“Among the feelings that invaded me during the few days after the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima disaster, not only was there sadness, unease, and fear, there was also hope. Surely such an unprecedented event would prove the first step for us to rise up as a society and realise changes that would otherwise be too difficult to make. That’s how I felt at the time. I wanted to portray the relationship between the living and the spirits who met their deaths in these circumstances while full of hope for the future. The lives of the dead have already completed their cycle and stabilised. We who continue to live envy them. We are tormented; we want to escape from there, forever trying to forget.”

Toshiki Okada, April 2016

In response to the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the theatrical vision of playwright Toshiki Okada shifted toward an exploration of the validity of fiction. This shift led to the staging of Current Location (2012) and Ground and Floor (2013), which allegorically portrayed the sense of tension and isolation in Japanese society in the wake of the disaster.

While again taking the post-disaster social situation as its theme, Time’s Journey Through a Room is an extremely meticulous scrutiny of the mental conflicts and arbitrary emotions of individuals preceding their social alienation. It expands upon these observations, bringing onto the stage new, unprecedented presentations from which they have been derived. The feelings that welled up in the breasts of people in Japan in the days right after the disaster struck were not confined to grief and unease; there was also a sprinkling of hope that ‘things would get better’ as a result. Those who today go on living, when it is no longer possible to have hope, are tormented by its pure and simple expression through the ghosts of the ones who died still embracing that kind of hope for the future. It makes them want to plug their ears and turn away. By way of Okada’s script and the physical movements of the actors, which reach new heights of intensity, the invisible mental anguish and pain are fused into a closely-knit and multi-layered relationship with the sound and space designed by contemporary artist Tsuyoshi Hisakado, who suffuses these elements with subtle shading. The manner in which the whole is presented makes it appear as though the piece is directed into the emotions, bound to deeply move those who see it.

The finely tuned approaches to the respective media of words, body, sound, and space come together on stage and wash over the audience in a wave. The work is nothing less than an interlude for each of its members to confront his or her own memories and experiences.