"Japanese traditional theatre of course has dialogue, beautiful dialogue, but it is all set in a musical tone of speaking. The words are very rhythmical and musical in traditional Japanese theatre, so that it is not something that imparts thought or ideas or even ideology. It doesn't have that kind of role and at times in the past I had quite a lot of antipathy toward that way of thinking. It is very hard to see the structure, how a Japanese theatre piece is constructed. In Double Suicide I wanted to bring out the black-dressed Kuroko to show how this piece of theatre is constructed, to expose that. So my great worry was that the Japanese theatre, with this musicality in its dialogue and its presentation, appealed to the emotions but it wasn't able to convey human philosophy or ideology. The writer of the Double Suicide was Monzaemon Chikamatsu, who was from a Samurai family. He wrote very, very definite and strict types of dialogue and he had a very good observation of different classes of Japanese society. I was impressed by that. I was very moved by the comment that he made (as long ago as the early seventeenth century) that the theater cannot be just showing reality. It must show some reality but it also must include fiction in order to be able to reach the audience. Truth lies in the very thin layer, a layer like skin, that lies between fiction and reality."