Agenda

Okada Toshiki’s New Noh
21 maggio 2026, 15.45
Aula Magna Silvio Trentin, Ca’ Dolfin

Speaker: Prof. M. Cody Poulton
Moderator: Katja Centonze

Abstract
“The stage is a place where ghosts can be seen” (Okada Toshiki, Ground and Floor).
Arguably the most important Japanese playwright and director on the international stage today, Okada Toshiki (b. 1973) rose to fame with the Kishida Kunio Drama Award-winning Five Days in March in 2005.
His book The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed (Watashitachi ni yurusareta tokubetsu na jikan no owari), which included a fictionalized version of Five Days in March, won the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize in 2008. Other literary prizes have followed, including the Yomiuri Drama Prize in 2021 and the Mishima Yukio Prize in 2022. He has been active in both Germany and the US, staging new work since 2006.
The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011 profoundly affected his creative work, beginning with Current Location (Genzaichi, 2012), Ground and Floor (2013), and Time’s Journey Through a Room (2016). All works are haunted by the spirits of the dead.
Okada’s debt to nō dramaturgy was made explicit with Nō Theater, a production of two new plays he premiered with the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2018. More recently he followed up with four new plays: Zaha and Tsuruga (2021), and Sango and Maruyama-chō (2026). These were presented in a series called Unrequited Ghosts and Monsters (Miren no yūrei to kaibutsu).
This year he also published a modern Japanese translation of Zeami’s classic nō treatises, Fūshikaden and Sandō.
I will focus in particular on the last four plays, tracing his evolution as a playwright and how the dramaturgy of nō theatre becomes a means to articulate the meaning of disaster and loss.

M. Cody Poulton
Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, Cody Poulton is currently Resident Director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies.
Poulton specializes in Japanese performance and is the author of numerous studies on and translations of Japanese theatre. He has translated kabuki and contemporary Japanese drama for multivolume series such as Kabuki Plays on Stage and Half a Century of Japanese Theater.
He is co-editor (with Mitsuya Mori and J. Thomas Rimer) of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (2014) and served as contributing editor to The Cambridge History of Japanese Theatre (2015).
He is editor and chief translator of Citizens of Tokyo: Six Plays, by Oriza Hirata (Seagull Press, 2019), and co-editor (with Peter Eckersall, Barbara Geilhorn, and Andreas Regelsberger) of Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre (Performance Research Books, 2021).
His most recent publications include a translation of a play by Betsuyaku Minoru in Asian Theatre Journal (Spring 2025) and two short stories by Izumi Kyōka in Japanese Language and Literature (Spring 2026).