Photo from the performance
Mishima's women
Yukio Mishima belonged to the group of modern Japanese writers who were most consciously and thoroughly Westernised in their literary background. At the same time, these writers tried eagerly to regain their Japanese identity by determinately identifying themselves with the all too self-consciously purified image of the Japanese tradition.
Mishima was by far one of the most controversial. On November 25, 1970 he committed the ritual suicide seppuku, at the age of forty five.
This production contains images of the womanhood found in Mishima's modern Noh plays - not a solid, unified image, but a collection of multiple images of the eternally feminine as conceived in Mishima's mind.
Mishima's Woman also takes on another dimension. The director, Mannojo Nomura, is a member of the gret historic Noh-Kyogen family who have preserved and handed down the living tradition of the Noh-Kyogen theatre for six-hundred years from generation to generations.