04/11/2015 2pm
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017
“In the Woods Beneath Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom” by Ango Sakaguchi (1947)
The mountains are dotted with cherry trees. There, a bandit makes his living by robbing and stealing from travelers. One day, he kidnaps a beautiful woman and makes her his wife. The beautiful woman soon misses her fancy lifestyle and demands that they move to the city. In the city, the woman’s demands keep escalating, and soon the bandit gets tired of it all and decides to go back to the mountains. However, he’s concerned about the one thing that terrifies him – cherry blossoms in full bloom.
The novel, which has been made into a movie and stage play, portrays the cherry blossom as something that’s so extremely beautiful that it becomes terrifying.
“The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov (1903), Edited by Miwa Satojima & Chiyo Abe
Ranevskaya, a Russian aristrocrat is brought by her daughter Anya, to the cherry orchard where she grew up after spending five years in Paris. She has used up all of her family’s fortune by living a luxurious life and the orchard is about to be auctioned off to pay the bills. A former serf of the orchard, Lopakhin, proposes renting out the orchard as a villa. However, Ranevskaya’s mind is preoccupied by two things: her son, who died young, and her lover she left in Paris.
Chekhov’s masterpiece has been rearranged to show the story from Anya’s point of view.
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