Chikao Tanaka was a Japanese playwright and dramatist whose plays focused on the mental, physical, and religious hardships of post-World War II Japan.
10 Facts About Tanaka Chikao
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Tanaka Chikao is perhaps the first modern Japanese playwright about whom this can be said.
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Tanaka Chikao is notable for his play Head of Mary and his expanded dramatic structures that convey metaphysical, spiritual, and existential themes in the form of masterful, rhythmic dialogue.
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Tanaka Chikao was born in 1905 in the culturally diverse city of Nagasaki, Japan where his father practiced medicine.
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Tanaka Chikao's father was a scholar and could fluently read Chinese kambun.
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Tanaka Chikao became so interested in Western ideas that in 1923 he became a student at Tokyo University and studied French literature.
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Seemingly overnight, Tanaka Chikao was thrown into the spotlight as a promising dramatist.
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Tanaka Chikao felt strongly about the ironic relationship of the destruction by the West of the city that came the closest to penetrating the very essence of Western culture due to the adoption of Christianity by so many of its citizens.
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Tanaka Chikao felt that the detonation of the atomic bomb had been the ruination of everything his father's generation had stood for and built.
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The play is French in tone and reflects the lasting influences Tanaka Chikao picked up from his final years with Kishida.