Five Days in March

Young people in Tokyo

On 21 March 2003, on the eve of the American and British offensive in Iraq, Japan rejoined the ranks of the armed forces for the first time since 1945. It is against this historical backdrop that the characters in Five Days in March tell their own small stories of the everyday life of Tokyo adolescents. The colloquial language spoken by these young people in Tokyo is real enough but seems to betray behaviour that is no longer anything like them. There is a constant dislocation between the words and the bodies – like a precariously balanced reality. Somewhere between the natural and the made-up, Toshiki Okada’s singular theatre grippingly sketches out traits of a disoriented generation through stereotypes of isolated young people.