Riho Fukuna (福名理穂) | Kishida Prize-Winning Playwright Guide

Introduction

Riho Fukuna (福名理穂) is a Japanese playwright and director who leads the theater group paprika (ぱぷりか). She won the 66th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2022 for Swaying Softly (柔らかく搖れる, also given in English as Softly Swinging), sharing the prize with Takuto Yamamoto's Banana no Hana wa Taberareru.

Born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1991, she makes dialogue-driven plays, many of them written in Hiroshima dialect, from her base in Tokyo.

Early Life and Career

Fukuna founded paprika in 2014 as the group through which she makes theater. Its members are Fukuna and Yui Okamoto. The group's first production was Chiisana Himawari (ちいさなひまわり, 2014) at Shinjuku Golden Gai Theater, followed by further plays at small Tokyo venues.

According to the group's official site, its work is mainly conversational drama about the sense of emptiness that comes out of human connection, and about people who are not really alone even when they feel lonely, or who never quite become adults as they age.

The Kishida Prize-Winning Work

Swaying Softly (柔らかく搖れる) premiered as paprika's fifth production at Komaba Agora Theater in Tokyo in 2021. The official site describes it as a play that portrays the claustrophobia of the countryside and a family whose members depend on one another, told in Hiroshima dialect. The National Diet Library's catalog record describes it as a gentle portrait of family "syndromes" in contemporary colloquial dialogue.

Hakusuisha published the script in May 2022. In 2023 the group revived the play with an entirely new cast on a tour of Toyooka, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, and it received a HOPE Award at the first Japan Midori no Yubi Performing Arts Awards (日本みどりのゆび舞台芸術賞).

Theatrical Style and Philosophy

Fukuna's approach, as the group itself and its funders describe it, has two clear features:

Conversational Drama: Her plays are built mainly on dialogue.
Hiroshima Dialect: Her dialogue is often written in the dialect of her home prefecture.

Major Works

Swaying Softly (柔らかく搖れる, 2021; revived 2023) - Her Kishida Prize-winning play.
Kippo (きっぽ, 2018) - Selected for MITAKA "Next" Selection 19th at Mitaka City Arts Center.
Dokka Ike! Kuso Taigii Waga Jinsei (どっか行け！クソたいぎい我が人生, 2022) - paprika's sixth production, at Komaba Agora Theater.
A Moment in Life (2025) - paprika's eighth production, at The Suzunari in Tokyo, a new work on balancing artistic activity and child-rearing.

How to Experience Their Work

Current information about productions by paprika (ぱぷりか) is on the group's official website.

For the Japanese script, see Swaying Softly in our script library. We have not confirmed a published English translation.