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Paper short abstract

Tsutsui Jun’s (dracom) play Yuitsusha to sono sōshitsu (2025) allegorizes the conditions behind escalations of xenophobia and cultural egocentrism in the Japanese contemporary. Tsutsui illuminates the antisocial psycho-cultural conditions behind aggressive conduct toward non-Japanese residents.

Paper long abstract

The new play Yuitsusha to sono sōshitsu (2025) by dracom theatre company leader, director, playwright, and performer, Tsutsui Jun, allegorizes what conditions lie behind the escalation of xenophobia and cultural egocentrism in Japan in the years since the Covid pandemic. Tsutsui has long chronicled the antisocial effects of what Jonathan Crary in Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022) calls the “internet complex” of the post-capitalist moment. The Ego and His Loss (Yuitsusha to sono sōshitsu) is his greatest indictment of post-capitalist alienation, and most lyrical exploration of the failure to connect.

Presented at YPAM in 2025, this latest work by the prolific Tsutsui, who has been active since the early 1990s, may be his most important. Like many of the playwright’s works it is based upon a true story: here, a murder of a Vietnamese resident living in Osaka Prefecture that took place in 2022. The play explores the fatal intersection of two lives residing in the same building: a middle-aged Japanese man living above a bento box shop, and a Vietnamese woman, who works there, below.

The narrative and moral structure of Tsutsui’s play resembles Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck: the puzzle of the murderer’s character brings into relief an allegory for human emptiness which channels the antisocial conditions behind extreme alienation. The character of the slain, the Vietnamese woman, is the other side of the allegory: a conduit of feeling and possibility which signals a chance of a more optimistic future, only to be cut short by the actions and attitudes of the murderer.

Especially concerned with the lives of the socio-economically precarious in the cities in northern Osaka Prefecture, Tsutsui’s allegorical rendering of a soon-forgotten crime presents a way forward for performance makers to explore post-capitalist conditions in the Japanese contemporary. The plight of foreign residents is central to Tsutsui’s ethic: among the most precarious in urban Japan are Vietnamese hospitality workers, and Tsutsui’s play, with its innovative dramaturgical forms of presentation of acts of hospitality and egocentrism in animated counterpoint, the result is a work of inventive contemporary theatre distinctly Tsutsui’s own.