Author's Note
Translator's Note
An angel sleeps on your collarbone
commentary
About the author
About the translator

A youth drama about love, violence, and cats.

"An Angel Sleeps on the Collarbone" is a youth drama about love and violence that crosses the past and present as the living and the dead meet.
In July 2015, the funeral of the owner, Kento Kirino, was held at Kirino's house near the banks of the Uji River.
Funeral director Toru Sakamoto, who helped with the burial of the deceased, encounters Yoshio Kirino, the son of Kento, who went missing five years ago.
Doru and Yoshio are best friends.
The conversation between Yoshio and Toru, which opens the first scene of the play, seems ordinary, but as their friendship is shattered by a past incident, their emotions gradually intensify and their relationship feels precarious.

Actually, this is “What do you do today?”
The British say 'day' as 'die'.
So 'today' becomes 'today'.
I was surprised at first too.
Suddenly he asked, “How are you going to die?”
But the truth is, it was “What are you going to do today?”
It's amazing.
Isn't that funny? (Page 12)

People representing the 'minority'

The story shifts to the past as a terrible incident from a shared memory comes to mind.
In the past landscape, the characters live their daily lives, each with their own 'minority'.
Kazue, Yoshio's older sister with her own taste in music, Yuka, the daughter of a family that has run a funeral parlor since she was young, Takuji, a war journalist, and Yoshio, who feels a sense of alienation from his own body, are all characters representing the 'minority' who have been pushed out of the center of the world.
The play intersects the flow of time and emotion through the longing that a living character feels for the departed.
This play, condensed with intense emotions, calmly presents 'death' and 'loss', which are closely connected to life, and the "structure that can be remembered and spoken of," and in a unique way reflects on the relationship between dramatic imagination and reality.
In this way, the story of "An Angel Sleeps on the Collarbone" on a stage where boundaries have been broken down is also a story about "beings" who are considered abnormal in society and who cannot hide their identities or freely reveal them under the gaze of stigma and hatred.

And the word ‘normal’ is also something that humans created at will.
Don't worry about whether it's normal or not.
(Page 105)

Imagination of beings who embrace angels

This work is a work of fiction based on the Japanese hostage crisis that occurred in 2015 by ISIL.
This fact is revealed in the dramatic final sequence, which depicts a horrific torture scene. Journalist Kenji Goto goes to rescue Haruna Yukawa, the head of a private military company who has been kidnapped by ISIS, but both tragically lose their lives.
In Japanese society, the two were branded as people who had caused great harm to the nation and were met with countless criticisms.
In the process, even their deaths were pushed to the margins.
The author said, “I tried to find the hidden stories in the events of these two people that were revealed on the surface,” and “Sometimes I thought about Yukawa’s soul.
And then suddenly, I began to fall into the arrogant thought, 'Isn't it possible that I am the only one who can be by Yukawa's soul?'
“Then, ‘An Angel Sleeps on the Collarbone’ was born,” he said.
The question of whether the social contempt cast across the stage at that time still lingers in our society remains for the audience who encounters this play today.
Cats, whose survival is threatened by the expansion of human settlements, are dying on the road, and graffiti covered with paint on rooftops reminds us of someone's pain and wounds.
We may never know about someone's loneliness, someone's will, or someone's life, but the play seems to speak of the possibility that it can continue and begin right here, right now.
The clavicle, the most fragile bone in the human body, connects the heart to the neck and protects the organs that sustain life and produce the voice.
The seemingly fragile question of whether this beautiful fact might be a starting point is revived in each person's senses.
“On your collarbone, Kazue is sleeping.” (p. 104) As we engage with each other’s wounds, the moment our individual existence as we live our daily lives expands beyond our individual dramas into a social drama, we will be able to vaguely believe that the world will be filled with beings who embrace angels.
“Doru, when this is over, can I sleep on your collarbone?” “…Yeah.” (Page 142)