Understanding 'Fish Festival': Yu Miri's Autobiographical Pain as Theater | Kishida Prize Play Analysis

Introduction

Yu Miri (柳美里) is among the most important and controversial literary figures in modern Japan, and her play Fish Festival (魚の祭り, Uo no Matsuri), which won the 37th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1993, stands as a defining work of autobiographical theater. Born to Korean parents in Japan, Yu Miri has spent her career mining the deepest veins of personal pain -- family dysfunction, ethnic discrimination, sexual violence, and the search for identity -- and transforming that raw material into art of unflinching power.

Fish Festival represents a crucial early work in this project, a play in which the young Yu Miri found a theatrical language adequate to expressing experiences that most artists would either suppress or sentimentalize. This analysis examines the play in the context of both Yu Miri's artistic development and the broader landscape of Japanese theater in the early 1990s.

The Playwright: Yu Miri's Background

Yu Miri was born in 1968 in Yokohama to parents of Korean descent. As a Zainichi Korean -- a member of the Korean community resident in Japan -- she grew up navigating the profound ethnic prejudice that has historically characterized Japanese attitudes toward its Korean minority. This experience of marginality became one of the central subjects of her work.

Her childhood was marked by family instability and violence. Her parents' troubled relationship, financial difficulties, and the broader social pressures facing Zainichi Koreans created an environment of chronic crisis. Yu Miri has been remarkably frank in her writing about these experiences, refusing the protective distance that autobiography often provides.

She joined the theater world as a teenager, becoming involved with the Tokyo Kid Brothers before establishing herself as an independent playwright and, eventually, as a novelist. Her 1997 novel Family Cinema (家族シネマ) won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, making her one of the few writers to achieve major recognition in both theater and prose fiction.

The Play: Fish Festival

Fish Festival draws heavily on Yu Miri's personal experiences, depicting a family torn apart by dysfunction and shaped by the specific pressures of Zainichi Korean life in Japan. The play does not attempt to present a balanced or comprehensive portrait of the Korean community; instead, it offers an intensely personal account of one family's suffering, rendered with a specificity and emotional honesty that gives it universal resonance.

The title itself is evocative. Fish, in many Asian cultures, carry associations with abundance, celebration, and communal gathering. A "fish festival" suggests a moment of collective joy. But in Yu Miri's hands, this festive image becomes ironic -- the family at the center of the play is incapable of the communal harmony that such a celebration implies. The festival becomes a cruel reminder of what is lacking rather than a fulfillment of what is desired.

The play's structure reflects the fragmented nature of memory and trauma. Scenes do not follow a conventional chronological order but instead emerge in patterns dictated by emotional logic. A moment of relative calm gives way to an eruption of violence; a tender memory is interrupted by a present-day crisis. This structural approach mirrors the way traumatic experience actually functions in the mind -- not as orderly narrative but as a constellation of vivid, recurring fragments.

Autobiography as Theatrical Method

One of the most significant aspects of Fish Festival is its relationship to autobiography. Yu Miri does not merely draw on personal experience as source material; she makes autobiography itself a theatrical method. The play asks the audience to confront the reality that what they are watching is not fiction in the conventional sense -- that real suffering lies behind the theatrical representation.

This approach raises profound questions about the ethics and aesthetics of autobiographical performance. Is it exploitative to put one's own trauma on stage? Is it therapeutic? Is it an act of courage or self-harm? Yu Miri does not provide easy answers to these questions, but by raising them, she adds a layer of complexity to the theatrical experience that enriches and disturbs in equal measure.

The autobiographical dimension also affects how audiences receive the play. Knowing that Yu Miri is not imagining but remembering changes the quality of attention the audience brings to the work. The usual comfortable distance between spectator and fiction collapses, and the audience is left in a more vulnerable and ethically implicated position.

Ethnic Identity and Discrimination

Fish Festival is one of the most powerful theatrical explorations of the Zainichi Korean experience in Japan. The characters in the play live in a society that simultaneously denies their Korean identity and punishes them for it. They face discrimination in employment, education, and social relations, while also grappling with internal tensions about assimilation, cultural preservation, and generational conflict.

