Playwright and director Go Aoki is one of today's many leading dramatists who emerged through the shōgekijō (small-scale youth theater) movement of the 1980s-2000s
Though he founded his theater troupe Gring in 1997, and with it specialized in detailed and realistic conversational plays, he also did a lot of writing and directing outside, gaining a reputation for being equally at home with small works and major commercial productions.
In 2009, however, Gring formally disbanded — a parting of the ways that Aoki, 47, described in our recent Japan Times interview, saying, "If you think of it like a married couple, we thought we'd want to get back together if we lived apart for a while — but we started to like being alone, so we got a divorce."