Where to Start: Your First 5 Japanese Plays to Read

Introduction

You have heard about Japanese theater. Perhaps you have read about Kishida Prize winners in these pages, or encountered the name of a Japanese playwright in a festival program, or simply felt curious about a theatrical tradition that stretches back centuries and is still producing new work. You want to explore -- but where do you begin?

This guide recommends five starting points in Japanese drama, all available to English readers, with context to help you get the most out of each.

These recommendations are chosen for their complementarity. Together, they cover different periods, styles, themes, and approaches, giving you a foundation from which to explore further in whatever direction interests you most.

1. Tokyo Notes (東京ノート) by Oriza Hirata (1994)

Why Start Here

Tokyo Notes is a natural gateway to contemporary Japanese theater. First performed by Hirata's company Seinendan in 1994 and winner of the 39th Kishida Kunio Drama Award, it is a leading example of Hirata's quiet, conversational style.

What to Expect

The play is set in the near future, in the lobby of a Tokyo art museum showing a loan exhibition of Vermeer paintings. A war is under way in Europe, and paintings are being sent abroad for safety. Visitors pass through the lobby and talk, and the war stays mostly at the edge of their conversation.

What You Will Discover

Reading Tokyo Notes, you will find a play in which very little appears to happen. The audience has to listen closely and read what lies beneath polite conversation, including the gradual breakdown of family and human relationships that the Japan Foundation identifies as the play's subject.

Availability

Tokyo Notes, translated by M. Cody Poulton, appears in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2014) and is also collected in Citizens of Tokyo: Six Plays (Seagull Books, 2019). There is also an international version of the production.

2. Friends (友達) by Kobo Abe (1967)

Why This Choice

Abe, best known internationally for his novel The Woman in the Dunes, was also a significant playwright. Friends is a dark comedy about a man whose apartment is invaded by an entire family who refuse to leave. It won the 3rd Tanizaki Jun'ichirō Prize in 1967.

What to Expect

A man finds a family of nine occupying his apartment. They insist they are there to save him from loneliness. The police see only a household dispute and leave, and his fiancée and her brother are won over by the family. After he tries to escape, he is locked up as punishment, and he dies. The family then moves on, praising him as their good friend.

What You Will Discover

Reading Friends, you will meet a play that turns friendliness into a form of control. Its central tension, between a person's wish for autonomy and a group's demand for connection, is easy to follow without any background in Japanese culture.

Availability

Friends is available in English translation by Donald Keene (Grove Press, 1969).

If you are drawn to the meeting of Japanese literature and international theater, also look for The Elephant Vanishes (2003--2004), Simon McBurney and Complicité's production adapted from Haruki Murakami's short stories and performed in Japanese. It is a stage production rather than a play to read.

3. Five Days in March (三月の5日間) by Toshiki Okada (2004)

Why This Play

Five Days in March, first staged by Okada's company chelfitsch in February 2004, won him the 49th Kishida Prize in 2005. It follows a man and a woman who meet at a live show in Roppongi in March 2003, as the Iraq War begins, and stay in a love hotel for five days, while other young people drift into anti-war protests in Shibuya.

What to Expect

The play does not build to a conventional climax. The story is not acted out directly. Instead, seven actors relate what the characters told them, on a nearly bare stage, in fragmentary, colloquial speech.

What You Will Discover

Okada's characters circle around their experiences rather than state them. As translator Aya Ogawa's website puts it, his circuitous, hyper-colloquial language and mundane details convey a generation's apathy and sense of powerlessness.

Availability

Five Days in March, translated by Aya Ogawa, appears in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2014). Do not confuse it with The End of the Moment We Had, a work of fiction by Okada that opens with a story based on the play.

4. The Tale of Genji (源氏物語) -- Noh adaptations

Why a Classical Work

No introduction to Japanese theater would be complete without an encounter with the classical tradition. Reading a Noh play connected to a well-known literary source is one accessible way in.

Several Noh plays draw on The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century narrative by Murasaki Shikibu. They include Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi) and Nonomiya, both of which center on the jealous and grieving Lady Rokujō.

