Half a Century of Japanese Theater I: 1990s: Part 1

Half a Century of Japanese Theater is a series of translated Japanese plays that begins from the contemporary theater scene of the 1990s and moves back through the decades of modern Japanese theater to the mid-twentieth century.The threefold aim of the Japan Playwrights Association in publishing this series is to offer performable English translations of modern Japanese plays, to encourage the production of such plays by foreign theatrical troupes and to extend possibilities for further international exchange in theater.

The first volume, Japanese Theater of the 1990s, Part 1, treats six major playwrights, five men and one woman. Their works range from comedies to accounts of historical figures like Korean activist An Chung-gun and Nobel physics prize winner Tomonaga Shinichiro. Diverse as these plays are, they represent the social concerns and artistic interests of the dramatists of this period.

Contents: Citizens of Seoul (Hirata Oriza), Epitaph for the Whales (Sakate Yoji), Time's Storeroom (Nagai Ai), Fireflies (Suzue Toshiro), Tokyo Atomic Klub (Makino Nozomi), Ice Blossoms (Kaneshita Tatsuo).

• Japan Playwrights Association, Editor