QUEENSLAND, Australia -- Each August, ghosts who have no descendants pour through the Gates of Hell into the streets of cities and villages of Southeast Asia. During the full moon, the most dangerous time of the year, the earth teems with hordes of these creatures, lusting for ribald entertainment and free food.

Hoping not only to satisfy their marauding spectral visitors -- in every way "the guests from hell" -- but also to ensure their own safety for another year, local Chinese communities annually band together to present elaborate street entertainment and banquets.

A new Australian chamber opera based on these Chinese traditions is making its Asian debut at Saitama Arts Foundation Nov. 2-4. Created by a composer of Brunei-Chinese heritage, a designer of Polish lineage, a director of Czech ancestry and performed by a mix of Australians from both European and Asian backgrounds, "Yue Ling Jie (Moon Spirit Feasting)" could almost be a metaphor for contemporary multicultural Australia.

Since it premiered at the Adelaide Festival in March 2000, this "Chinese Ritual Street Opera in Seven Parts" has had well-received runs in Melbourne, Berlin and Zurich. In Saitaima, it will be performed by three singers and nine musicians from the Australian music collective Elision. Formed in Melbourne in 1986 but now based in Brisbane, Elision is regarded as the foremost exponent of contemporary concert music in Australia.

Much of the opera's inspiration is drawn from the Hungry Ghost Festival, which composer Liza Lim and librettist Beth Yahp witnessed firsthand in Penang several years ago. Customarily, street shrines are erected to appease the hungry ghosts, who are entertained by nervous local people with movies, ad-hoc puppet shows and Cantonese opera. Cardboard televisions, McLuhan-esque symbols of mass commercial culture, torched to the blaring accompaniment of street horns and electric guitars, compete with traditional instruments and screaming actors dressed in dazzling costumes.

This event precedes another traditional Chinese festival, that of the Autumn Moon, which honors the Moon Goddess, Chang-O. Although the story varies, legend has it that the Archer, Hou Yi, shot down nine unruly suns and as a reward, the gods gave him the Herb of Immortality. His wife Chang-O stole it for herself and was pursued all the way to the moon.

In the various ways that these legends have been told and enacted in different parts of the world, Lim sees a reflection of the Chinese diaspora. "People are re-activating and maintaining a tradition that is now more alive in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan than in mainland China," she says. "The vitality we love is in the transformations." She maintains that such stories can be understood as "projections of the soul of a society in terms of symbolic interactions between themselves and cosmic forces."

In Lim's work, the celestial story of the Moon Goddess is told from several angles. "Chang-O is a woman transformed into a goddess," Lim explains. "She is also a figure of psychic nightmare and a wish-granting heavenly creature, associated with fertility myths."

The libretto, written by fellow immigrant Yahp, is a linguistic Babel, relayed in performance by local-language surtitles projected above the stage. It's mostly in English, but parts are in Mandarin and Cantonese, and others in colloquial Malaysian-English.

The ritual nature of the work is laid out in seven sections, a series of "tools" that enable the audience to access the story at different levels -- as myth, comedy, symbol or contemporary allegory.

Both Lim and her husband, Daryl Buckley, artistic director of Elision, believe that audiences in Saitama will easily identify with the themes of "Moon Spirit Feasting."

"Asian audiences will resonate to the element of ritual," Buckley explains.

"The first sight is an elaborate banquet table laid out for the spirits, whom we never actually see. Whereas Western audiences find this totally mystifying, Asian audiences will instantly recognize this as symbolizing offerings to dead ancestors."

Lim takes that notion a step further. "Asian audiences will understand the need for rituals to exorcise the ghosts and return them to the spirit world," she says. "They will also recognize such figures as the Moon Goddess and Monkey King, archetypal creatures that appear in the childhood stories of so many Asian cultures."

Japanese audiences will probably appreciate the opera's blurring of Eastern and Western traditions, and its fusion of modern and ancient rituals. Alongside strong hints of kabuki in Michael Kantor's colorful production, there are routines that suggest beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals sharing the stage with elements of contemporary Japanese anime.

The costumes and sets by the Polish-Australian designer Dorotka Sapinska graft Dali-esque Surrealism onto the street shenanigans of Penang. A lurid but hilarious sex scene originates in a Tokyo strip bar via the declasse Australian cult movie, "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." The figure of the Queen Mother of the West, normally a revered "untouchable" demi-deity in many cultures, is attired in a somewhat pornographic transparent plastic costume that could well have been a cheongsam worn by one of the partygoers from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Other costumes peel away to reveal several layers underneath. Overhead, flashing lotus lights, a kitschy mirror ball, glaring neon lights and monstrous joss sticks complete the scene of the Banquet from Hell.

At the first show in Adelaide, "Moon Spirit Feasting" was performed on a stage floating on the River Torrens. For the Saitama production, a small shrine is being built outside the theater. After all, Buckley points out, "How do you perform for the spirits in a formal theater?"

The inspiration for Elision's visit to Saitama came from both sides. In 1997, Buckley was part of a cultural delegation from Australia exploring ways to develop cultural links with Southeast Asia. He sensed that Australia's largely successful experience in developing a multicultural society could be relevant in Japan, and that Elision's theater pieces were a kind of symbolic representation of this. Two years later, Makoto Moroi, president of the Saitama Arts Foundation, saw an Elision concert at the Sydney Opera House. Having already heard of Lim and her extraordinary theater works, Moroi invited the company to Saitama after seeing Elision.

In preparation, a technician from Saitama was sent to observe the Adelaide premiere of "Moon Spirit Feasting" in 2000. During a visit to Japan the following year, Buckley and theater director Michael Kantor inspected the Saitama Arts Theater and not long after their return to Australia, a 4-square-meter container with 5 tons of sets, props and costumes was shipped from Hamburg.

In all, it has taken over three years and several international trips to bring this Saitama presentation from Australia through Europe and to Japan. Twenty-one people are being brought over, including Yan Jiemin, a "superstar" erhu player from Beijing, and koto player Satsuki Odamura, who has similar status in her home-base of Sydney. Along with seven other musicians -- flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, cello and two percussionists -- they sit onstage dressed in resplendent golden costumes, carefully following cues from the young Australian conductor Simon Hewett.

Buckley and Lim see their hybrid work as reflecting "the total flux" animating an evolving Australian identity, notions that concern Japanese culture as well.

"Our work celebrates the cultural impurity of Southeast Asia," Lim explains. "We are all migrants these days. Who can speak for whom, and about what?"

"Uncertainty is more interesting than the ability to provide certainty," Buckley says. "Although it seems to us that Japan is still largely monocultural, the Japanese are also curious about diversity and cultural hybridity. Australians are addressing similar questions, creating an exciting hybrid culture fashioned from the many migrant traditions of contemporary Australia."