A rich, spoilt musician who happens to be blind viciously beats the boy servant she’ll one day take as her lover. And does he complain? No, Sasuke helps and helps, gives and gives, and only when he’s made an extreme sacrifice, one whose horror I can’t reveal, does Shun-kin seem even slightly grateful.

And does he resent her unending abuse, her contemptuous declaration that he’s just a “physiological necessity”? Does he protest when she gives away the children they secretly have together? No,no and no. If she’d hung, drawn and quartered him, his dying moan would be a thank you.

This is the second time that actors from the Setogaya Theatre in Tokyo have come to the Barbican under Simon McBurney’s direction and the auspices of his Complicite company; and their offering couldn’t be more different. The Elephant Vanishes showed the modern city in all its disorienting, ennui-generating oddity. Shun-kin, which is based on a story written in 1933 by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, plunges us into a 19th-century world so murky, so shadowy, that a candle, a lamp, the dim blue rays that fall from the flies, seem almost garish.

That fits a story whose inscrutability is evident from the moment a frail, wispy man dodders on to a nearly bare stage. He’s Sasuke in old age, and he crouches on the floor throughout the evening, sharing the odd besotted memory of the woman he still calls Madam or, since she taught him the stringed instrument called the samisen, even Master. But there are other narrators, including Tanizaki himself and a modern actress who has come to a radio station to record his story. And this medley of voices is purposeful, suggesting there can be many views of the weird symbiosis at the play’s centre.

Sheer sado-masochism? An example of love and self-sacrifice that a monk is quoted as calling transcendental? A parody of hierarchy and servitude as it once was and still can be? There’s evidence for all that, as well as for my suspicion that Tanizaki’s cool, detached story has a political dimension. Anyway, it put me in mind of those Japanese soldiers so devoted to their god-emperor that they remained on alert in the jungle decades after war had ended. Altogether, it’s a fascinatingly ambiguous piece.

Finely staged by McBurney, too, and not just because of the Complicite-style effects: poles for swaying trees, paper for birds, and so on. Shun-kin herself begins as a puppet with a shrill, brattish voice, even has voracious sex with Sasuke in that guise, and then morphs into an actress with an almost more mask-like face. That’s a magical transformation but it raises a key question. Are people like her fully human?

Box office: 020-7638 8891, to Feb 21

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