Understanding 'Yama Yama': Shuntaro Matsubara's Dense Literary Theater Pushing Language to Its Limits | Kishida Prize Play Analysis

Introduction

Shuntaro Matsubara (松原俊太郎) won the 63rd Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2019 for Yama Yama (山山), a work that challenged virtually every convention of contemporary Japanese theatrical writing. Dense, allusive, philosophically ambitious, and linguistically extraordinary, Yama Yama stands as one of the most demanding and rewarding plays to emerge from Japan in the twenty-first century. It is a work that treats language not as a transparent medium for conveying character and plot but as the very substance of theater -- an opaque, textured, resistant material that generates meaning through its own internal operations.

The title itself -- two repetitions of the kanji character for "mountain" (山) -- establishes the work's mode of operation. It is an act of doubling that is also an act of estrangement: the familiar character becomes strange through repetition, its meaning destabilized by the very simplicity of the gesture. This principle of defamiliarization through repetition, accumulation, and recombination operates throughout the play, creating a theatrical experience that demands a fundamentally different kind of attention from its audience.

Historical Context

Yama Yama emerged from a Japanese theatrical landscape that had, by the late 2010s, settled into several recognizable modes. The "quiet theater" tradition inaugurated by Oriza Hirata continued to produce meticulously naturalistic work. The physical and visual traditions descended from angura and butoh remained active. A younger generation of playwrights was creating work that was often witty, accessible, and engaged with contemporary social issues.

Against this backdrop, Matsubara's work was a provocation. It rejected the accessibility that had become the default value of much contemporary Japanese theater, insisting instead on a linguistic and intellectual difficulty that made no concessions to audience expectations. This was not difficulty for its own sake but difficulty as a necessary consequence of the play's ambition: to create a work of theatrical writing that operated at the highest level of literary complexity.

Matsubara's influences are drawn as much from philosophy and literature as from theater. His engagement with continental philosophical tradition -- with thinkers who treat language as a site of philosophical investigation rather than a transparent tool of communication -- is evident in the texture of his writing. But Yama Yama is not philosophy disguised as theater; it is genuine theater that employs philosophical modes of thinking to create a specifically theatrical experience.

Language and Text

The Play as Linguistic Object

The most immediately striking feature of Yama Yama is its language. Matsubara writes in a style that is unlike anything else in contemporary Japanese theater -- a dense, layered, recursive prose that builds meaning through accumulation, repetition, and variation rather than through the linear progression of conventional dramatic dialogue.

His sentences are long, complex, and syntactically adventurous, exploiting the full resources of Japanese grammar to create structures of meaning that unfold in multiple directions simultaneously. Individual words carry weight and resonance, chosen not merely for their semantic content but for their sonic qualities, their historical associations, and their position within the larger linguistic architecture of the play.

This approach to theatrical language draws on the resources of Japanese that are specific to that language. Japanese syntax, with its verb-final structure and its capacity for long, internally complex sentences, allows for a kind of suspense and accumulation that is difficult to achieve in English or other European languages. Matsubara exploits these syntactic possibilities to create a theatrical language that is uniquely Japanese in its structure while addressing themes of universal significance.

Monologue and Dialogue

Yama Yama blurs the conventional distinction between monologue and dialogue. Characters speak in ways that are simultaneously addressed to other characters on stage and directed inward, toward the speaker's own process of thought. The result is a form of theatrical speech that occupies a middle ground between conversation and soliloquy -- a mode of utterance that is social and solitary at the same time.

This blurring reflects one of the play's deepest themes: the difficulty of genuine communication, the gap between the richness of inner experience and the impoverished means available for sharing that experience with others. Characters in Yama Yama speak at length and with great eloquence, but their speech often fails to bridge the distance between them. The play suggests that language, for all its power, is fundamentally inadequate to the task of connecting one consciousness with another -- and that this inadequacy is itself a source of beauty, pathos, and philosophical interest.

Structural Analysis

Accumulation Rather Than Progression

The structure of Yama Yama is governed by a principle of accumulation rather than linear progression. The play does not build toward a climax through the conventional mechanisms of rising action, complication, and resolution. Instead, it accretes meaning through the gradual layering of linguistic, thematic, and imagistic material.

This structural approach is analogous to geological processes -- the slow accumulation of sediment that builds mountains (a resonance activated by the play's title). Each passage of text adds another layer to the play's meaning, and the audience's understanding deepens not through sudden revelations but through the patient accumulation of insight.

