Balalaika troupe

The Balalaika troupe is the theater company Hiromi Kadokura joins after deciding that acting is the one future she wants. It shapes both her early life in Tokyo and her later work as a director; its production of a reimagined murder mystery also makes the theater a pointed reflection of the novel’s concern with performance, appearances, and hidden versions of events.

Identity and Entry into the Company

Hiromi’s commitment to acting takes shape after she sees a performance staged by the Balalaika troupe. She auditions in Tokyo in February despite having no acting experience and little expectation of success, but wins a place. The offer is conditional: she must spend the first two years as a trainee without a regular salary. The company can help arrange part-time work and an apartment shared with other trainees, practical support that makes her chosen path possible without making it secure.

At the time, Hiromi is in a relationship with her former teacher, Seizo Naemura. She does not treat that relationship as a plan for a shared future: finding her own path through acting is her priority, and she accepts that pursuing the troupe may mean not seeing Naemura for a while, perhaps ever again. Her entry into the company therefore marks a choice of vocation and independence, even as the evidence leaves uncertain what Naemura wanted from their relationship.

Rehearsal and Working Conditions

Years later, Shuhei Matsumiya visits the troupe’s rehearsal space in East Tokyo. The company is preparing to open a play the following month, and the rehearsal takes place in a gym-like room transformed into an approximate stage with tables and cardboard boxes. The makeshift setting and approaching opening date establish both the practical conditions of the work and the pressure under which the performers are preparing.

During the rehearsal, Takeo Suwa’s sharp reprimand is directed at a younger actor who has made a mistake. The other actors remain expressionless and concentrate on their own parts; Matsumiya senses that they understand how easily an ill-judged word could put someone in Suwa’s disfavor. The scene presents the troupe as a workplace governed by concentrated rehearsal and an evident hierarchy, not simply as a place of artistic aspiration.

Productions and Dramatic Form

The troupe’s work becomes especially important through a production directed by Hiromi. As the play approaches its climax, it retells the story of Ohatsu and Tokubei, whose joint suicide belongs to the traditional play, as a modern murder mystery. In this version, the events are framed as taking place in someone’s imagination. The plot begins with the discovery of the lovers’ bodies and follows a friend of Tokubei as he tries to understand what happened. A detective uncovers a financial swindle behind the events and concludes that Tokubei killed himself and his lover to prove his innocence; just when that explanation seems complete, the play reveals another startling version.

The layered construction makes the production more than a straightforward adaptation: apparent explanations give way to a further account, so the audience must reconsider what it has seen. That theatrical structure resonates with the novel’s broader interest in the difference between a public face and concealed circumstances, without collapsing the play’s fiction into the investigation unfolding outside it.

Hiromi as Director and the Troupe’s Narrative Role

When the curtain falls, the audience’s applause swells. Hiromi, who has been holding a handkerchief balled in her fist, dabs at her eyes in the darkness; she worries that people would scoff if they knew she had cried while watching a play she directed. She then takes a deep breath and stands, measuring the evening by a practical standard: the performance has passed without major problems. The moment joins emotional investment to professional discipline, showing the director both moved by the work and responsible for its successful completion.

The troupe thus connects several stages of Hiromi’s life: the young woman who accepts an unpaid traineeship because acting is her chosen future, and the established director whose production turns a familiar tragedy into a mystery built from competing explanations. Its rehearsal room also supplies a literal setting in which people perform under observation. In the novel, that theatrical fact gains a wider resonance as Hiromi’s words and self-presentation become objects of scrutiny, while the troupe’s layered play offers a formal echo of the uncertainty surrounding what is true.