Hisashi Inoue's death at the age of 75 on April 9, 2010, at his home in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, was a major event in the postwar Japanese theater world. It moved many dramatists to stage works by the great author and playwright who combined comedy and searing social and political commentary into unique productions.

Within months of the anti-establishment figure, and lifelong chain-smoker, succumbing to lung cancer, several of his plays opened at major theaters in Tokyo, elsewhere in Japan and abroad — with many addressing the looming threat he foresaw to Japan's postwar pacifism, as well as perhaps drawing on his experience of growing up in an orphanage after his businessman father, who campaigned for tenant farmers' rights to buy their land, died in 1939 after periods in police custody.

The New National Theatre, for one, presented Inoue's powerful Tokyo War Crimes Trials trilogy comprising "Yume no Sakeme" ("A Crack in the Dream"), "Yume no Namida" ("Tears of the Dream") and "Yume no Kasabuta" ("Scab of the Dream").

Another of the city's public theaters, Za Koenji in Suginami Ward, staged "Keshou" ("Make Up"), his one-woman play about a traveling entertainer always wondering if the son she gave up for adoption will one day recognize her on stage.

In addition, with support from the major production company Horipro, Komatsuza — Inoue's own Tokyo-based theater company — made its first foreign tours in May and July that year, with London and New York stagings, respectively, of "Musashi."

In that renowned work, Inoue portrays the imaginary consequences of a storied duel fought in 1612 between the great swordsmen Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1645) and Kojiro Sasaki, imaging that instead of Kojiro dying, as history records, he recovers from his wounds and launches a campaign of vengeance that sparks an expanding but pointless round of killings.

Speaking to this writer after Inoue's death, stage maestro Yukio Ninagawa — who directed "Musashi" (which, before going to New York, was also staged at Saitama Arts Theater outside Tokyo, where he was and remains artistic director) — said, "Both of us have been dedicated to Japanese theater for almost the same length of time and I now feel robbed of an eminent comrade-in-arms. In great and meaningful ways, Inoue put forward his fierce criticism against the postwar state of Japan, and he did so with a tremendous energy."

While many theater people both mourned and missed the great man in those days, his third daughter, Maya Inoue, was also somewhat apprehensive about having to run the Komatsuza company on her own without the help of her father.

Established in 1983 with the aim of staging its founder's canon of some 70-odd plays, the company — which comprises a core cast of actors, directors and technicians — typically stages between four and six plays a year in some 200 performances all over Japan.

For most of her life, Maya, who's now 47 and the remarried mother of daughters aged 18 and 21, never imagined she would ever be running her father's company. Then, one day in the late 1990s, she called her father, quivering with rage.

"I'd hardly been in touch with him since my parents divorced in 1987, as I'd seen how badly he treated my mother when I was in my teens," she told me when we met at a Tokyo rehearsal studio last week.

"However, a close family member had developed a mental disorder, and I called my father to blame him for that, as he'd never really cared for his family even though he was always concerned about lots of other people.

"I expected he would shout back at me, but instead he listened to me earnestly and told me I had become a mature person."

Afterward, her father contacted Maya frequently as they talked about that family crisis among other things, and she said he gave her valuable life advice as they gradually grew closer.

Then in April 2009, just a year before his death, he asked her to join Komatsuza to do the accounts — before making her the company's president that November.

For Maya, it was a real bolt from the blue.

"I was used to working in the hospitality business, such as in hotels and art galleries," she explained. "But then my father encouraged me to become involved with theater, saying it was the ultimate hospitality business to heal people's minds — so I could continue doing what I fundamentally wanted to do.

"Then I followed his advice as he told me precisely how I should plan the program for three years after his death.

"When I asked him, 'What should I do after that?' — he answered: 'Don't worry, I think you will see what you should do after those three years, but if you don't, you'll have reached your limit as a theater producer.' "

Now, as she embarks on her fifth year leading the company, she said that, like her father, she particularly wants to focus on Japan's evolution since World War II.

