The Little Match Girl by Minoru Betsuyaku: Plot and Meaning

Introduction

Minoru Betsuyaku (別役実, 1937--2020) is widely recognized as the leading figure of absurdist theater in Japan, and The Little Match Girl (マッチ売りの少女, Macchi Uri no Shojo, 1966) stands as one of his most accomplished and enduring works. Awarded the 13th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1968 together with his A Scene with a Red Bird (赤い鳥の居る風景), 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 play borrows its title and its image of a child selling matches for a very different situation: on New Year's Eve, a woman calls at the home of an elderly couple and claims to be their daughter. The result is a landmark of Japanese absurdist drama, rooted in postwar Japan and open to wider readings.

Betsuyaku and Japanese Absurdism

To understand The Little 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 Japanese variant of absurdist drama, shaped by Beckett's example and by the experience of postwar Japan.

Beckett was a major influence on Betsuyaku, who began writing plays as a student at Waseda University and co-founded the Waseda Shogekijo company with the director Tadashi Suzuki. He called the pared-down stage he took from Beckett "Beckett space." His own history was marked by the war: he was born in Manchuria and returned to Japan as a child in 1946. His 1962 play The Elephant (象) takes up the aftermath of the atomic bombing.

But Betsuyaku was never simply a Japanese imitator of European absurdism. He became known for finding the absurd within everyday life and wrapping it in dry humor, in plays whose stage might hold little more than a utility pole.

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.

Beneath its sentimental surface lies a tale of 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 does not retell this story. He uses it as a point of reference for a play about contemporary Japanese characters, set on the same night of the year.

The Transformation: From Fairy Tale to Absurdist Drama

Betsuyaku's The Little Match Girl does not stage Andersen's story. It opens on New Year's Eve, as a man and his wife, an elderly couple, are about to have their evening tea. A woman calls at the house. She eventually says that she is their daughter, although the couple's daughter is supposed to have died at the age of seven, struck by a train. She also asks whether her younger brother, waiting outside, may come in, although the couple have no son.

In Betsuyaku's version, the match girl of the title is not a child on the street but this adult visitor; according to a review of one recent production, she sold matches twenty years earlier, when she was seven. The play has been read as a critique of postwar Japan's readiness to behave as though the war had never happened, and a 2017 study at Bucknell University discusses it in terms of patriarchal authority, prostitution, and conflict between generations.

The matches remain in the play as a link to that past, and Andersen's tale hangs over the encounter even though the situation on stage is far from the one in the fairy tale.

Theatrical Style and Dramatic Technique

Betsuyaku's dramatic technique in The Little Match Girl, an early work, shows features associated with his writing more broadly: a domestic situation that gradually turns strange, and figures identified by their roles rather than by personal names.

The following features stand out:

Generic Figures: The people of the play are identified by roles such as man, wife, woman, and brother, a practice common in Betsuyaku's plays.
The Logic of the Illogical: The woman's claim contradicts what the couple know about their own family, yet it has to be dealt with as part of an ordinary evening at home.
Domestic Surrealism: The strangeness here emerges from a most ordinary domestic situation: a couple sitting down to tea when someone comes to the door.

Betsuyaku's plays are generally associated with minimal sets and few props, which force the audience to attend closely to the language and the performers.

The Kishida Prize and Critical Recognition

The 13th Kishida Kunio Drama Award, given in 1968, went to Betsuyaku for two plays, The Little Match Girl and A Scene with a Red Bird. The prize, run by the publisher Hakusuisha, is known as a gateway for new playwrights, and it came to Betsuyaku within a decade of his first play, A and B and a Certain Woman (1961).

Legacy and Continuing Relevance

The Little Match Girl is still staged by Japanese theater companies, including a 2023 production by Doro in Kobe. In English it can be read in Robert N. Lawson's translation in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2014), and it also appears in Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays (University of Hawaii Press, 1992). Its combination of accessibility -- the Andersen title provides a familiar point of entry -- and depth makes it a natural introduction to Betsuyaku's work and to Japanese absurdist theater more generally.

The play's questions about family, memory, and what a society chooses to forget remain as relevant today as when the work was first written.

Betsuyaku is credited with establishing the absurd play in Japan, and his spare stage became an instantly recognizable world of its own.

Fairy tales and familiar stories recur in his work: The Little Match Girl was followed by plays such as Alice in Wonderland (Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu, 1971) and Godot Has Come (2007), which is based on Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Betsuyaku's legacy also includes criticism, essays, and children's stories, published alongside the 144 plays he wrote through 2018.

For international readers interested in exploring more Japanese theatrical scripts, including works in the absurdist tradition, visit our script library where you can search by author and thematic category.