Understanding "Five Days in March" by Toshiki Okada: A Kishida Prize-Winning Masterpiece

Introduction

Toshiki Okada (岡田利規) and his theater company chelfitsch first presented Five Days in March (三月の5日間) in 2004. The play, which won the 49th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2005 (shared with Kudo Kankuro's Donju), follows young people in Tokyo over five days around the start of the U.S. bombing of Iraq in March 2003. The Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels has called it a landmark turning point in contemporary Japanese theater.

Its performers speak in a super-colloquial, rambling Japanese, and their bodies perform exaggerated versions of everyday gestures. The actors tell the story rather than simply playing its characters, moving in and out of the roles.

The Historical Context: March 2003

To understand Five Days in March, one must understand the moment it depicts. U.S. forces began bombing Iraq on March 20, 2003 (March 21 in Japan). The play covers the two days before and the two days after that date.

The young couple at the center of the play are largely oblivious to the invasion. Others encounter the war only at a distance: two young men join an antiwar march in Shibuya, but only half-heartedly.

The Language: Hyper-Colloquial Revolution

The most immediately striking feature of Five Days in March is its language. The dialogue mirrors how young Japanese people actually speak, and it can shift style and setting in the middle of a sentence.

Okada's writing also differs from conventional stage dialogue in its use of narration. The actors relate the characters' actions to the audience, as if they had heard the stories from the characters themselves.

The Body: Movement as Counter-Text

If the language of Five Days in March was striking, so was its physicality. The company is known for exaggerated, choreographed gestures, and the physical style of Okada's work has also been recognized as contemporary dance. In this play, movement magnifies subconscious everyday gestures. One American critic, reviewing the 2009 Seattle run, described the effect as "a corporeal static."

Structure and Narration

Five Days in March does not follow a conventional dramatic structure. The Japan Foundation's summary says it has no real plot or notable incidents. It is divided into 2 acts and 10 scenes, and runs for about 1 hour 20 minutes.

The basic story follows Minobe and Yukki, who meet at a live performance in Roppongi, go straight to a love hotel in Shibuya, and stay there for five days. Around them are Miffy, a slightly "wired" girl, and Azuma, a boy she meets at a movie theater, as well as Yasui and Ishihara, the two young men at the march. The play ends without a climax, as the couple leave the hotel and head for the station.

The story is not told straightforwardly. It is:

Narrated rather than enacted: Seven performers (five men and two women) come on stage as "Actor 1," "Actor 2," and so on, and take turns telling the audience what happened.
Distributed across multiple performers: The actors slip in and out of character while narrating and playing scenes, so the role of narrator keeps changing hands.

Political Theater Without Politics

The play is set against the backdrop of the Iraq War, but its central couple spend the war inside a love hotel, and the two marchers are only loosely engaged. Okada himself has named "war and sex and such" as examples of the themes he saw as widely shared. Rather than offering a call to action, the play conveys a vague unease about a distant war colliding with ordinary life.

International Reception and Impact

The play's first performance outside Japan was at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels in 2007, after the festival's director saw a re-staging in 2006. The same festival describes that visit as Okada's breakthrough in Europe. In early 2009, Japan Society organized a seven-city North American tour, with performances in Japanese with English subtitles. The play has since been staged in more than 30 cities worldwide.

For a later re-creation, presented at the 2018 Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Okada cast seven actors in their early twenties through auditions. He kept the script nearly the same but made the staging entirely new.

An English translation by Aya Ogawa appears in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Conclusion

Five Days in March remains one of the best-known works of twenty-first-century Japanese theater, and the work that first brought Toshiki Okada and chelfitsch to international audiences.

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