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was a triumph of the highest order. And I remember looking out at the standing, cheering audience; at the beaming faces of my fellow players, and thinking, It was I who made this happen . And I realized at that moment that the course of my life had suddenly, irrevocably changed.
    The Indifferent Sea earned a rave review in the Japanese newspaper, the Rafu Shimpo . The second night sold out, and also the third, and so Okamoto added another week to its original one-week run. After the final performance, the businessmen who backed the theater threw a party at Haraoka, an exclusive restaurant to which I never before could have gained legitimate entry. After many toasts, and countless emptied bottles of sake, beer, and champagne, one of the businessmen put his arm around me and said, “Thank you for saving our theater, Nakabayashi. What do you have in mind for the next production?”
    I was due to sail for Tokyo—once again—two weeks later, and I didn’t relish the idea of sending my family a telegram announcing another delay. But it would be disingenuous to say I wasn’t prepared for such a question, and as the people around me all fell into a hush, I pulled myself up straight. “A mystery,” I said, “entitled Double Bind . I saw it in a theater in Tokyo just before I sailed to America, and it was a fine piece of work, taut and resonant.” The businessmen all nodded solemnly, and then looked at Okamoto, who was as happy and red-faced as Buddha. “Well, prepare the theater, Okamoto!” the first businessman said. “The boy’s got a play to put on!”
    The second play, Double Bind , was as successful as the first. It was followed by The Swallows , and then Futility and The Shadow of the Mountain , all plays that had been produced very recently by the new theater companies springing up in Tokyo. By the time the third play opened, the theater had become the talk of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo—as had the young new actor/director behind it. I had been staying with the Yamada family through the summer months, but once I began to collect some of the earnings from the plays—and once it became clear that I would not be returning to Japan in the immediate future—I took two rooms in a house off Second Street. Now, suddenly, I was being recognized on the streets of Little Tokyo. People bought me drinks when I ate in local restaurants; launders competed for my business; middle-aged women offered me their daughters’ hands in marriage. I cannot claim that I didn’t enjoy this attention, but my real devotion—as it was from the moment I first demanded to speak to Okamoto—was to the quality of the plays we presented.
    It was in the interest of expanding my artistic range that I decided to produce, as my next play, Twelfth Night . This was not the first work the theater had presented in English—one of the plays that Okamoto had produced before my arrival was an English translation of a German play—but it was the first that had been penned by an English-speaking writer. Few of the theatergoers were familiar with Shakespeare, and those who were had seen the master’s plays in Japanese translation, where much of his poetry and verbal trickery were lost. I did not know how well a Shakespeare play would be received in its original English, but I was ready to make the theatergoers stretch their minds—and I had built up enough credibility and good will by that point that the audience would trust me. Moreover, the backers of the theater, who were concerned with how the growing Japanese population was perceived by the Americans, were pleased by this production of a Western classic. It turned out that we gambled correctly. Although the actors were more nervous than usual—especially those who felt uncertain that they could convey the subtleties of English—the play was a tremendous success.
    Because the production of Twelfth Night by a Japanese theater was considered somewhat of a novelty, this play garnered a level of