Understanding The Match Girl: A Kishida Prize-Winning Masterpiece by Minoru Betsuyaku

Introduction

Minoru Betsuyaku (別役実, 1937--2020) is widely recognized as the father of absurdist theater in Japan, and The Match Girl (マッチ売りの少女, Match Uri no Shojo) stands as one of his most accomplished and enduring works. Awarded the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, this play demonstrated Betsuyaku's extraordinary ability to transform familiar material -- in this case, Hans Christian Andersen's beloved fairy tale "The Little Match Girl" -- into something profoundly unsettling and theatrically original.

Where Andersen's story is a sentimental tale of poverty and divine consolation, Betsuyaku's version strips away the consolation and leaves only the poverty -- not merely material poverty but an existential poverty, a barrenness of meaning and connection that speaks to the fundamental condition of modern existence. The result is a work that is both deeply Japanese in its sensibility and universal in its resonance, a play that ranks among the finest examples of absurdist drama produced anywhere in the world.

Betsuyaku and Japanese Absurdism

To understand The Match Girl, it is essential to understand Betsuyaku's unique position in Japanese theater history. While the Theater of the Absurd is typically associated with European playwrights -- Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet -- Betsuyaku developed his own distinctively Japanese variant of absurdist drama that drew on both Western models and indigenous theatrical and literary traditions.

Betsuyaku encountered the work of Beckett in the late 1950s, and the experience was transformative. In Beckett's spare, repetitive dramas, he recognized a theatrical language that could express the particular forms of displacement and anomie that characterized postwar Japanese society. The experience of atomic devastation, military defeat, foreign occupation, and rapid modernization had created in Japan a sense of existential dislocation that conventional realistic drama was ill-equipped to address.

But Betsuyaku was never simply a Japanese imitator of European absurdism. He developed his own distinctive approach, one characterized by a gentler, more wistful quality than the harsh existentialism of Beckett or the savage farce of Ionesco. His absurdism has a peculiarly Japanese flavor -- quieter, more domestic, inflected with a sense of mono no aware (the pathos of things) that gives his work an emotional depth that European absurdism sometimes lacks.

The Andersen Source Material

Andersen's "The Little Match Girl," published in 1845, tells the story of a poor girl selling matches on a freezing New Year's Eve. Unable to sell any matches and afraid to go home to her abusive father, she strikes matches one by one, each flame producing a beautiful vision -- a warm stove, a magnificent feast, a glowing Christmas tree, and finally her beloved dead grandmother. In the morning, the girl is found frozen to death, a smile on her face. The story ends with the narrator assuring us that she has gone to heaven with her grandmother.

It is easy to see why this story attracted Betsuyaku. Beneath its sentimental surface lies a tale of profound social cruelty -- a society that allows a child to freeze to death while celebrating the New Year -- and of the illusions that make such cruelty bearable. Betsuyaku recognized that by removing the sentimental consolation, he could expose the harsh existential reality that Andersen's story both reveals and conceals.

The Transformation: From Fairy Tale to Absurdist Drama

Betsuyaku's The Match Girl takes the basic situation of Andersen's story -- a girl with matches, a cold night, visions produced by flame -- and transposes it into an absurdist theatrical framework. The specific details of the adaptation vary across productions and versions, but the essential transformation is consistent: the sentimental narrative is replaced by a series of encounters and exchanges that are simultaneously mundane and deeply strange.

In Betsuyaku's version, the match girl is not merely a pathetic figure but an unsettling presence. Her persistence in trying to sell matches to people who do not want them creates a dynamic of uncomfortable obligation and guilt that Betsuyaku exploits to devastating effect. The people she encounters are not villains; they are ordinary individuals confronted with a demand they cannot satisfy, trapped in a social transaction that has no satisfactory resolution.

The matches themselves become multivalent symbols. They offer light and warmth, but only briefly and inadequately. They illuminate reality without transforming it. They create expectations they cannot fulfill. In Betsuyaku's hands, the act of striking a match becomes a miniature drama of hope and disappointment, a gesture that encapsulates the human condition as the absurdists understand it.

