Essayist, novelist and playwright Hisashi Inoue, who passed away at age 75 in 2010, is one of Japan’s most popular and most prolific writers of the 20th century, yet remains largely untranslated — among over 200 works, English translations can be counted on two hands.
His play “Chichi to Kuraseba,” or “The Face of Jizo” in English, is a notable exception, translated into several languages, such as French, Italian and Chinese, and performed in small, local productions across Europe and Russia, with a handful of staged readings in North America.
This year, a staging of the play in Sydney, Australia, by Omusubi Productions and the Seymour Centre marks the first major English production in an English-speaking country. The play’s translator, Roger Pulvers, who’s also a writer, filmmaker and lifelong friend of Inoue’s, was an excited witness to the play’s preliminary staging.
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