The Martlet

What: The Face of Jizo Where: Metro Studio (1411 Quadra) When: 3 and 8 p.m., March 21 Cost: $12 ($10 for students)

A bloom of smoke, an echo of thunder, 24 frames a second.

The mushroom cloud of Hiroshima on cellulose nitrate film points to a collective nightmare. It’s a Pandora’s memory box we mostly keep closed.

But at Victoria’s Futarikko Theatre Company, UVic students keep the memories raw with their upcoming production, The Face of Jizo, which stares at pain straight on.

“We think about the physical consequences like cancer and radiation sickness,” said director Alyssa Knox. “But we don’t hear about the emotional effects.”

The Canadian incarnation of Futarikko was formed by Ayumi Hamada in 2006. Hamada founded the original company in Kochi, Japan in 2002, with high-school friend Minori Okamura.

In Victoria, Futarikko’s plays began as living room productions.

Even The Lady Aoi, performed at the Phoenix Theatre with UVic’s Student Alternative Theatre Company and at the Nanaimo Japanese Festival, started with boarding up the bay windows and making creative furniture arrangements in the home that Hamada and Knox share with other roommates. But they won’t need to fl ip the couches over for The Face of Jizo — they’ve scored the Metro.

The story follows Mitsue (Hamada), a woman who is haunted by the ghost of her father (UVic student David Christopher) who died in the blast while she got away. Her guilt is smothering, and Mitsue believes she will never deserve to be loved.

“Mitsue is like a bird in a cage,” Hamada said as she pointed to the chains hanging from her skirt and touched the feathers on the shoulder of her dress after a rehearsal.

“The door of the cage is open, but she can’t fly out.”

The play, called Chichi to Kuraseba in Japanese, was written by famous Japanese playwright Hisashi Inoue and translated into English in 2003. The 2004 cinema version swept up awards in Japan.

While the Metro can’t house the kinds of stunts and special effects that Chichi to Kuraseba used to recreate the physical bombing, Futarikko tackles the recreation of the emotional blast through staging and symbolism. Hence the chains and feathers: Mitsue’s dress is an outward expression of inner wounds.

With her props and her plays, Hamada hopes to give Canadians a more intimate perspective on the land of the rising sun.

“The Japan that we usually see right now … is a modern techno-Japan kind of image,” said Knox. “Japanese theatre is something we don’t usually see. It’s a different side of the culture.”

Lately Futarikko has featured a second theme: ghosts.

“You always have them,” said Knox as she and Hamada laugh about reoccurring phantoms — The Lady Aoi was also a ghost piece.

But the ghost in The Face of Jizo is more profound than Casper or Poltergeist. The show is inspired by documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the way that survivors are haunted by the dead.

The play explores the suffering and loss that persist long after coarse debris is cleared. In a world where atomic explosions are contained by our TV sets and war seems to dirty our hands only with newsprint ink, Hamada and the Futarikko Theatre Company bring a more intimate view from overseas.

With the help of the Vancouver Peace Philosophy Centre and a group called Saving Article 9, the Metro will double as a gallery of historical paintings and photographs to ground the audience before curtains call. Saving Article 9 advocates to keep a clause in the Japanese constitution that renounces war. The preservation of Article 9 has been under debate since Japan considered joining the Iraq war.

Futarikko will continue to engage Victoria with profound picks of Japanese plays— with or without the undead — at least until Hamada returns to Japan in her quest for stardom. Expect another apparition in the Victoria Fringe Festival this August.