The mountains of the title are thus not merely a thematic reference but a structural metaphor. The play itself is a kind of mountain -- a massive, dense, resistant formation built up over time through processes of accretion and compression. To engage with it requires the patience and stamina of a mountain climber, but the views from various points along the ascent reward the effort.

Repetition and Variation

Repetition is a fundamental structural principle in Yama Yama. Words, phrases, images, and ideas recur throughout the play, each recurrence slightly altered by the new context in which it appears. This technique of repetition with variation creates a kind of musical development that is unusual in theatrical writing but deeply effective in performance.

The effect of this repetition is cumulative: each recurrence of a motif adds to its meaning, so that by the end of the play, simple words and images have acquired extraordinary density and resonance. A word that seemed unremarkable on its first appearance reveals, through repeated encounters in different contexts, a depth of meaning that could not have been anticipated.

Thematic Analysis

Language and the Limits of Expression

The central philosophical concern of Yama Yama is the nature and limits of language itself. Matsubara is interested in what language can and cannot do -- its capacity to create meaning and its equally real capacity to obscure, distort, or fail to capture the realities it attempts to represent.

This is not a merely abstract concern in the play but a dramatically embodied one. Characters struggle with language, finding it simultaneously indispensable and insufficient. They speak at length, elaborate, qualify, retract, and try again, driven by the need to communicate and frustrated by the inadequacy of the means available. This struggle is the play's primary dramatic action, more compelling than any conventional plot could be because it engages with a problem that every audience member recognizes from their own experience.

Mountains as Metaphor

The mountain imagery of the title extends throughout the play in various forms. Mountains represent permanence and change (they seem eternal but are in fact constantly being formed and eroded), the relationship between surface and depth (what we see of a mountain is a tiny fraction of its total mass), and the experience of confronting something vastly larger than oneself.

The doubled mountain of the title -- 山山 -- adds another dimension. Two mountains seen together create a landscape, a relationship, a comparison. They suggest the possibility of passage between them (a valley) and the impossibility of occupying both simultaneously. This image of two mountains facing each other across a gap becomes a metaphor for communication itself: two massive, complex entities separated by a space that can be traversed but never eliminated.

Being and Nothingness

At its most philosophically ambitious, Yama Yama engages with questions about existence itself -- what it means for something (a person, a word, a mountain) to exist, and how we know that anything exists beyond our own consciousness. These ontological questions are not posed abstractly but emerge from the texture of the play's language and from the specific situations of its characters.

Performance Considerations

Yama Yama presents extraordinary challenges to performers. The density and complexity of Matsubara's language require actors to develop a relationship with the text that goes beyond conventional preparation. Performers must find ways to inhabit the language physically and vocally, making its rhythms, textures, and meanings their own without simplifying or domesticating the text's inherent difficulty.

The play's premiere, directed in collaboration with Matsubara, demonstrated that this difficulty could be not merely managed but transformed into theatrical power. When skilled performers commit to the full complexity of Matsubara's language, the result is a theatrical experience of unusual intensity and beauty -- one in which the audience feels the weight and texture of language as a physical, almost sculptural presence in the theatrical space.

Legacy and Influence

Yama Yama has been widely recognized as a landmark in contemporary Japanese theatrical writing. Its uncompromising linguistic ambition has served as both inspiration and challenge to younger playwrights, demonstrating that theatrical writing can aspire to the density and complexity of the most ambitious literary prose without sacrificing its specifically theatrical qualities.

The play's Kishida Prize win was seen by many as a statement about the value of difficulty in art -- an affirmation that theater does not have to be immediately accessible to be profoundly rewarding. In a cultural moment that often privileges ease of consumption, Yama Yama stands as a reminder that some of the most valuable artistic experiences require patience, effort, and a willingness to be challenged.

Conclusion

Yama Yama is a play that demands everything from its audience and rewards that demand with an experience of language, thought, and theatrical presence that is unlike anything else in contemporary Japanese theater. Shuntaro Matsubara's achievement is to demonstrate that theatrical writing can push language to its limits and, in doing so, discover new possibilities for what theater can communicate and how it can communicate it. The play remains a challenge and an invitation -- a mountain that rewards every step of the ascent.

For readers interested in discovering more innovative Japanese theatrical writing, visit our script library to explore works that push the boundaries of dramatic form and language.