Actor Masanobu Katsumura appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) broadcast on December 5th. He talked about his beginnings in acting and his memories of director Yukio Ninagawa.
Wanting to act, he knew only Haiyuza, Mumeijuku, and Bungakuza, so he went to Haiyuza, which he knew the location of, and when he opened the iron door a little, he found many scary people wearing T-shirts with the word "Haiyuza" written on them. He gave up on Haiyuza and tried Mumeijuku, which was recruiting. They only accepted two or three out of about 3,000 applicants, and when he got to the second round, the founder, Miyazaki (Nakadai) Kyoko, told him, "You have the power, so you can make it anywhere." "I thought I would be accepted, but I was rejected. I thought they were liars," he said.
He was rejected by Bungakuza, but a friend told him that Ninagawa's theater company was recruiting, so he went to try out. At the time, Ninagawa and his family were promoting Kellogg's, so he didn't know that he was a world-famous director and just thought of him as "the uncle from Kellogg's." But, he says, "I tried out and for some reason I got in, and I'm still here today."
Ninagawa was strict and always irritable at the time. There were four or five cigarettes in the ashtray, and he would light the next one without putting out the fire, and smoke with great vigor. He was always frowning and yelling while taking a lot of stomach medicine. As he got older, he became much kinder. He would think about the timing of throwing things, and would throw more when the media came. "He was great as a director who self-produced and directed the whole production, but he was also amazing as a producer even back then," he recalled.
At the time, he only had bad memories of being yelled at, but after he left Ninagawa and started working with him again, he began to understand the things Ninagawa was angry about and saying thanks to reading various books. "I selfishly asked him not to call me Shakespeare and to let me do new works only, and we worked together on new works for about 20 years," he said. In the end, he said, their relationship became more like that of "comrades" than that of "master and disciple."
