From Cultural Mobility to Cultural Misunderstanding

This chapter examines Akio Miyazawa’s Motorcycle Don Quixote, the Japanese contribution to the Cardenio Project in which 12 dramatists all over the world wrote their own versions of Cardenio, Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee’s collaborative work inspired by a lost Shakespeare play and episodes in Cervantes’ Don Quixote to explore how cultural mobility works in the case of Shakespeare. The chapter demonstrates how Miyazawa’s transformation of the play to fit Japanese mores was incomprehensible to the non-Japanese/Americans. It theorises how this inaccessibility of some Asian adaptations to global translation may produce so-called cultural misunderstandings as mobility in a globalised world.