Nippon Wars and Other Plays Takeshi Kawamura

Book: Nippon Wars and Other Plays Takeshi Kawamura
Edited by: Peter Eckersall
Published by: Seagull Books, 2011

Nippon Wars and Other Plays provides a glimpse into 30 years of the Japanese theatre scene, as seen through the works of Japanese theatre artist Takeshi Kawamura’s important plays. The book is edited by Peter Eckersall who also writes an introductory essay examining Kawamura’s plays and his involvement from production group Daisan Erotica to the forming of his own TFactory. The plays are translated by various translators including; Shoichiro Kawai, Leon Ingulsrud, Sara Jensen, Aya Ogawa and Peter Eckersall, the selected plays include – Nippon Wars, The Lost Babylon, Hamletclone, Aoi, (based on the Noh play Aoi no ue), Komachi, and The White House in the Hills of Argos.

“In other words, Kawamura explores the ways in which things are both remembered and forgotten socially, politically, and culturally. Like the cascading litany of past existence of the fallen in his play Hamuretto Kiron (Hamletclone, 2000)-where actors recite “I was Yukio Mishima”, “I was Pol Pot”, “I was sarin gas” as they are shot and reanimated- or the cyborg warrior’s memory implants in Nippon Wwozu (Nippon Wars, 1984), memory in Kawamura’s plays becomes both an accurate and inaccurate means of fixing patterns in society and of showing how history is constructed as an expression of power.” (pg xi)