Hirata Oriza on the Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature … and Theatre Too

One of Japan's leading playwrights and stage directors, Hirata Oriza (b. 1962) won the 2018 Tsuruya Nanboku Prize for his stage adaptation of Takahashi Gen'ichirō's (b. 1951) novel The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature. In August 2019, Hirata gave a public lecture at the downtown Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University that, in touching on this play, discussed the social and political forces behind Japan's creation of modern literature, theatre, and music since the Meiji Era (1868–1912). Hirata's talk was a kid-gloved punch at reactionary forces in Japan today that are attempting to quash freedom of expression. NOTE: In this review I follow the traditional order for Japanese names: family name first, followed by personal name.