2003 Volume 41 Pages 41-57
What is new about TSUKA Kôhei's plays? He was born in 1948, in the middle of the so called “period of baby-boom” after the World War II. When he was a student in Tokyo in the late 1960s, he witnessed many new plays by new avant-garde playwrights. He learned a lot from them, but refused their concept of history. They tried to visualize on the stage postwar history, in which their characters lived their own lives. But Tsuka's characters are free from that history and live on their own. Instead of history, bodies and passions make drama. Thus, for example, his play, Hiryuden, shows the students' revolt in the late 60s, which he experienced as a student, not as a fact but as a parody of it. A fact is criticized by means of a fiction. The play shows not past history, but a possible history. It is, nevertheless, a history, his history of the 60s, which, however, he could see only on the stage.
