantial with few verbal references or quotations. Shakespear-
ean characters as hollow containers will continue to turn up, accommodating
various cute and pop elements in the process of transmedial repositioning
from one platform to another, and the transmedial repurposing of Shake-
speare necessarily coincides with its cutification, which is indispensable for
marketing Shakespearean media objects/texts as commercial cultural
commodities.
The phenomena of cutification and commodification of transmedial
Shakespeares in anime and video games may also be observed outside Japan, as

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 134 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 16:3

all the Shakespearean anime mentioned here are commercially available in En-
glish and illegally available on the Internet in several languages. Although the
video games are not available outside Japan, the mobile games are open to
global consumers/players via the Internet. Just as Hello Kitty, which may have
been born in London, became a popular character in Japan and around the
world, so, too, has Cute Shakespeare gone global since Shakespeare and his
plays are being cutified as transmedial objects to be widely spread across na-
tional and medial boundaries.21

notes
1. About Pokémon, see Allison.
2. This illustration was drawn for the poster and the conference bag of the interna-
tional conference “Shakespeare and Popular Media,” held at Shirayuri College, Japan, in
December 2012.
3. McVeigh illuminates the wide range of meanings of the word kawaii and the cult of
cuteness in Japan (chs. 5–6).
4. Jenkins defines “transmedia storytelling” as follows: “Transmedia storytelling rep-
resents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across
multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertain-
ment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfold-
ing of the story” (“Transmedia Storytelling” 101). On this character-­centered transference
of a story across media, which is often called “media mix” in Japan, see Steinberg.
5. Miranda’s lines are: “O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How
beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” (5.1.184–87). The
Player Queen’s are: “Now what my love is, proof hath made you know, / And as my love is
sized, my fear is so: / Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear. / Where little fears
grow great, great love grows there” (3.2.153–54).
6. Yoshino Takigawa quotes the following lines from Hamlet twice in the manga ver-
sion of Zetsuen no Tempest, (Shirodaira et al. 1: 122 and 5: 187) and in the anime version (2nd
and 18th episodes).
I lov’d Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum. (5. 1. 254–56)
In Zetsuen no Tempest (The Blast of Tempest), Hamlet and The Tempest are frequently
quoted from or mentioned in both the anime and the manga versions, as the following
passages on this work illustrate.
7. The same episode is depicted in the 37th episode of the manga version. Zetsuen no
Tempest Vol. 9 (2013).
8. This scene is transcribed and translated from Japanese by Ryuta Minami.
9. About otaku and their database culture, see Azuma and Ito.
10. Sakura-­so no Petto-­na Kanojo was first broadcast from October 2012 to March 2013
after midnight.
11. See Steinberg. A similar phenomenon, though not necessarily commercial, is dis-
cussed by Jenkins as “spreadable media” (Jenkins et al.).

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 Minami • Hello Sha-kitty-peare? 135

12. A princess disguised as a man to fight against the usurper is a very familiar charac-
ter to the fans of Japanese anime since the 1960s, as is well illustrated by “A Genealogy of
the Beautiful Fighting Girl” (Saito ch. 5).
13. Condry develops Azuma’s ideas (see esp. ch. 7).
14. Popular character elements include “maid uniform,” “violet or green hair,” “cat
ears,” “tsundere” (an adjective describing a personae who is cold or hostile to others in public
but becomes lovey dovey to a particular person in private), and so on (see Azuma, ch. 2; and
Josh).
15. “Romeo and Cinderella” is covered in several languages, including English, Viet-
namese, and Spanish.
16. Along with the red long hair of Juliet’s, the purple hair of Escalus’s and the eyepatch
of Benvolio’s are notable examples of such popular character elements.
17. Fan fiction is fiction that fans create about characters and/or settings taken from
the original work. Romantic fan fiction is one of the popular genres, in which characters
that are unlikely to love each other develop a romantic relationship. Since Romeo vs. Juliet
is a derivative work of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “Mercutio” and “Laurence” are twice
removed from the original play.
18. See Kim.
19. Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere started as a novel series in 2008 and still contin-
ues, whilst it is also translated into other media platforms such as anime (2011–12), manga
(2012–15), audio CDs (2012), video game (2013), and card game (2013–14).
20. See Galbraith for a comprehensive discussion of moé and otaku. Also see Condry
190–91.
21. About Hello Kitty’s biography, see “Hello Kitty, My Melody, Badtz-­Maru and
other Sanrio Characters.”

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