Seventy-six-year-old theater director Yukio Ninagawa is famed and honored the world over for his magnificently visualized stagings of Shakespeare and Ancient Greek tragedies — as well as modern Japanese plays.
He was awarded a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and has been invited to present his latest interpretation of "Cymbeline," at the World Shakespeare Festival in London this month.
Yet this lofty international figurehead of Japanese drama — who usually has at least two productions on the go — uncharacteristically betrays more than a hint of an apology for the outcome of his latest project, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's 2002 fantasy novel "Umibe no Kafka (Kafka on the Shore)"