Yu Miri's treatment of these themes avoids both victimhood narratives and idealized representations of cultural resilience. Her characters are complex, flawed individuals who sometimes perpetuate the violence and dysfunction that the broader society has inflicted on them. The family in Fish Festival is not a haven from social hostility but a site where that hostility is internalized and reproduced.

This unflinching honesty was controversial within the Korean community as well as in mainstream Japanese society. Some Zainichi Korean intellectuals criticized Yu Miri for presenting a negative image of their community, while some Japanese critics were uncomfortable with the play's implicit indictment of Japanese racism. Yu Miri's refusal to cater to either group's expectations is one of the most courageous aspects of her work.

Family as Battlefield

The family in Fish Festival functions as both a microcosm and a battlefield. The relationships between parents and children, between siblings, and between the family and the outside world are depicted with a raw intensity that can be difficult to watch. Violence -- physical, emotional, and psychological -- is a constant presence, not as sensationalism but as a lived reality.

Yu Miri's depiction of the father figure in the play is particularly complex. He is simultaneously an oppressor and a victim, a man whose own suffering at the hands of a discriminatory society has not made him more compassionate but has instead given him a reservoir of rage that he empties onto those closest to him. This refusal to simplify the dynamics of family violence is one of the play's greatest strengths.

The mother, too, is depicted with nuance. She is not merely a passive victim but an active participant in the family's dysfunction, capable of both tenderness and cruelty. Yu Miri does not romanticize maternal suffering or present the mother as an uncomplicated figure of sympathy.

The children in the play bear the weight of their parents' failures while simultaneously beginning to replicate those failures in their own relationships. This cycle of transmitted trauma is one of the play's central concerns, and Yu Miri renders it with a precision that is both sociological and deeply personal.

Theatrical Language and Style

The language of Fish Festival is direct, unadorned, and startlingly honest. Yu Miri avoids the literary flourishes and verbal pyrotechnics that characterize some of her contemporaries. Instead, she crafts dialogue that captures the way people actually speak when they are in pain -- the repetitions, the sudden silences, the eruptions of incoherent emotion, the moments when language simply fails.

This stripped-down linguistic approach serves the play's autobiographical project. Ornamental language would create a barrier between the audience and the reality being depicted. By keeping the language raw and unpolished, Yu Miri maintains the immediacy and urgency that give the play its power.

The play also makes effective use of silence and physical action. Some of the most powerful moments in Fish Festival occur when characters have exhausted their capacity for speech and the stage is left with nothing but the physical reality of bodies in proximity -- bodies that may hurt or hold each other, but can no longer explain why.

The Kishida Prize and Its Significance

The awarding of the 37th Kishida Kunio Drama Award to Fish Festival in 1993 was a significant moment in Japanese theater. It represented the recognition of a new, younger voice whose work challenged the comfortable assumptions of both the theatrical establishment and mainstream Japanese society.

The prize also drew attention to the Zainichi Korean experience in a cultural context where it was often invisible or misrepresented. By honoring Fish Festival, the Kishida Prize committee implicitly acknowledged the importance of diverse perspectives in Japanese theater and validated the autobiographical approach that Yu Miri had taken.

Legacy and Influence

Fish Festival remains a crucial text in Japanese contemporary theater, one that continues to provoke discussion about the relationships between art and autobiography, personal pain and political critique, ethnic identity and national culture.

Yu Miri's subsequent career -- including her acclaimed novels, her ongoing engagement with the Zainichi Korean community, and her relocation to Fukushima after the 2011 disaster -- has only deepened the significance of her early theatrical work. Fish Festival can be read as the foundation for an artistic project that spans decades and media, always returning to the same fundamental questions about belonging, identity, and the possibility of survival.

For those interested in exploring more Japanese theatrical scripts and discovering works by Yu Miri and her contemporaries, visit our script library where you can search for works by various Japanese playwrights.