Shun-kin is his everything - a viciously demanding mistress, harsh music master, sadistic lover and countless other things. He is her everything as well. When she is mysteriously disfigured, he blinds himself, so that he will never see the ruin of her beauty and she will be certain of that. Finally, they lie buried close together in a neglected cemetery visited by a narrator, with an ugly modern industrial city as a backdrop. But to say that is to reveal little about the play.

It has to do with beauty, cruelty, ritual, hierarchy, dependency, obsession and spirituality, with the extremes of sexuality, sadism, narcissism and luxury - even to the use of nightingale droppings as exfoliants for Shun-kin's alabaster skin. Shocking though some of these themes are, they are handled with the intense delicacy and heroic restraint that Westerners love in Japanese art. The play deals with the tensions between Japan past and Japan present, between Japan and the West, between the illumination of the light bulb and the shadows full of obscured meanings of the era of candlelight. It touches on the ambiguities of storytelling and the loneliness of the recording studio.

It even deals with moments of high spiritual tranquillity in the traditional Japanese lavatory, though that might be lost on anyone who had not read the programme notes. Ultimately, the production is very beautiful. Complicite has always devised extremely physical theatre and here, drawing heavily on the traditions of Japan, the physical rituals of Japanese life are mesmerising, as is the constant music and occasional singing. With the dark sets, troubling puppets and formal movements, this is the world of an alien but familiar fairy story.

Why are there several narrators? Why are there different versions of the story? Why does Shun-kin herself begin as a masked puppet and then much later become a naked living woman? There are explanations, but they are elusive-allusive. The point is that Shun-kin is not schematic. It has no tricksy literary or theatrical devices that can be interpreted literally. The story is unfolded with so many different layers of suggestion and emotion that it is impossible to enumerate them. Many are expressed only physically or musically.