Riku Onda’s An Incident in the Courtyard (2006) is a contemporary Japanese hybrid-genre novel partly based on William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though the novel has a complex narrative structure, it mainly deals with three actresses in their competition for the role of Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who are involved in the death of its director, Kamiya. Through their struggle to express themselves and a metafictional intervention of a Puck-like figure, Tomoe, with them, the work explores how a relatively minor character in the Bard’s comedy can reflect gender problems seen in the early-modern as well as the contemporary world.
Tomoe is a commentator of an unfinished draught of a playwright, Akira (the three actresses are characters in his play). She is associated with the half-legendary Japanese Amazonian warrior, Tomoe Gozen, which adds a new twist to the shadow of the Amazonian subjugation to the marriage institution in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tomoe is an Amazon, but she is not a Hippolyta but a Puck in Onda’s work. As a cross-bordering trickster, she checks her male friend’s manuscript which attributes the cause of the murder to the three actresses’ stereotypically female passions, and helps the Helenas speak out that they perform what (male) audience would like them to do ? that they are creature of the male discourse.
The change of the key number 4 (a symbol of concord and of marriage) in the original play to two odd numbers, 3 and 1, in the novel also contributes to undermine the heterosexual marriage imperatives which critics traditionally have connected with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, recent queer studies argue that heterosexual marriage in the play is achieved not by rectification but by distortion, highlighting its impossibility. Onda’s novel also seeks an alternative ending other than heterosexual matrimony. Akira’s play remains unfinished so that Tomoe speaks the epilogue of this open-ended work, demonstrating that a story in which a newly-married husband is killed can end happily without any excuse, and the attempt is not a refutation of the original, but an approval of the play’s potential subversion of the patriarchal marriage institution. An Incident in the Courtyard shows us, as all good adaptations do, how we can read A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the contemporary point of view.