Chiori Miyagawa

Chiori Miyagawa is a NYC-based playwright. This Lingering Life had a premiere production in June at Z Space in San Francisco, directed by Jubilith Moore. This play will have a second life in NYC at HERE in September, produced by Cake Productions and directed by Cat Miller. “Love Suicides in Tsunami Country”—her non-theater-related prose debut essay written under the name Chiori Miya— is published in the Fall 2013 issue of Ecotone Journal. Parts of both the play and the creative essay were written at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She is a faculty member of Theater & Performance program at Bard College.

Ghostly Profound

Essay

Ghostly Profound

A Thing of Unknowable Depth

25 July 2014

I have been terrified to even put down the word 幽玄. I had to ask Google to write these characters for me. According to Google Translate, yugen means “subtle and profound.” Looking at the unfamiliar characters, I would have guessed “ghostly.” For the first time in decades, I looked for the Japanese dictionary that I brought with me when I left Japan alone at age sixteen.