Goma no Hae

The setting is a park in a huge housing development in a downtown section of Osaka called Hirakata.

Atop a leaning steel post is a bell-shaped loudspeaker and on the ground are several drawn circles and rectangles where children must have been playing.

These geometric shapes become symbolic signals in course of the play, which involves three episodes that unfold vertically, horizontally and diagonally in an intertwined plot development where time and space are twisted like a Mebius band and the park transforms freely, at times becoming the rooms of the characters, the fast-food shop where one of them works part-time or some undefined space in the future.

The vertical thread of episode is the human-interest events of the life of a man in his late 20s named Nobuo, who lost his high school sweetheart in a traffic accident. After finishing his high school years like an average student and starting to work part-time at a fast-food restaurant, he begins to face the real emptiness in his heart and his life becomes increasingly reclusive.

The horizontal thread contrasting this is a succession of scenes from the lives of a number of local residents who claim to have seen Nobuo’s sweetheart walking as a corpse over a course of about 100 meters after being hit by a truck and killed instantly on a street in the housing development. A narrator tells the accounts of these witnesses interjected arbitrarily with excerpts from their daily lives.

The third episode involves an old man named Itokuzu and a girl named Sakana and the scenes that occur between them implicit of a world of the near future where humankind is struggling to survive, perhaps in a post-catastrophic environment.

This play is not a drama involving the things that happen to any particular persons, it is about the world of the Hirakata housing development, or in a more universal sense it is about the atmosphere of the Japanese town and something like the vague sense of emptiness we feel among the people who live there.