Theatrical Style and Dramatic Technique

Betsuyaku's dramatic technique in The Match Girl displays the hallmarks of his mature style. The dialogue is spare and repetitive, with characters speaking in patterns that are simultaneously naturalistic and artificial. People say the kinds of things that real people might say, but they say them in ways that gradually reveal the absurdity underlying ordinary social interaction.

The play employs several characteristic Betsuyaku devices:

• Repetition with Variation: Scenes and dialogue patterns repeat with subtle changes, creating a sense of both stasis and progression that is fundamental to absurdist theater. Each repetition slightly alters the audience's understanding, building meaning through accumulation rather than linear development.

• The Logic of the Illogical: Characters follow chains of reasoning that are internally consistent but lead to absurd conclusions. This technique reveals the fragility of the logical structures on which we build our understanding of the world.

• Domestic Surrealism: Unlike the cosmic surrealism of some European absurdists, Betsuyaku's strangeness emerges from the most ordinary domestic situations. The uncanny quality of his theater comes not from exotic imagery but from the revelation of strangeness within the familiar.

• Silence and Pause: Following Beckett, Betsuyaku uses silence as a dramatic tool, creating spaces in the dialogue where meaning accumulates in the absence of words. These silences are not mere gaps but active elements that shape the audience's experience.

The staging of The Match Girl typically emphasizes simplicity and bareness, reflecting the existential emptiness that is the play's central subject. The sparse visual vocabulary forces the audience to attend closely to the language and the performers, creating an intimacy that more spectacular productions might not achieve.

The Kishida Prize and Critical Recognition

The Kishida Prize committee's recognition of The Match Girl acknowledged Betsuyaku's significance as a theatrical voice and validated the absurdist approach as a legitimate and important strand of Japanese dramatic writing. The award recognized that Betsuyaku had not merely imported a European theatrical form but had created something genuinely new -- a Japanese absurdism that spoke to specifically Japanese experiences while participating in a global conversation about the nature of modern existence.

Critics praised the play for its economy, its precision, and its ability to create profound unease through the simplest means. Many noted that Betsuyaku's achievement lay not in the grandeur of his theatrical effects but in their modesty -- the way he could make a simple exchange between two people on a bare stage resonate with existential significance.

The play's relationship to Andersen's source material also attracted critical attention. Reviewers noted that Betsuyaku's transformation of the fairy tale was not merely clever but deeply purposeful, revealing meanings latent in the original that Andersen himself may not have intended. This act of creative reinterpretation was seen as exemplifying the best possibilities of theatrical adaptation.

Legacy and Continuing Relevance

The Match Girl has become one of the most frequently produced and studied works in the Japanese theatrical canon. Its combination of accessibility -- the Andersen source material provides a familiar point of entry -- and depth -- the absurdist treatment opens up layers of meaning that reward repeated encounter -- makes it an ideal introduction to Betsuyaku's work and to Japanese absurdist theater more generally.

The play's themes of social disconnection, inadequate communication, and the failure of consolation remain as relevant today as when the work was first written. In an era of increasing social atomization and performative empathy, Betsuyaku's unflinching examination of the gap between what we feel we should do for others and what we actually can do continues to resonate with audiences worldwide.

Betsuyaku's influence on subsequent generations of Japanese playwrights is immense. His demonstration that absurdist theater could address specifically Japanese concerns without losing its universal dimension opened a path that many younger writers have followed. His spare, precise dramatic language set a standard for Japanese playwriting that remains influential.

The specific technique of using fairy tales and folk narratives as source material for absurdist reinterpretation, which Betsuyaku pioneered in The Match Girl, has become a recognized strategy in Japanese theater. Subsequent playwrights have drawn on Betsuyaku's example to create works that use the familiarity of well-known stories as a foundation for unsettling explorations of contemporary anxieties. The audience's prior knowledge of the source material creates expectations that the playwright can then subvert, producing a cognitive dissonance that is central to the absurdist effect.

Betsuyaku's legacy also includes a body of critical and theoretical writing about theater that has shaped how Japanese practitioners and scholars think about dramatic form. His reflections on the relationship between Japanese and Western theatrical traditions, on the nature of dramatic language, and on the social function of absurdist theater constitute an important intellectual contribution that complements his creative work. Together, his plays and his criticism offer a comprehensive vision of what theater can be -- a vision that continues to challenge and inspire artists working in Japan and around the world.

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