The secret life of Japan's homely hermits - Arts - Entertainment - smh.com.au. New York theater review - Brook Stowe. Imagining The Nation. Artist Interview: Yoji Sakate | Performing Arts Network Japan. Review JUST BELOW THE ROOF OF THE SKY—Yoji Sakate’s The Attic→“Play of the Month” by Roger Pulvers In a moving passage the young girl who has locked herself up in her own personal attic speaks of Anne Frank. The young girl, presumably living in present-day Japan, can choose to do what she likes with her life, unlike Anne Frank.
And yet she envies Anne Frank’s freedom. She asks herself, and us in the process, what freedom is. It is in scenes like this that “The Attic” soars. It becomes a vehicle for introspection that we all ride in. The space itself is an ingenious device. This word, hikikomori, is pivotal to the play. Sakate’s manipulation of the space through the use of sound and light is brilliantly inventive. The cast’s physical and vocal work is equally brilliant. Sakate reaches far out of Japan with this play. He combines the wacky with the arch-serious, the mundane with the lyrical: in one of two beautiful monologues we are told that “the dream just continues on…it never ends….” Theatre Communications Group - Shinsai. Artist Interview: Ai Nagai | Performing Arts Network Japan. Essay The Woman Who Wants Others to Sit Up and Take Notice by Roger Pulvers When talking about their culture, the Japanese tend to think in terms of generations.
Of course, they are not unique in this. In America, to take one country, there was the Lost Generation. Then, some three decades later, came the Beat Generation. But in Japan, the demarcation lines are stronger, as if it is almost impossible for someone to cross over and be a part of a generation into which he or she has not been born. Writers are defined by the generation they “belong” to. Modern theatre, or Shingeki, was revived after the war essentially in the prewar mold.
The 1960s saw the emergence of the first real reaction against Shingeki in Japan. The playwrights and directors who formed what became the mainstream of 1960s Japanese theatre—referred to as either the Little Theatre Movement or Angura (for “underground”)—reacted against Shingeki’s perceived orthodoxy of acting style and naturalistic structure.