Toshiki Okada

Toshiki Okada (岡田 利規) is a Japanese playwright, theater director, novelist, and founder of the theatrical company chelfitsch.

He is known for "his use of hyper-colloquial Japanese and his unique choreography."

In the same year, Five Days in March, a play that juxtaposes a couple spending five days in a love hotel against the beginning of the Iraq War, won the 49th Kishida Prize for Drama.

Born in Yokohama in 1973, Okada attended Nagatadai Elementary and Nagata Secondary School there.

Okada's hyperrealistic style is often referred to as "super real Japanese," which draws influence from Oriza Hirata's "quiet theater" movement from the 1980s.

His works are distinguished by the use of fragmented and abbreviated idiosyncratic language in the vernacular of Japanese in their twenties, which is deliberately inarticulate, drawn out, and circular.

Exaggerating the natural rhythms in human speech, his works comically integrate "natural" Japanese speech that is filled with passive verb forms and chains of dependent clauses, with no periods.

A typical example is from the opening of Enjoy, translated by Aya Ogawa:"ACTOR 1: We'll begin with Act One... This guy named Kato was riding the subway the other day, he was riding the Keio line and, he had an encounter then, when he sat next to... There were these two women who were talking, but... Kato had no intention of eavesdropping at all, of course but, while he was listening, to be honest, he... in the end, from the middle of the conversation, it did turn completely into eavesdropping but... you know how for text messaging they have those screen stickers that you put on your phone to keep your screen hidden from the person standing next to you, well there aren't such things for voices, so in a way, it's a little like too bad, you know, which may be like totally an excuse but.... but with that conversation, it was a little like no matter how you look at it, their voices were, clearly above and beyond what is a standard volume, I mean come on, was the way it seemed and that was because... on top of that the content of the conversation itself also like, would have piqued anyone's interest in this..."Accompanying the broken phrases is the physical body language of the performers, made up of disjointed and abstract movements that combine isolated pedestrian gestures.

The choreography he uses in his play is very different from highly coordinated dancing, as it focuses on "junk body" or "child’s body" choreography that rejects adult sexuality and Western dance techniques.

Okada was inspired by Hirata's quote, "It is strange for the actors to tap into their self-consciousness when speaking their lines."

Okada's works represent the "lost generation," the generation that is most affected by the Japanese recession in the 1990s.

Faced with economic and political challenges that were set by the bubble burst, young Japanese people are forced to have part-time work for which they are overqualified.

One of his plays, Enjoy (エンジョイ), explores this issue of unemployment and temporary employment.

The story follows the stories of struggling freeters in their 20s and 30s who work in a manga café.

Okada’s works deal with everyday life, pertaining to work, love, and personal life.

Rather than directly addressing recent social issues in Japan like Ai Nagai and Yōji Sakate, Okada focuses on connecting to his audience's sense of alienation by separating speech and movement in his plays.

In 1992, he started attending Keio University under the Faculty of Business and Commerce.

Being a fan of Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, Okada aspired to be a movie director when he was in middle school, which led him to join a theater club in Keio University.

During this process, he gained experience in writing scenarios and scripts, which piqued his interest in stage directing as well.

In his first year at Keio, he learned of Hideki Noda through Noda's troupe, The Dream Wanderers (夢の遊眠社), who had their final performance in 1992.

Noda's modern and "unexpected" style influenced Okada's earlier works.

In 1997, Okada formed the theatrical company chelfitsch in collaboration with dancer, Natsuko Tezuka.

The name chelfitsch (チェルフィッチュ) is a play on the English word "selfish," and is always written with a lowercase c.

(彼等の希望に瞠れ) in 2001, and he started choreographing his plays with Five Days in March (三月の5日間) in 2005.

He received his first award, Yokohama Cultural Award / Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement in 2005.

Air Conditioner (クーラー) was a finalist at the 2005 Toyota Choreography Awards.

In 2006, Okada participated as the representative for Japan in the Stuecke '06/International Literature Project in Mülheim, Germany during the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

In December 2006, Enjoy (エンジョイ) was presented at the New National Theatre Tokyo.

In contrast to his international acclaim, Enjoy was not well received by Japanese theater critics, who voted the play as the year's worst play.

Between 2006 and 2007, he was appointed the director of the Performing Arts Festival "Summit" at the Komaba Agora Theater, where one of his role models, Oriza Hirata served as the artistic director.

His book, The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed (わたしたちに許された特別な時間の終わり), was published in February 2007 and consisted of two novels.

One is a reworking of his play Five Days in March; the other, an earlier piece, is called Our Many Places (わたしの場所の複数).

The book received the 2008 Ōe Kenzaburō Prize.

After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, chelfitsch relocated from Yokohama to Kumamoto to avoid the threats of the earthquake and nuclear contamination.

Okada has written all the scripts and directed all of the company's productions.

Okada first started writing in a hyperrealistic style with Behold Their Hopes!

In 2015, Okada was nominated for the 28th Mishima Yukio Prize for his novel adaptation of his play, Current Location (現在地), which was first staged at the Kanagawa Arts Theatre on April 20, 2012.

Besides directing his own plays, he has also directed Samuel Beckett's Cascando for the Tokyo International Arts Festival and Beckett Centennial Memorial Festival, and Kōbō Abe's Friends at the Setagaya Public Theater.

Since 2012, he has been a judge for Kishida Prize for Drama.

He also leads workshop programs with theater students in Japanese universities during his free time.