Uchino Tadashi, professor in the department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo, is one of the foremost theorists and critics in the fields of theater and performance studies in Japan today. If a scholar wants to study contemporary or postwar Japanese theater, she will be sent immediately to speak with him. He is the only person who could have written this book, and not only because it is written directly in English by the author (rather than translated by others). The book opens a new field for English language scholarship on Japan: as a side effect of reading its essays, no matter what one's familiarity with the world of Japanese theater, one emerges with a mental map of twentieth-century Japanese theater history, with a detailed picture especially of the decades from 1980 to the present.
Yet Uchino (I want to write Professor Uchino, which shows the clash...