SHAKESPEARE AND THE JAPANESE STAGE, edited by Takashi Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring. Cambridge University Press, 1998, 357 pp., 45 British Pounds.

More than 50 years ago I went to my first Japanese staging of Shakespeare. It was "Hamlet," in Tokyo, and what I remember best is that when the prince of Denmark and his court lay sprawled on the boards, Puck tiptoed in and, after looking about, delivered his speech about what fools these mortals be.

I now know, thanks to Ryuta Minami's fine chronological table of Shakespeare productions in Japan, 1866-1994, which concludes the present volume, that this occurred in December 1947 and that the perpetrators were members of the Tokyo Seinen Gekijo.

At the time, I did not consider Puck's intrusion to be creative or witty or postmodern or any of the things that would be expected of me in 1999. I simply wondered why. Now, of course, I have lived long enough in Japan to know why. The integrity of the foreign import, omelet or Hamlet, is not to be observed. It is to be rendered into something else, and there are reasons for this.