One of Japan's leading playwrights and stage directors, Hirata Oriza (b. 1962) won the 2018 Tsuruya Nanboku Prize for his stage adaptation of Takahashi Gen ichiro's (b. 1951) novel The Rise and Fall ...of Japanese Literature. In August 2019, Hirata gave a public lecture at the downtown Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University that, in touching on this play, discussed the social and political forces behind Japan's creation of modern literature, theatre, and music since the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Hirata's talk was a kid-gloved punch at reactionary forces in Japan today that are attempting to quash freedom of expression. NOTE: In this review I follow the traditional order for Japanese names: family name first, followed by personal name.
This article reviews the forty-year career of visionary Japanese director Matsumoto Yukichi and his theatre company Ishinha, which disbanded soon after the director's death in 2016. One of the most ...innovative companies in Japanese performing arts in the past generation, the spectacular scale of Ishinha's productions and the rap-like syncopated beat of their choral chanting was unique among Japanese productions, bearing passing resemblance to the work of other theatre artists like Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor, but inspired by the streets, factories, and working people of Matsumoto's adopted home, Osaka.
This anthology is the first to survey the full range of modern Japanese drama and make available Japan's best and most representative twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century works in one volume. It ...opens with a comprehensive introduction to Meiji-period drama and follows with six chronological sections: "The Age of Taisho Drama"; The Tsukiji Little Theater and Its Aftermath"; "Wartime and Postwar Drama"; "The 1960s and Underground Theater"; "The 1980s and Beyond"; and "Popular Theater," providing a complete history of modern Japanese theater for students, scholars, instructors, and dramatists. The collection features a mix of original and previously published translations of works, among them plays by such writers as Masamune Hakucho (The Couple Next Door), Enchi Fumiko (Restless Night in Late Spring), Morimoto Kaoru (A Woman's Life), Abe Kobo (The Man Who Turned into a Stick), Kara Juro (Two Women), Terayama Shuji (Poison Boy), Noda Hideki (Poems for Sale), and Mishima Yukio (The Sardine Seller's Net of Love). Leading translators include Donald Keene, J. Thomas Rimer, M. Cody Poulton, John K. Gillespie, Mari Boyd, and Brian Powell. Each section features an introduction to the developments and character of the period, notes on the plays' productions, and photographs of their stage performances. The volume complements any study of modern Japanese literature and modern drama in China, Korea, or other Asian or contemporary Western nations.
Hirata Oriza's Tokyo Notes, which has had some forty productions since it won the thirty-ninth Kishida Kunio Award, Japan's highest prize for new drama, in 1995, toured North America in the fall of ...2000. In its focus on the understated and ordinary, the play is an exemplary work of the shizuka na engeki (quiet theatre) movement prevalent in Japan in the past decade. In his introduction, translator M. Cody Poulton argues that while Hirata's theatre recalls the naturalism of early-twentieth-century shingeki (new theatre), the playwright's aversion to dramatic convention and overt expressions of emotion or ideological messages, as well as his use of colloquial Japanese, make him a significant voice in contemporary Japanese theatre. M. Cody Poulton teaches Japanese theatre and literature at the University of Victoria in Canada. He is the author of Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001) and translator of three kabuki plays for the series Kabuki Plays On Stage edited by James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, which is being published by the University of Hawai'i Press.