"Seventy years since that war ended in 1945, there's all this talk of changing the Constitution and (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe wanting to revise or abolish its (war-renouncing) Article 9, so I'm always wondering what my father would do if he were still alive," she said. "I believe it's important to infer his way of thinking from his own words, and luckily he left lots of guidelines in his writing.

"For example, he often talked about Article 9. Once he even wrote a children's book titled 'Kodomoni Tsutaeru Nihonkoku Kenpo' ('The Constitution We Want to Pass on to the Children'), saying there that the word 'constitution' could be said to mean 'the form of this country' — and stressing that it should be 'our' form that we want for this country, not an imposed Constitution.

"So he said that Japanese people need to discuss this together and take responsibility themselves. But as he wasn't an activist or politician, I'm sure he would be trying to find the best way to respond to the current swing to the right in politics through staging plays with Komatsuza."

However, the longer she stays at the helm, the more Maya is bound to put her own stamp on the company.

"My father insisted on the importance of establishing Komatsuza's own style," she said. "So I am setting a target to establish my new style in the first 10 years."

Asked to elaborate, she explained, "I recently realized that Komatsuza has a unique position in Japan, which is becoming more and more polarized with a widening gap between rich and poor.

"So in today's theater world, while famous actors and so-called idols are given starring roles to sell out expensive tickets in advance for long-running shows designed purely as light entertainment, other small companies — usually made up of young people concerned about political and social issues — can usually only afford to finance runs of a few days playing to a niche market paying not much for tickets.

"In Komatsuza's case, we tour all over Japan to reach as many people as possible, and I want us to maintain a middle position appealing to people across the board — but staging political and social works in line with my father's mission."

In particular, Maya said her prime targets are middle-aged and retired people — those baby-boom generations who have spent their entire lives working, with little time to partake of any culture, much less enjoy theater.

Although she realizes it's a big ask to attract them to cutting-edge plays, she said she believes such people are able to relate to her father's works as they reflect concerns in their own lives — and because his rubric as a writer was to express difficult things in easy-to-understand terms, easy things profoundly, and profound things interestingly.

In addition, she said, "I want them to go home and tell their families and children about the plays."

Nonetheless, the company president conceded, "We also need to pose fresh challenges to keep regular, repeat audience members happy.

"Hence I hope this month's upcoming 'Gesakusha Meimeiden' ('The Lives of Writers of Light Literature in the Edo Period') — which the rising young playwright and director Kenji Higashi created for Komatsuza from two of my father's novels — will make events in that relatively recent feudal era in Japan connect vividly with people's lives today. That's not only because it tells the story of authors losing their lives simply for satirizing the ruling regime's injustice and highlighting its suppression of freedoms and expression, but also because it asks about the meaning of what they did."

Then, sharing something very personal, Maya added, "My favorite line of all of my father's plays goes, 'Do you have a beautiful tomorrow in your mind, a beautiful tomorrow in your heart somewhere?'

"That comes from a song in his hit 1970 play 'Omoteura Gennai Kaeru Gassen' ('Different Sides of Gennai the Frog's Battle'), which is about the life of the brilliant Edo Period (1603-1867) naturalist and playwright Gennai Hiraga," she explained, "and I think it says everything my father wanted to say.

"My understanding of those lines is that if someone wants to follow the authorities' view, let them do so — though for the sake of basic human dignity, everyone must have the right to imagine their beautiful tomorrow.

"So now I'm looking to meet fresh and amazingly talented people to break through to the core of my father's work, just as many young directors are now creating new approaches to Shakespeare for their beautiful tomorrows."

"Gesakusha Meimeiden" runs May 24 to June 14 at Kinokuniya Southern Theater in Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, then on June 20 it moves to Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Nishinomiya. "Chichi to Kuraseba" ("The Face of Jizo") runs July 6-20 at Kinokuniya Southern Theater. For more information, call 03-3851-5165 or visit www.komatsuza.co.jp.