ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare has provided many media products with an inexhaustible repertoire of plots and characters to be appropriated or utilized and circulated in variegated forms in Japan. One can easily find Shakespeare-inspired or -related episodes in manga, anime, and video/mobile games. This chapter offers an overview of how Shakespeare, in variegated forms, permeates the contemporary mediascapes of Japan, where manga, anime, and video/mobile games occupy a significant place in Japanese culture as popular forms of entertainment in everyday life. In the 1970s and after, Shakespeare was mostly adapted or recreated by artists of shojo manga. Shojo manga recreated Shakespearean plays from female characters’ perspectives according to its own conventions. Shakespeare is used in anime called Psycho-Pass in a different way. One of the most globally famous Japanese video game series is the role-playing video game Final Fantasy franchise. Just as Final Fantasy, a Japanese media franchise, has “few traces of [its] cultural origins,” many Japanese Shakespearean media objects are culturally “odorless”.
