For playwright and director Ryuta Horai, the last two years have been a nonstop whirl of activity since "Mahoroba" ("A splendid location") — his drama about four generations of women in a traditional rural family meeting up and feuding — won the highly prestigious Kishida Kunio Award for best play in 2009.
At that time, Horai, now 35, was already one of the country's most sought-after stage writers and directors, but since then offers of work — for the stage, television and movies — have been flooding in. And that's all on top of his writing and directing for Modern Swimmers, the company he co-founded with fellow student Yoshimasa Nishijo when they graduated from the Butai Geijutsu Gakuin (Performing Arts Academy) in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, in 1999.
To date, that's a pretty good resume for the Hyogo Prefecture native who says he only joined his high school's theater club because it seemed an easier way to get a few credits than joining a sports club — but he was then bitten by the stage bug.