• 母と暮らせば (Living With Mother), 7/25/25 (Fri)
• 木の上の軍隊 (Soldiers in a Tree), 7/25/25 (Fri)

Set respectively in Nagasaki and Okinawa, these are the final two dramas in what is considered Inoue Hisashi’s trilogy of post-war life along with Hiroshima-based Living With Father (aka The Face of Jizo), which I saw on stage last week. Today’s shows are archive films of the stage productions, shown as a special tribute on the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. The description “trilogy” is deceptive: while Inoue did plan the shows, his hugely popular Father of 1994, which became his signature piece, was the only one he actually wrote. The other two were picked up after his death based on his notes. The first, Soldiers in a Tree (I’m using this inside of the clumsy official title Army on a Tree), is a three-person show dating from 2013; the one presented today is the 2016 revival. The movie version, which I saw in a sneak preview several weeks ago, has just been released in Japan. In contrast, Living With Mother was first released as a movie in 2015 by the venerable Yamada Yoji under the rather maudlin English title Nagasaki: Memories of My Son (which Japan unsuccessfully nominated as its Oscar candidate), and only then adapted into a two-person stage show in 2018. The stage production was revived in 2021 and 2024, both with the original members, and it is the latter being shown today.

Mother: Whereas Father was about a guilt-ridden Hiroshima woman visited by the ghost of her father three years after his death from the atomic bomb, Mother is about a guilt-ridden Nagasaki woman visited by the ghost of her son three years after his death from the atomic bomb. Moreover, both women’s activities involve the younger generation (the former a librarian and school assistant, the latter a midwife). Talk about déjà vu. As suspected, the latter is largely a recap of the themes pursued in the earlier and better piece. The Hiroshima daughter, having lost her entire family, is pushed by her boisterous father to accept the hand of a suitor and move on with life, while the Nagasaki mother, devastated by the loss of her entire family, is encouraged by her worried son to return to her profession as a midwife and move on with life.

An interesting variation here is that the grieving mother is Christian. That is entirely plausible given the setting: Nagasaki was the only allowed entry point for foreigners into Japan for centuries and was a Christian center, many of its churches now given World Heritage status by UNESCO. The mother asks tearfully why God didn’t stop the madness, wondering if the deity was on America’s side. She concludes powerfully, “God wasn’t in Nagasaki that day” (“神様はなぜお止めなされんかった？神様はアメリカの味方ね？あの日の長崎に、神様はおらんかった”). That brings to mind another Nagasaki-based work, Endo Shusaku’s Silence, where the priest asks God in vain to speak out about suffering of His persecuted believers. The play doesn’t pursue this in depth, which seems an opportunity missed, but its inclusion does add an extra dimension.

The concept of the midwife, someone who brings new life into the world, is an attractive metaphor here. But the talky script by Hatasawa Seigo lacks the adept comic touch that Inoue used to balance out the more serious scenes. It has some sitcom lines, like the old “What do you mean how do I feel? I’m dead!” that have been around at least since I Love Lucy and Fiddler (I stole it myself for A Kabuki Xmas Carol), but it fails to set or maintain the proper tone for that. As a result, the show slips into over-earnestness.

The boy’s initial appearance is rather solemn with a soft, “Mom, it’s me.” I can understand him not wanting to frighten her, being a ghost and all that, but it’s dramatically inert; for her part, she barely reacts. The boy doesn’t come across as a distinctive personality despite the endless dialogue. The one big exception was his haunting description/reenactment of his agonizing death in an exceptionally well played scene. As he screams, the mother offers him water to quench his burning thirst, which as a ghost he can’t drink; she drinks it instead on his behalf. Having studied medicine, he notes that the mother herself doesn’t look well, then tells her that he has prepared a cure for her ills. She drinks it and spits it out, realizing that it is no more than heavily salted water. That represents, I presume, a way to shock her into realizing that the cure for her ills is inside her. There’s an implication that her physical bomb scars are one reason that she doesn’t want to return to midwifing, which is a copout. I imagine it’s her emotional scars that are really holding her back, and I wish they had left it at that. The ghostly son tells her that in fact he’s always been there with her and, urging her to live the life that he couldn’t (a line lifted directly from Father), disappears. The saltwater remains, i.e., it’s not imaginary, an indication that she poured it herself and has dreamed the entire encounter. She carefully takes out her medical instruments in a sign that she will go back to her midwifing duties and move forward. The show ends humorously when, just to make sure, she tries the over-salted water again and spits it out.

The message of rebounding from tragedy and embracing life is fine, but Inoue’s comic approach in Father was more effective. On the plus side, the show offered terrific performances by the seasoned Tomita Yasuko and Matsushita Kohei. A dignified Tomita ably managed to avoid sentimentality as the grieving mother despite some sappy moments in the script. Matsushita was more conventional in his approach, but his rendering of the bomb experience was alone worth the price of admission. The lighting effects also deserve special mention.

Tree: As in the film, the show, set on a small island off Okinawa, is a riff on the true story of an officer from Kyushu and a native Okinawan soldier who pursued the enemy from the safety of a tree until mid 1947 without realizing that the war had ended two years earlier. The show adds a female character who variously narrates, portrays other characters, and sings Okinawan-sounding songs. The men await reinforcements from Tokyo as they watch in discomfort while the Americans dig in and build a huge camp. The loyal officer refuses initially to touch the food that the young soldier has pilfered from the enemy, seeing that as a betrayal of the nation’s ideals, while the soldier is less concerned with loyalty to the nation and emperor than with the pangs of his stomach. When they eventually receive word that the war is over, the officer initially considers it a trap, unwilling to entertain the possibility that Japan has lost. He is finally won over by the simple soldier’s uncomplicated acceptance of life as it is rather than some impossible ideal.

The idea of the soldiers fighting their imaginary war, true or not, is great Theatre of the Absurd, and the script is thankfully not overly preachy on that point. Unlike the film, it does not concern itself with how the soldiers got there, dismissing that nicely in a few sentences. By eliminating other characters, it manages largely to avoid sentiment (unlike, say, the movie death of the soldier’s lifelong friend), forcing us to imagine the horrors and tensions that drove them to remain in the tree. The dialogue is an improvement over the earnestness of Mother, though it was polished to even better effect in the later film. The female character seems entirely unnecessary, mainly plugging in narrative gaps that should have been addressed in the dialogue. On the plus side, her singing was nice, accompanied by an onstage instrumentalist.

Matsushita Kohei again starred as the soldier, while the officer was played by Yamanishi Jun. Yamanishi ably handled the rather stereotypical role of the narrow-minded military man devoted only to killing and winning, and Matsushita did well enough as the naïve soldier wanting only to go home. The piece felt better handled in the portions of the film restricted strictly to the two soldiers, and hopefully those good parts can be incorporated into any revival of the stage work.