TEHRAN-The play “The Lady Aoi” written by Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima and directed by Sasan Riahipour is on stage at Aftab Theater in Ahvaz, Khuzestan Province.

Director Riahipour also acts in the play along with Forough Jalali, Golnoush Shafiei Makvand, and Bahar Nazari.

Mishima wrote the play in 1954, which appeared in his “Five Modern Noh Plays”. It modernizes the Noh drama “Aoi no Ue,” a Muromachi period Japanese Noh play based on the character Lady Aoi from the Heian period novel “The Tale of Genji”. Mishima did a modern adaptation in Freudian terms, which was set in a hospital.

Aoi is the wife of Hikaru Genji who is the son of the emperor. One of Genji's lovers, Lady Rokujo, is consumed with hate and jealousy for Aoi who is pregnant with the child of her husband, and Rokujo's living spirit haunts and torments Aoi.

Mishima (1925-1970) was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai (Shield Society). Mishima is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s. 

His work is characterized by its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty and death.

He was proud of the traditional culture and spirit of Japan and opposed what he saw as Western-style materialism, along with Japan's postwar democracy, globalism, and communism, worrying that by embracing these ideas the Japanese people would lose their “national essence” and their distinctive cultural heritage to become a “rootless” people.

Graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947, he published novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy—which contains the novels “Spring Snow” (1969), “Runaway Horses” (1969), “The Temple of Dawn” (1970), and “The Decay of the Angel” (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction.

A production of Act Studio, the Persian adaptation of “The Lady Aoi” will be performed at Aftab Theater until March 10.

SS/SAB