Playing a Role and Returning to Oneself

Playing a Role and Returning to Oneself names the principle through which Kafuku understands both his acting and his life beyond the stage. Performance offers a temporary way to become someone else, but it does not provide an unchanged self to return to: experience alters the person who comes back. The idea links Kafuku’s theatrical practice to his concealed feelings, his friendship with Takatsuki, and the ways people manage their identities in ordinary relationships.

Origins in Acting

Kafuku did not set out to become an actor. At college, a female friend invited him to join her theater club. He had wanted to play baseball and had been the starting shortstop on his high-school team, confident in his defensive ability, but he was not good enough for the college team. Joining the club offered something new and a chance to spend more time with his friend. Acting became important to him only after he had begun doing it: he discovered that he liked entering a role and then being able to return to himself when the performance ended.

That movement between selves is more than a practical description of an actor’s work. For Kafuku, the freedom to leave his ordinary identity depends on the possibility of coming back. Asked whether he had ever wanted not to return, he pauses rather than answering immediately; the question is new to him. The hesitation leaves open a tension within his account. Acting promises release from the self, yet his pleasure in it is bound to the assurance that the departure is temporary.

Rehearsal and Daily Practice

The principle is embedded in Kafuku’s working routine. After hiring Misaki Watari as his driver, he travels from his apartment building in Ebisu to a theater in Ginza in a Yellow Saab 900 convertible. On the way, he rehearses with a cassette recording for a Meiji era adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, in which he plays Uncle Vanya. He knows the lines by heart, but recites them to calm his nerves before performing. Repetition thus prepares him to enter the role while also serving as a familiar means of managing the transition into a public performance.

Kafuku ordinarily finds it stressful to rehearse in front of another person, but that inhibition disappears with Misaki. Her reserved manner gives him room to recite loudly without needing to attend to a listener’s reaction; she appears to keep her attention on driving. Their different journeys in the car also have their own routines. On the way home they usually listen to Beethoven string quartets, which Kafuku values as music for thinking or for letting thought subside. When he wants something lighter, he chooses American rock from his youth. Misaki does not comment on his choices, and he cannot tell whether she enjoys the music or listens closely. The car becomes a setting in which his rehearsal and private habits can continue alongside another person without requiring an explicit performance for her benefit.

Acting Beyond the Stage

Kafuku’s understanding of performance is shaped by a role he maintained in his marriage. He knew that his wife had affairs with other men, yet continued to live with her as though their daily life were normal. Their nearly twenty years together were, apart from the affairs, calm and contented; they managed ordinary responsibilities and remained intimate. Kafuku regarded his ability to sustain this outward normality while privately carrying knowledge and pain as a form of acting. Unlike his theatrical roles, this was performed without an audience.

His account complicates the boundary between a role and a supposedly authentic self. The marriage did not become unreal simply because Kafuku concealed what he knew; he describes genuine affection and a satisfying intimacy alongside the secret he could not resolve. After his wife’s death from uterine cancer, he regretted not asking her why she had been drawn to the other men. He had come close to asking, but her illness and approaching death kept him from demanding an explanation. The question remained unanswered. In this light, role-playing is not simply a disguise that can be removed once an occasion ends. It can coexist with attachment, concealment, and loss, leaving the actor to live with what the role could not settle.

Friendship as an Unfinished Performance

Years after his wife’s death, Kafuku became friends with Takatsuki, one of her former lovers. Takatsuki had approached him at a television studio to offer condolences and speak of having acted with Kafuku’s wife. They became friends not long after she died, so Takatsuki was no longer sleeping with her during their friendship. Kafuku says that he first wanted to understand why his wife had chosen Takatsuki, but he never found a clear answer. He nevertheless felt some affection for the man.

The friendship was at once sincere and strategic. Kafuku later admits that he wanted to punish Takatsuki and had planned to gain his confidence, discover his weakness, and use it against him. In their meetings, he played the role of a sympathetic listener. As Takatsuki drank and talked, Kafuku encouraged him to continue, offered comfort, and gathered information, while also acknowledging that he genuinely liked him. Their shared bereavement gave them something substantial to discuss: both remained in love with the same dead woman, despite having had very different relationships with her.

Kafuku cannot finally divide this companionship into a truthful friendship on one side and a false performance on the other. He describes it as both. His explanation is that a role, once fully entered, is difficult to stop at will; one has to continue until the performance reaches the point at which its meaning becomes clear. He compares this to music, which reaches a proper ending only when it arrives at its final chord. The analogy makes the friendship an unfinished process rather than a plan with a clean boundary between acting and feeling. Kafuku’s original intention matters, but so do his real affection and the relationship that developed around it.

The Changed Self

The rule Kafuku draws from acting is that a person returns to a place that is never quite the same as the one left behind. The role may end, but the experience of inhabiting it has altered the person who resumes ordinary life. This principle helps explain why he could not simply stop being Takatsuki’s friend once he recognized the mixture of revenge and affection in the relationship. It also gives form to his account of carrying knowledge of his wife’s affairs while continuing their shared life: what looked like ordinary routine took place after that knowledge had changed his experience of the marriage.

Near the end of the conversation with Misaki, Kafuku says that everyone is an actor, and she agrees, with qualification. The exchange extends the idea beyond professional theater without claiming that every person’s roles are identical. Kafuku then tries to rest before returning to the stage. He thinks of the brief departure from oneself in performance and the altered self that comes back, and tells Misaki he will sleep for a while. She does not answer; her quiet attention to the road is welcome to him. The ending returns the concept to its practical setting: a driver, a passenger, the journey toward work, and a performer preparing once more to leave and re-enter himself.