SOTOBA KOMACHI

About the show

Japanese Nō drama is one of the world’s great medieval art forms. In the 1950s, Yukio Mishima — a controversial but immense figure of postwar literature — infused new life into the form by adapting 5 traditional Nō stories into contemporary plays. They preserve Nō’s magical and revelatory roots but are, at the same time, utterly modern and intelligible to today. This is one of them. Mishima’s Sotoba Komachi is a strikingly beautiful ghost story about love and aging. Komachi is 99 years old. Her clothes smell, her hair has lice and she is alone. But when a young poet meets her in a park we discover that, in her past life, she was quite the opposite. What follows is an enthralling and magical exploration of age and our perception of beauty...