• 父と暮らせば (The Face of Jizo)

7/16/25 (Wed)

The classic piece by the prolific Inoue Hisashi about a woman in post-war Hiroshima with a bad case of survivor’s guilt who is visited by the ghost of her father. The immensely popular show, known in English as The Face of Jizo or more literally (and better) as Living With Father, has been revived at least 17 times in Japan in addition to numerous foreign-language productions (including a Japanese reading this month in NY) since its premiere in 1994 by Komatsu-za. That was directed as today by Uyama Hitoshi, so I assume this more or less follows the original staging. It’s being presented just a month before the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing. It is the first in Inoue’s trilogy of post-war life along with Okinawa-based Army on a Tree, whose film version has just been released, and Nagasaki-based Living With Mother.

We are in Hiroshima in 1948. A librarian who survived the atomic bombing through a quirk of fate is struggling with her memory of the horrors that she saw and her guilt for having lived despite the gruesome death of her friends and family. As she runs into the house terrified on a lightning-filled night, her father emerges from the closet to comfort her. We quickly gather that this is in fact the ghost of her father, who died in the bombing three years earlier.

Their conversation reveals that she has a suitor from another town who is collecting artifacts and information linked to the event, even as the victims themselves seek to dispose of everything that may remind them of that day. Only someone who experienced the horrors, she feels, could even begin to understand them, and only someone from the outside could possibly want to remember them. While her activities include conveying old stories and traditions to children specifically in order to preserve the national heritage, she is unable to bring herself to help the suitor in his quest to pass down the history of the bombing.

Furthermore, she resists his clear personal interest in her in the belief that she has no right to happiness for having survived the ordeal when so many died. She notes that she lived only because she happened to drop a letter that she was sending to a friend, picking it up behind a protective stone lantern at the very instant the bomb went off. She can’t stop obsessing about that friend, who did not make it, even treasuring a pencil that they shared. In the back-and-forth with her ever-positive father, she comes to the realization that the important thing is to carry on and live. When he snaps the precious pencil in half, it seems to awaken her to the need to free herself from her attachments. She can be seen at the end preparing for a visit from her suitor as her contented father slips away.

Japanese reviews tend to concentrate on the horrors of the atomic bombing itself, a view, it should be said, that was encouraged by Inoue in his program notes and elsewhere. But the show seemed to me more about dealing with grief and moving on with one’s life.

The Hiroshima accent added tremendously to the atmosphere. It would have been a different experience in standard Japanese. The characters refer to the bomb interestingly as pika, an onomatopoeia indicating the blinding light emanating from it, rather than naming it outright. References to “atomic bomb sickness” (原爆病) are translated in the English text as radiation sickness, but I think the idea here is that the sickness is at least partly psychological, reflected in her inability to accept the suitor’s pure intentions and her conviction that her life is not worthy. The father in fact mentions survivor’s guilt explicitly. That is, her big problem isn’t the effects of the radiation but the trauma that has come from that, a form of PTSD in modern lingo. Hopefully future translations will handle that better. (The published English version is generally rather old-fashioned. I hope they’re not using that for foreign productions.)

Japanese frequently use ghosts in their plays, so this was part of a long tradition. I think her back-and-forth with the visiting spirit can be interpreted as her struggling with her conscience and essentially speaking to herself, and that’s backed up by Inoue himself. The father’s urging for his daughter to get married was rather Ozu-like, as with his mention of grandchildren, but of course the point isn’t the marriage itself but the need for her to move forward.

The dialogue, as always with Inoue, is snappy and fun. There are some overwrought lines (looking at the statue’s melted face: “Ah, it’s father on the day the bomb dropped!”), and their precise recounting of long-ago conversations (“I said, ‘XX’, then you said, ‘YY’”) sounded phony at times. The Jizo head with the melted face, intended as a symbol of the bomb’s destruction, was too small on stage to have the proper impact; the playwright felt compelled to have the daughter explain it later. Still, their lively exchanges overall handle the sensitive material nicely without emotional pandering.

Matsukado Yohei as the father was a perfect Showa Era character, like a Hiroshima version of Tora-san, and Seto Saori remained admirably free of sentimentality. The unfortunate jaunty Western music between scenes was random and inappropriate to the subject, but background music is always a problem in Japanese theater. (I complained about Inoue’s use of music in one of his shows to a restaurant operator in my neighborhood, who turned out to be the playwright’s brother. Told of my observations, Inoue was apparently impressed – not that he did anything about it.)

The subsequent movie version reportedly shows us the suitor, but I like the imagined version here as well as the claustrophobic setting maintained strictly within the home. Numerous bloggers have said that the show left them in tears, and while it didn’t have that effect on me, it was a superb rendition of a worthy theme.