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.