In Los Angeles last week, the showdown in the World Baseball Classic between Japan's "Samurai" and their South Korean rivals had TV audiences gripped. So, too, were those at Saitama Arts Theater, who witnessed an acting duel between 26-year-olds Tatsuya Fujiwara and Shun Oguri in "Musashi," a hilarious samurai sword-fighting tale directed by the theater's resident dramatist, Yukio Ninagawa.
Written by Hisashi Inoue, former president of the Japan Pen Club, "Musashi" is led by the performances of these two, both Ninagawa favorites. Fujiwara made his career debut aged 15 at the Barbican in London in Ninagawa's production of "Shintokumaru (by Shuji Terayama)," while Oguri performed for English audiences in 2006 with a role in Ninagawa's version of "Titus Andronicus" at Stratford-upon-Avon in the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Complete Works" festival.
Having last shared a stage in 2003 in Ninagawa's "Hamlet," when Fujiwara played Hamlet and Oguri was Fortinbras, the two young blades cross swords again in a work based on the life of the wandering samurai swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1645) and his famous encounter in 1612, the Duel of Ganryu Island with a rival, Kojiro Sasaki (1585-1612?).