Takahiro Fujita was really looking forward to the new year in 2016. He'd already been honored when dramatist supreme Yukio Ninagawa asked him to write a play for him to direct. Now, they were each set to stage separate versions of "Nina's Cotton," that new work inspired by the life of Japan's worldwide theater icon.
But it was not to be, as Ninagawa died, aged 80, of pneumonia on May 12.
Yet it's almost as if some of Ninagawa's special sparkle has rubbed off on this gifted 31-year-old playwright and director whose "Romeo and Juliet" — his first-ever Shakespeare production — opens soon in Tokyo. "I'd never thought to do Shakespeare before I started to work closely with Ninagawa and began wondering why he was so obsessed with those plays," Fujita said when we met in a rehearsal studio in downtown Tokyo last week.