Madame de Sade

“It was while reading Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s *The Life of the Marquis de Sade* that, for me, as a writer, the puzzle arose of understanding how the Marquise de Sade, who had shown such loyalty to her husband during his long imprisonments, could have abandoned him just as he was finally regaining his freedom. This enigma served as the starting point for my play, which can be seen as an attempt to provide a logical solution to the problem. I felt that something deeply true yet deeply incomprehensible lay behind the enigma, and I wanted to examine Sade within this framework. It may seem unusual that a Japanese person would write a play based on a French story. The reason is that I wanted to use, in reverse, the skills that actors in our country have acquired by performing plays translated from foreign languages.” Yukio Mishima.