Translating Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See Into Japanese

Actor Marina Kondo grew up singing in both Japanese and English. In fact, growing up in Michigan, the daughter of Japanese immigrants (her father worked for Mitsubishi), a way for Kondo to stay in touch with her Japanese heritage was through singing in Japanese at public events—whether it was a local rodeo or a Japanese festival in Brazil. “Time and time again, I would come into my identity by performing Japanese music and learning about Japanese music—what makes Japanese songs what it is,” she explains.

Which is why when director Emilio Ramos and music director Adam Rothenberg asked her if she would help translate part of Michael John LaChiusa’s 2005 musical See What I Wanna See into Japanese, and star in the show too—Kondo didn’t hesitate to say yes. “It's definitely a scary task, but I didn't even think about it. I just was like, this will be a fun challenge for me,” explains Kondo, who plays three roles in the show: Kesa, the Wife, and the Actress.

This new Off-Broadway revival of See What I Wanna See is currently running through September 29 at Out of the Box Theatrics' 154 Christopher Street. Ramos has always loved LaChiusa’s work, especially See What I Wanna See, which he calls “this strange chamber piece.” It was first performed Off-Broadway in 2005, starring a post-Wicked Idina Menzel, Marc Kudish, and Mary Testa. It’s based on three short stories from Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The first and second act opens up with a scene based on “Kesa and Morito,” where two Japanese lovers decide to kill each other. The first act is based on “In a Grove” (which was also the basis for the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon) where a murder in Central Park is told from the point of view of four people (including the man who dies). The second act is based on “The Dragon” where, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a priest tricks all of NYC into believing a miracle will happen.

These three seemingly disparate stories are held together in the show by a common theme: the malleability of truth, and how different people can have entirely different viewpoints of the same event.

“Akutagawa wrote revealing, compassionate, and sometimes quite comic stories about what we call the ‘human condition,’” LaChiusa tells Playbill over email about what drew him to those stories. “‘In a Grove’ is inventive in its storytelling (the same, singular event told from four different points of view). That inspired me. The structure of the short story intrigued me musically––it’s like a fugue with variations. And ‘The Dragon’ is a deeply moving moral tale of the loss of faith that really touched me with its combination of humor and pathos.”

Emilio Ramos and company of *See What I Wanna See* Rebecca J. Michelson

When Ramos set out to revive See What I Wanna See, he wanted to bring the musical closer to its source material. LaChiusa did not identify a race for any of the characters (though Menzel and Kudish did wear kimonos in the original production). But despite it being based on Japanese stories, a production with mostly Asian actors had not been done before in New York. So, Ramos thought, what if he did a production with an all-Asian cast?

“It has a lot of Eastern musical motifs, and it's obviously from this amazing [Japanese] source material,” explains Ramos. “But the first cast was entirely white. None of the characters were explicitly Asian. They're all American. And so, it just felt like a cool experiment.”

It wasn’t just casting. Kondo’s work on translating the opening song of the show, “Kesa,” into Japanese was also integral to bringing the show closer to its source material. That opening song is sung from the point of view of a married woman who decides to kill her lover. A challenge for Kondo was that Japanese songs do not contain rhymes or alliteration. The language is also less frank; it takes more time to say something in Japanese than in English. Translating musicals to Japanese isn’t new—after all, there is a thriving musical theatre industry in Japan (especially for translated Broadway musicals).

“I listened to Japanese Wicked, and it just never says enough of what actually is said in the English language,” explains Kondo. “It just takes so many more [musical] notes to say one word in Japanese than it does in English…A lot of the hard-hitting words that come out in musical theatre, it just doesn't come out that way, because culturally, we just don't speak in that way. We don't even have swear words. We don't have a word for sex—it's about not saying the exact thing that you mean.”

For her translation, Kondo was inspired by a Meiji-era genre of Japanese music called Enka, which described great emotions and turmoil with metaphors of landscapes and seasons. So, instead of an exact replica of LaChiusa’s lyrics, Kondo has created a translation that is its own form of poetry. For instance, LaChiusa’s lyrics, “I watch myself outside myself/Sleep and breathe and wake and sigh/Laugh and kiss and fuck and lie,” has become, literally translated from the performed Japanese, “From my body I fly/Rise with the sun, I’m jolted awake/A breath, a cry, a scream.”

But do not worry musical theatre fans. The song “Morito,” which opens Act II of See What I Wanna See, is from the point of view of Kesa’s lover, and the same lyrics are sung in English. Ramos sees this device, of two lovers speaking in different languages with different perspectives on the same event, as an enhancement of LaChiusa’s original intention. Says Ramos: “That concept of—there's his perspective, and there's her perspective, and then there's the truth, and then there's the thing that you see and that you take away for yourself. I'm very proud of that.”

Adds LaChiusa: “It’s a thrilling twist when, in Morito, Kesa’s lyric is virtually repeated (in English) by her lover. I wish I had thought of doing that when I wrote the show!”

Ramos also took the theme of multiple perspectives literally—the actors in the show also have a puppet doppelgänger. And those puppets are created through Japanese bunraku (for Act 1) and Indonesian wayang kulit (for Act 2)—Tom Lee is the show’s puppet designer. “I was just thinking, I'd love to honor theatre practices from the [Asian] continent,” explains Ramos. “We're going to be doing an American musical. We will be doing all the things that an American musical does. But what are the things we can introduce that are from the continent that could be in conversation with this?”

Kelvin Moon Loh, Zachary Noah Piser, Sam Simahk, and Marina Kondo in *See What I Wanna See* Thomas Brunot

Aside from the translation, this version of See What I Wanna See didn’t make any changes to the text. Instead—just through casting, design, and translation—LaChiusa says this new production is “fresh and provocative” and “underlines the source of this show: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the brilliant Japanese writer who espoused the idea that a mingling of Japanese and Western cultures would allow for greater universality in literature.”

Universal, yes, that audiences across an ocean can find resonance in Japanese stories that were first written over 100 years ago. And what those stories give this particular musical is the opportunity for anyone from any background to, well, see what they wanna see from it. For Ramos, as the one who conceptualized this new production, what he sees is very particular.

“When I went back and combed through it, it does feel like, if [this musical] were a person, or if it could self identify, it might identify as Asian American or as mixed,” he says. “Because as a mixed-race person—my mother's white, and my dad is from the Philippines—the thing that really resonated from the text to me was having to walk through life in a certain ambiguity, without a certain fixed viewpoint. Having to hold two cultures is, essentially, like having to hold two truths. And so, I guess, all I've really aspired to do by placing these [Asian American] actors within this text is to sort of illuminate that experience.”