Half a Century of Japanese Theater VII: 1960s: Part 2

The seventh volume in this series treats the major works of six award-winning counterculture playwrights of the 1960s. Miyamoto Ken’s Meiji Coffin is a biographical play about the Christian socialist Tanaka Shōzō and his involvement in the Ashio copper mine pollution problem of the early Meiji period. Fukuda Yoshiyuki’s Oppekepe is a fictionalized treatment of Kawakami Otojirō’s shinpa theater company that performed sōshi plays, a New Wave theater form that arose in the early modernization period of Japan. Comedy Duo in Hibernation by Akihama Satoshi is a delightful absurdist piece about two family members stuck together in the snow. Akimoto Matsuyo’s Our Lady of the Scabs depicts how a cult captures the hearts of its naive followers while ignoring or exploiting the truly devout. Shimizu Kunio’s Such a Serious Frivolity uses the image of a queue to illustrate the docility of citizens and the defiance of youth. At Play with a Lion by Yamazaki Mazakazu treats the complex relations between the seventeenth-century ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the consummate tea artist Sen no Rikyū.

• Japan Playwrights Association, Editor