Mizuki Ando has a distressing condition. Played by Rin Nasu, she is not a demonstrative woman, but insists on finding a cure. Referred to a counsellor, she describes her only symptom: she cannot remember her name. Elicia Daly’s empathetic therapist takes her seriously. “Without a name we’re nothing,” she says.
It is a scene from Haruki Murakami’s 2006 short story A Shinagawa Monkey, about a woman fearing for her sense of identity. Here, in this collaboration between Glasgow’s Vanishing Point and Yokohama’s Kanagawa Arts Theatre , it provides an extra layer of intrigue to an adaptation of the author’s more recent Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey, which is a magical-realist encounter between a man and a talking animal in a down-at-heel ryokan, the only place the man can find a room for the night. [READ MORE]