The Receptive Culture of the Reader and the Peculiarities of the Characters’ Communication in K. Mitani’s Play “University of Laughs”

For the first time in Russian literary criticism, the article attempts to analyze the dramatic text of the modern Japanese author K. Mitani – “ University of Laughs” (1996). The genre of the play is proposed to be attributed as a comic modification of the socalled play-dispute, in connection with which the specificity of the communicative behavior of the actors, referred to in the paratext as the Author and the Censor, is of particular research interest. The main plot of the work is built around the issue of acceptance for the production of the comedy “Hamlet and Juliet”, created by one of the characters, the discussion of which stretches for seven days. As it turns out in the process of stage communication, the censor who recently found himself in this position is an amateur in the world of literature and theater (for whom even Shakespeare himself turns out to be unknown). It is noted that the vast majority of the official’s remarks belong to the normative-rhetorical discourse formation, however, in a number of significant exceptions, he approaches communication in the form of a “dialogue of consent”. The article attempts to reconstruct the path of evolution of the reader’s culture and receptive behavior of the hero named Sakisaki, based on the perception of a literary text implicitly embedded in his behavior and manifested explicitly in his speech, as well as author’s comments in the paratext. The compositional-speech form of the “play within the play” turns out to be a kind of indicator marking the different understanding of the structure of the artistic world by the actors. The communication of the censor with the comedian Tsubaki has a beneficial effect on the growth of the receptive reading culture of the first of them, in connection with which the article draws conclusions about the beginning of the inner transformation of the character and his most effective formation as an “exemplary” reader.