Fifty-day performance run

The Fifty-day performance run is both a theatrical achievement and a crucial marker in Kaga’s reconstruction of Hiromi Asai’s past. The play’s first performance took place on March 10, and its fiftieth and final performance draws the investigation to the theater, where police approach Hiromi after the curtain is about to fall.

The production and its form

Hiromi’s play, titled “Love Suicides at Sonezaki: A Reimagining,” recasts the lovers Ohatsu and Tokubei’s joint suicide as a modern murder mystery. The action begins with the discovery of their bodies and follows a detective, who is Tokubei’s friend, as he investigates what happened between them. A financial swindle appears to have driven the events leading to their deaths, with Tokubei taking his own life and that of his lover to prove his innocence. Just as the audience believes the mystery has been resolved, the play reveals another startling version of events.

The play’s shifts between imagined versions of the lovers’ story make performance itself a frame for uncertainty: what seems settled can be revised by a further account. That structure also echoes the investigation surrounding Hiromi, whose public identity as a director does not in itself settle what happened in her private life.

The fifty-day run

The production ran for fifty days at the Meijiza Theater, an unusually long engagement for that venue. Kaga identifies March 10 as its opening date and notes that the performance on which he is speaking is the final one. Earlier, the date has another significance in the investigation: March 10 was the day before Michiko Oshitani failed to appear for work on Monday, March 11. The calendar thus links the theater’s schedule to a separate point in the case without making the dates identical in meaning.

By the final performance, the actors had grown into their roles. Their developed performances made the short, harsh lives of Tokubei and Ohatsu feel like another reality onstage. Hiromi checks the time with a penlight and sees that the show is proceeding on schedule; she thinks that, having staged this work, she is content and has no regrets.

The final performance and the investigation

As the curtain falls, applause swells. Hiromi dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief she has been clutching, conscious that people might scoff at a director crying over her own play. She gets to her feet after taking a deep breath, measuring the evening first by its practical success: another performance has passed without a major hitch.

The production’s run also supplies Kaga with a chronological clue. In explaining his theory, he connects the theater’s March 10 opening with Hiromi’s and Tadao Asai’s efforts to minimize contact, and with Shunichi Watabe’s visits to Nihonbashi, which Kaga believes were intended to meet his daughter. The long public run gives the investigation a firm endpoint against which Kaga can place those concealed meetings.

After leaving the control room, Hiromi finds a group of men waiting outside. Squad Leader Kobayashi identifies himself with his Tokyo Metropolitan Police badge and asks her to accompany them to the police station for questioning. Hiromi takes a deep breath and asks to speak briefly with the cast and crew first. The final performance therefore ends not only with the completion of the run but with the transition from her work as director to the police inquiry.