"People compare me with Bertolt Brecht, and I am glad to hear that — but why won't anyone call me Anton Inoue?"
According to those who knew him, this was an oft-made remark by Hisashi Inoue — Japan's foremost contemporary dramatist and author, whose April 9 death is still a raw wound among theater lovers — in reference to Russian playwright and short-story author Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), whose influence has made a deep impact on Japanese theater.
Indeed, Inoue's regard for the physician son of a grocer was such that he based one of the last plays he wrote, 2008's "Romance," on the life of Chekhov. He even fashioned that work in the vaudevillian style that Chekhov often used.