In his autobiography, Ninagawa recalls an incident from a couple years before his career turned to Shakespeare. A teenager called out his name and approached him outside a movie theater in Shinjuku. The kid had a question he needed to ask: “Can you name any unfulfilled aspirations?” Ninagawa smoked silently. “None worth mentioning,” Ninagawa said finally. “I don’t name aspirations.” “Oh,” the teenager said, “I’m glad,” pulling out a jackknife from his pocket and showing it to him. “I’ve been watching your plays for a while. I was going to stab you if you told me you’ve started to aspire to things, instead of doing them.” Ninagawa would write that the boy’s voice never left his mind when he directed; that if there were a thousand teenagers in the audience—a thousand eyes—they could hold a thousand knives. He had to create a theater that roused enough feeling that it would make a teen want to wield a knife for Japanese theater.

Watching Ninagawa in college, I had a single wish: that someone would clap and it would all suddenly be clear to me: the characters I transform into, what I transform from, who I am performing for. There were moments of inanity in everyday American life when I wanted to pull a Ninagawa and make things giant and absurd—drop a life-size horse on someone’s head—so that I didn’t feel obliged to be a cordial translator for “my” culture. When I watched Ninagawa, I felt a sense of security: I wanted to swallow his assurance in a stable idea of a Japanese person, who he wanted his audience to be, because I didn’t have it. Most of all, I wanted him to put a framing device on my world. After losing R, I wanted to be legible to someone again.