"The word 'home' comes from the Nordic and Germanic languages and means a place of comfort, a warm fire and a place to sleep," said Colleen Lanki, artistic director of Kee Company, a Tokyo-based bilingual theater group.

In her research for Kee Company's most recent production, "Home," Lanki discovered an even wider range of definitions of home, especially in Japanese.

"We tried to translate 'home' but found it has no Japanese equivalent," said Lanki. "It requires three words: ie -- ancestors' family house; uchi -- where you live with your immediate family; and ibasho -- place of being, place of your heart."

Kee Company presented yet another definition of home in its June 1-3 production at Theater X in Ryogoku. Characters combined movement, music and text as they raced around a bare stage in a frantic search for home. They buzzed between appointments, hung like sardines from train straps and never quite arrived at feeling comfortable in the places they called home. Even a house became less a place to recharge batteries than to lick wounds and act out family battles.

"Home" follows four characters: a foreign interior designer who gives advice to her client; a salaryman obsessed with his goldfish bowl; a young woman who can't quite find the apartment she's looking for at a price she can afford; and a homeless courier clutching at an undeliverable package.

Is this how we feel in Tokyo? Always searching? Never really comfortable with our lives, or where we live?

"Home" is a bilingual production, with the Western actors speaking in English, the Japanese responding in Japanese. Unless those in the audience are bilingual, some of the lines could be easily missed. However, the alienation these characters feel comes through loud and clear.

Similarly, when high school students in Vancouver (Lanki's hometown) were asked to come up with their definition of home, the feeling of unease turned out to be surprisingly universal.

"In my home I have a chair and a guitar. I live in the guitar I play. It provides me with a place to stay when I need to come back from each long day," Malcolm Biddle, one of the students, wrote in response to his teacher's assignment.

"Home is where you hang your heart," wrote another student. "I remember sitting in my grandmother's kitchen and staring up at the wood paneling. There on the wall hung a garishly painted sign stating: 'Home is where you hang your heart.' I always thought this statement was nice enough but wasn't always true.

"In your teen years you spend much time devoted to thinking of ways to escape the grasp of home. Anything to break free of its clutches, but at the same time -- well, for me anyway -- there is an ever-present fear of what's beyond home. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but I know it's there."

For another student, domestic shortcomings overshadowed her relationship to home. "My home is a place where black pants are quickly turned white from dog hair. In my home, rugs are placed strategically to cover spills and stains, and a sheet on the chesterfield hides the areas my cat chose as a scratching post. Neither the floor of my bedroom or the top of my desk have been seen for years, and one of the angel stencils on my wall doesn't quite match the rest."

In Tokyo, when asked the same question, a Japanese woman in her 50s, perhaps unwittingly, talked about the transient feeling that many foreigners know too well.

"Home is a place where I grew up and where my parents were, but now that they are gone I feel differently. I remember the strange feeling I often had every time I moved. I've changed places 10 times or so. Once I moved out of a place with all the things that belonged to me. The place was just an empty space, which did not make me feel like going back at all. Since then I began to think home can be anywhere I exist."

Actress Eriko Shibata summed up this feeling in the final line of "Home" when she said: "Watashi ga watashi no ibasho nan da (I am my own home)."