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JAPAN: A Japanese director's world debut

Gen Fujimoto

May 26, 2010

By DAN GRUNEBAUM

TOKYO — Haruki Murakami’s books top bestseller lists worldwide, and the filmmaker Takeshi Kitano is a regular hit at Cannes. But contemporary Japanese theater remains by and large terra incognita.

Abroad, Japanese theater directors are mainly known in the form of Amon Miyamoto’s Broadway hits and Yukio Ninagawa’s kabuki Shakespeare productions. Performances of new Japanese theater are rare, leaving a gaping hole in the world’s understanding of the country’s performing arts scene.

That is beginning to change with the translation into English and other languages of recent works by the theater company Chelfitsch and the playwright and director Shu Matsui. Festival/Tokyo, Japan’s leading performing arts showcase, regards Mr. Matsui as one of the country’s most important young directors, and translated his disturbing, surrealistic “Ano Hito no Sekai” (That Man’s World) for its fall 2009 season.

Via his Sample company’s eye-catching, multilevel staging, the play follows the story of a directionless loner in rural Japan who searches for meaning in anarchic, bestial ceremonies. But the larger theme is the intolerance lurking behind the polite facade of Japanese society.

“The story is about people whose prejudices prevent them from interacting,” the soft-spoken Mr. Matsui said in a recent interview in the trendy Shibuya district. “I wanted foreigners to see the play because it deals with bigotry. Living in homogeneous Japan there aren’t many chances to confront one’s prejudices, so they remain hidden.”

Key to “Ano Hito no Sekai” was the way that the characters acted mechanically and didn’t even attempt to scale walls of mutual noncomprehension. This grew out of Mr. Matsui’s view of Japan as a zombie nation, something that led Festival/Tokyo to describe him as portraying “the emptiness of modern Japan.”

“I’m not quite sure how they arrived at that catch-copy,” Mr. Matsui said, laughing. “For me, it’s not so much a question of ‘emptiness.’ I prefer the image of a zombie. Why? Because zombies represent the future of mankind: they have no soul, no interior, no emotions. They wander about with no purpose, they respond to stimuli — for example if there is an escalator at a shopping center they’ll go up and down — but that’s all they do. Their form to me somehow represents what humans are heading toward.”

For his latest work at the Tokyo Performing Arts Market this spring, Mr. Matsui was asked by a local theater in the western Japanese island of Kyushu to create a play based on Takiji Kobayashi’s landmark Japanese Marxist novel “Kanikosen” (The Crab Ship), about exploited crab cannery workers. The 1929 book has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in Japan amid the financial crisis and hardships facing the nation’s young.

The result was “Hakobune” (Ark), which depicts dead-end, part-time workers performing meaningless tasks at an anonymous factory. They suffer under the hand of an overseer, but midway roles are suddenly reversed and he becomes an underling. Relentlessly cheery J-pop music and ubiquitous cellphones inject notes of everyday Japanese reality into an absurdist plot in which even death is a matter of little import.

It wasn’t long ago that Mr. Matsui himself labored on a conveyor belt as a struggling actor. Reflecting his experience, the workers of “Hakobune” are the passive Japanese freeta — those unable to land full-time jobs — of the moment rather than the Marxist rebels of “Kanikosen.”

“‘Kanikosen’ has a revolutionary flavor that I thought wouldn’t resonate,” he said. “People don’t join organized labor these days and before it gets to that point they lose their jobs to outsourcing anyway, so I depicted a softer workplace — even if the workers are still throwaway.”

The irony of Mr. Matsui’s reference to Noah’s Ark in the title is that his characters are not in fact irreplaceable bearers of their species’ gene pool, but disposable ciphers.

“Rather than the people, it’s the objects on stage that are the main players,” he explained. “The characters are like holographs, like something you might see at Disneyland’s haunted mansion. They serve only to explain the situation — like artifacts of a mistaken history.”

The son of a lawyer and radio announcer, Mr. Matsui spent an unremarkable childhood and only ended up in theater when he followed a girl he had a crush on into his high school drama club. There he was bitten by the theater bug, and spent his 20s as a professional actor and odd-job worker before his 2004 breakout “Tsuka” (Passage) was given the New Face Award by the Japan Playwrights Association.

“I’d been an actor for 13 years, but didn’t start to think about writing my own plays until I was past 30,” said Mr. Matsui, who is 37. “I wanted to create a world that I found compelling, and to see if it compelled others. I wondered if others shared my anxieties. It surprised me when people related to my work, especially since the first one about a family that is taken over by outsiders was pretty disturbing.”

Bestiality and rape appear in Mr. Matsui’s work, but the violence serves a cautionary purpose. He cites the intense interest among his generation in the “otaku murderer,” Tsutomu Miyazaki, who between 1988 and 1989 mutilated and killed four young girls, molesting and cannibalizing their corpses.

“He said before his execution that he was told to do so by someone in his head, and that it was not his fault,” Mr. Matsui recalled. “Ever since then I’ve been fascinated by his comments. His thinking is different from thinking up until now. He has no interior life, no feelings. We want him to express remorse and show his feelings — we think this is part of being human — but maybe that’s not the case, and maybe we are all heading in his direction.”

For his next project, which will have its debut in the autumn, Mr. Matsui has been commissioned to create a new piece for Yukio Ninagawa’s Saitama Gold Theatre, which consists entirely of elderly amateur actors. He said it would inevitably deal directly with the issue of Japan’s aging society.

“Images of the elderly in Japan tend to split into extremely negative depictions of the senile and terminally ill or idealistic depictions of sprightly old folks,” he said. “We’re now beginning to face the problem of our aging society, so I want to confront these extremes. I want to offer an everyday tragedy that treats old age as just another period of life in a way that is emotionally liberating — not as heaven or hell, which I think is weird and unhealthy.”

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