O n Friday, April 9, Hisashi Inoue died at the age of 75, and with his passing Japan lost its most brilliant playwright.
Hisashi — I shall use his given name, as we both always used our given names together — was my closest and dearest friend for more than 35 years. Numerous obituaries have already appeared in the media, but this is more of a personal reminiscence — and one that, I confess, has been difficult to write.
Hisashi was born in 1934 in Yamagata Prefecture, in the Tohoku region of northern Honshu, in a small town called Komatsu, known today as Kawanishi. When, in 1984, he founded his own theater organization in Tokyo dedicated to his work, he called it Komatsu-za, harking back to those provincial roots.