The highly-acclaimed young playwright Matsuda Masataka has written a series of plays that are set in his own native Nagasaki. His style, which highlights the inner world of people living in Nagasaki through conversations that are casual and unsentimental, once again makes a vivid impression in HAHATACHI NO KUNIE (Towards the Mothers' Country), written in 2001 to address the theme of "An Era and Memory." Nagasaki is a land of faith, a land connected to the continent on the other side of the ocean, and also a city that achieved remarkable reconstruction after being devastated by the atomic bomb. Striving to link this historical reality to the present day, Matsuda wrote a long play called NAMIDA NO TANI, GINGA NO OKA (The Valley of Tears, The Hill of the Milky Way), which could be considered the culmination of his past efforts.
The setting is the Urakami district of Nagasaki, which had been burnt to the ground, in the winter of 1945. Four sisters and their baby brother return to Japan from Korea with nothing except the clothes on their backs. The play looks at how the four sisters and brother, as well as others who they came into contact with along the way, carved out a life for themselves while being tossed about the current of the times that stretched from Japan's wartime defeat through the period of rapid economic growth and up to the present day, continually holding out hope for change but being disappointed its results. In the turbulent sixties, the sisters and brother continue to ponder the question of how to live, at times drifting along with destiny, and at other times defying this fate. Focusing on the path that these characters took, the play looks back at the history of postwar Japan from a new perspective.
A dramatic world is conceived for the large space of the Playhouse. As a drama that deals with large groups of people and spans a long period of time "NAMIDA NO TANI, GINGA NO OKA is an attempt to dynamically break new ground never seen before in Matsuda's plays. The director will be Kuriyama Tamiya, Artistic Director for the NNTT's Drama Division, who has worked with the playwright since the plan for the performance of the play at the theatre was conceived. In directing, Kuriyama has always tried to grasp the essence of a play's written words, and at the same time construct what lies between the lines into a beautiful spatial world that merges with art and music. It will be quite interesting to see what dramatic space will be created when Kuriyama confronts the spiritual world particular to the playwright, which underlies human dramas he depicts. The actors and actresses appearing in the play, starting with those who play the four sisters, are all talented and active on the stage, as well as in movies and on television, and have had a strong influence on both the playwright and the director. NAMIDA NO TANI, GINGA NO OKA fits perfectly with the NNTT Playhouse's on-going theme of "An Era," and we hope you take the opportunity to be a witness to the birth of a play that might be considered the Japanese War and Peace.