What to Expect

A Noh play generally lasts around 60 to 90 minutes in performance. Many belong to the type known as mugen Noh, in which the whole story is treated as a dream or illusion of the waki, the supporting actor. In Nonomiya, a traveling monk visits the ruins of a shrine and meets a village woman. She tells him the story of Lady Rokujō and reveals who she is. In the second half, Rokujō's ghost appears in a carriage, recalls her humiliation and her parting from Genji, and dances.

Aoi no Ue works differently. There is no traveler: Rokujō's spirit is summoned to the sickbed of Lady Aoi, who is represented only by a robe laid at the front of the stage, and a priest fights and subdues her.

What You Will Discover

Reading these two plays side by side, you will see how the same character and the same jealousy can yield two quite different dramatic shapes. Together they also show how much Noh leaves to a few objects and a few lines.

Availability

Arthur Waley's The Nō Plays of Japan includes Aoi no Uye. Royall Tyler's Japanese Nō Dramas (Penguin, 1992) includes Nonomiya, under the title "The Wildwood Shrine."

5. The Bacchae--Holstein Milk Cows (バッコスの信女―ホルスタインの雌) by Satoko Ichihara (2019)

Why End Here

Satoko Ichihara's play, winner of the 64th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2020, is a recent example of how far contemporary Japanese theater will go in dialogue with world drama. It premiered at the Aichi Triennale in 2019, with an all-women cast including the chorus.

What to Expect

The play draws on Euripides' The Bacchae. Its central character is a housewife who once worked as a technician, artificially inseminating livestock. She buys donor semen online and, without serious intent, uses it to inseminate a cow. The result is a half-human, half-cow being, who later returns to her, and the story ends in a violent confrontation and a darkly comic final scene.

The Japan Foundation describes the play as examining love, sex, and gender roles, reproduction, discrimination and abuse, and human-centered views of the world.

What You Will Discover

Reading The Bacchae--Holstein Milk Cows, you will see Greek tragedy reworked for very different concerns. You will also see the range of what "Japanese theater" can mean, from Hirata's quiet conversations to Ichihara's provocation, from Noh to Okada's speech.

Availability

The play appears, translated by Aya Ogawa, in The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Japanese Plays (Methuen Drama, 2022).

Where to Go from Here

These five plays represent starting points, not endpoints. Each one opens a pathway into a different dimension of Japanese theater:

• If Tokyo Notes captivates you, explore more of Hirata's work, starting with the other plays in Citizens of Tokyo.
• If Friends intrigues you, try Abe's The Man Who Turned into a Stick in the Columbia anthology.
• If Five Days in March speaks to you, follow Okada's later career.
• If the Noh tradition enchants you, there is a vast repertoire of classical plays to explore.
• If The Bacchae--Holstein Milk Cows excites you, the Methuen volume also includes plays by Yuko Kuwabara, Shiro Maeda, Tomohiro Maekawa, and Takuya Yokoyama.

For all of these explorations and more, our script library is a resource for discovering Japanese theatrical texts, and our author profiles offer context on the playwrights.

Happy reading.

Sources

• Hakusuisha: list of Kishida Kunio Drama Award winners (Japanese)
• Stage Beyond Borders (Japan Foundation): Tokyo Notes (International Version)
• British Theatre Guide: review of a Tokyo Notes reading
• Columbia University Press: The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama
• 友達 (戯曲) (Japanese Wikipedia)
• University of Pennsylvania Libraries catalog: Friends; [play]
• Complicité: The Elephant Vanishes
• 三月の5日間 (Japanese Wikipedia)
• Aya Ogawa: Five Days in March
• World Literature Today: review of The End of the Moment We Had
• Invitation to Nohgaku: Plays and Characters, Japan Arts Council
• the-noh.com: Aoi no Ue
• the-noh.com: Nonomiya
• Project Gutenberg: Arthur Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan
• CiNii: Japanese Nō Dramas
• Performing Arts Network Japan (Japan Foundation): The Bacchae -- Holstein Milk Cows
• Canterbury Christ Church University Bookshop: The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Japanese Plays