Two years ago, 32-year-old director/translator Eriko Ogawa returned to Japan after 10 years in New York and presented a riveting production of "The Late Henry Moss," Sam Shepard's 2000 Pulitzer prize-winning tale of loves and hatreds in a frontier family way out West.
Though still a virtual unknown in her homeland, that debut work in Japan earned Ogawa the Odashima Yushi Award, a prestigious 2010 drama-translation prize.
By 2011, the Japanese drama world really got to know her face when Ogawa walked away with the much coveted Yomiuri Drama Award for three plays she directed that year — her original adaptation of the epic courtroom drama "Twelve Angry Men" by Reginald Rose, J.B. Priestley's classic thriller, "An Inspector Calls," and gay-themed "Pride" by the rising English writer Alexi Kaye Campbell.