Before the Hothouse and Other Plays and Essays

A brother and sister live quietly among flowers until two visitors awaken hopes they scarcely know how to express. In Before the Hothouse, Kishida Kunio follows the movement of expectation, intimacy, and disappointment through three scenes. Two shorter plays turn to a farewell at a mountain railway station and an actor who refuses to continue his part.

The ten essays surrounding these plays range from silent film and its live narrators to the future of kabuki, the pleasures of foreign literature, and the art of Jules Renard and Paul Claudel. A seaside recollection entwines fantasy with an ambiguous rescue, while the theater criticism asks what language, actors, and audiences make possible onstage.

Written during the 1920s and early 1930s, these works reveal the wit and unease of a playwright attentive to both performance and ordinary life. Complete translations preserve the dialogue, silences, arguments, and period judgments of all thirteen supplied works. Concise notes explain names, theatrical terms, uncertain readings, and textual details.