Never has Ophelia looked so playful. In Hisae Imai’s 1960 Ophelia, the character blooms not as Hamlet’s betrothed but as a Japanese girl, tinted blue, patiently stuffing leaves into her mouth. Her hair, curling in the wind, looks alive. Her nails are bejeweled. “Poor Ophelia,” the King laments in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia, having gone mad, drowns in a brook, “divided from herself and her fair judgment.” In Imai’s visual renderings, this division is not within Ophelia but in how we might interpret her face and expression. Is that two dabs of glitter on her cheek, or a tear? Are we interrupting the most unthinkable time in a life—the necessary solitude of the seconds before death?
In Imai’s recasting, we do not see Ophelia’s long hair submerged into a brook—a moment of incapacity made exquisite in Sir John Everett Millais’s 1851–52 painting of the same scene. Instead, shorn and ear-length, the hair and the petals seem to be simultaneously part of her. Her expression is opaque—partly because the image is in negative—and a form
