Japanese Literary Awards

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Kishida Theater Award きしだえんげきしょう

Edition 2 (1955)

Play

Winners

2 people

Shiroari no Su is a full-length play written by Yukio Mishima for Seinenza in 1955. Set on a coffee plantation in Brazil, it entangles a plantation-owner couple and a chauffeur couple in love, hatred, and suspicion, using the image of a termite nest to suggest desires that eat away at human beings from within.

A nest of love and hatred built on a Brazilian plantation quietly eats through the inside of human relationships.

305 pages
dramalove-hate conflictmarriageJapanese Brazil settingdesire and ruin

Tsuneari Fukuda's translation and staging of Hamlet was an important postwar Japanese rendering of Shakespearean tragedy. It brought the story of Prince Hamlet, who learns from his father's ghost of his uncle's crime and moves through doubt, feigned madness, love, and death, into a new theatrical form through both translation and direction.

A prize-recognized work that made Hamlet resonate on the postwar Japanese stage by treating translation and direction as one theatrical act.

284 pages
Shakespearetranslated dramarevenge tragedypostwar theatredoubt and madness