Theatre
On the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Hisashi Inoue’s great postwar play The Face of Jizo recounts a horrific event with profound humanity. By Chantal Nguyen.
The Face of Jizo two-hander relives Hiroshima bombing
Eighty years ago, at 8.15am on an ordinary Monday morning in summer, a plane flew over an unsuspecting city and dropped a bomb. Those gazing upwards in surprise saw – for just a moment – what looked like two suns dancing in the sky: a portent of the unnatural chaos the bomb would unleash in a fury of fire, radiation and atomic wind. By 8.16am the world had changed forever.
The city was, of course, Hiroshima, and in August Japanese communities around the world commemorated the 80th anniversary. In Sydney at the Seymour Centre, Omusubi Productions is remounting its sold-out 2023 production of The Face of Jizo. Hailed by literary critic Saiichi Maruya as one of Japan’s greatest postwar plays, it was written by the famed playwright Hisashi Inoue and translated into English by his Sydney-based friend Roger Pulvers. As intimate and heartwarming as it is expansive and heart-wrenching, this tender, poignant production is about the importance of storytelling, first love, the aftershocks of war and a father–daughter bond stronger than death.
The Face of Jizo begins as gentle drama, sidestepping the horror of war to open on a snug domestic scene three years after the bombing, with a father and daughter bantering about daily life in Hiroshima.
The daughter is 23-year-old Mitsue Fukuyoshi (Mayu Iwasaki, who also produced the play). On the outside Mitsue seems the perfect picture of youthful womanhood. She goes to work every day at the local library, where she tells folk stories to children. Her sweetness catches the romantic devotion of an eligible young professor, and her surname even begins with fuku (福) meaning “luck”. But inside Mitsue is eaten up by survivor’s guilt, more inclined to keep company with the ghosts of the past than to open her heart to love and hope.
Her father, Takezo (veteran actor Shingo Usami, who also co-directed the play with David Lynch and baked the Japanese buns that feature in the first scene), is earthy, humorous and affectionate. Widowed when Mitsue was “just a tiny baby”, his fatherly support is undying. He makes bad dad jokes, recites even worse poetry, dances about her apartment, dons an apron to help with housework and tells stories to cheer her up, all while offering sage paternal advice. His job, he says, is to help her re-embrace living and accept the happiness that will allow him to move on from her life.
The two-hander play takes place completely in Mitsue’s apartment. While other productions have re-created a full-stage, dreary postwar set, this production opts for a cosy, modern design (Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s set and Matt Cox’s lighting), cocooning the audience in the warmth of family life. We hear the patter of raindrops through a leaky roof, the slap of shoes and the chopping of a carrot in the kitchen.
Lynch and Usami’s direction avoids the heaviness of war, making each scene light and radiant with the affection of the father-daughter bond. This makes the bomb’s ultimate rending of that bond – portrayed in flashbacks guaranteed to leave not a single dry eye in the house – all the more devastating. The monstrous scale of destruction is tightly rendered with the same personal detailing that just moments earlier made family life so vivid. The impact is sudden, gut-wrenching and far more sophisticated and visceral than large-scale postwar epics such as last year’s hyped Counting and Cracking.
Usami – who was nominated for director and performer awards for the 2023 season – is a delight as Takezo. Usually relegated to playing “bad, mean Japanese soldiers” in Australian war pieces, he takes full advantage of this rare opportunity to portray a fully realised Asian character, shifting easily between Takezo’s slapstick irreverence and his profound pathos at the effects of the bomb. Usami’s playfulness is the foil to Iwasaki’s elegant, thoughtful Mitsue, whose bereavement and gentle resilience is impossible not to feel. Their chemistry makes the play sparkle with light and shadow.
In an impressive feat of bilingual memory, both actors perform Inoue’s original Japanese-language version in separate performances as part of the same season. The opportunity to watch the same play in two languages highlights its multifaceted capacities. Inoue famously wrote the Japanese version entirely in the Hiroshima dialect – fiendishly different to his own native Yamagata dialect – to capture the cultural and linguistic identity of 1940s Hiroshima, imbuing the original script with deep postwar historicity.
Iwasaki and Usami were coached in the Hiroshima dialect by translator and bomb survivor Keiko Ogura, who celebrated her eighth birthday just before the bomb fell. Ogura is philosophical about the “invisible scars” borne by survivors and drew on her own experiences to inform the rehearsal process – the kinds of horrors no eight-year-old should ever witness, such as burnt survivors descending on her house gasping only one desperate word: “mizu” (水), water.
Unfortunately, the subtitles at the Japanese-language premiere were so poorly timed that I would recommend audiences stick to the English performances unless they are fluent enough to have no need for subtitles.
In contrast, Pulvers’ English translation bears little trace of dialect and is modern and relatable. While Usami’s portrayal of Takezo remains impressively consistent no matter which language he is speaking, Iwasaki undergoes a fascinating linguistic-theatrical shift – her Mitsue seems a little more demure and traditional in the Hiroshima dialect, more modern and sassier in English.
Iwasaki has spoken previously about how important it is that Australian audiences relate to the play, given current global conflicts and their impact on what she describes as “the voice that isn’t heard”: families, women and children.
For the 2023 premiere, she was anxious that no one would be interested in a play by two Asian actors on a difficult theme. “But the Australian audiences really welcomed us,” she says. “They cried with us and laughed with us. We are feeling that Australian people are open to bilingual plays on challenging themes and meaningful theatre as not an escape but a chance to ignite conversation.” Usami recalls a performance where the front row appeared to be asleep, but they were actually bent over sobbing, too affected to stand up.
Modern Japanese theatre is rare in Australia. With a script, direction and actors as heartwarming as this production, it is a hugely enriching addition to the country’s theatre scene.
The Face of Jizo is playing at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, until September 7.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "The hidden face of war".
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