O n Friday, April 9, Hisashi Inoue died at the age of 75, and with his passing Japan lost its most brilliant playwright.
Hisashi ¡ª I shall use his given name, as we both always used our given names together ¡ª 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 ¡ª 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.
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