Director Stephen Earnhart was traveling around Southeast Asia when he first started to hear the name of cult Japanese author Haruki Murakami. “People kept handing these books to me and saying, ‘You gotta read this guy,’” he recently recalled backstage at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York’s East Village, where his theater company, who has adapted Murakami’s eighth novel “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” was holding a residency ahead of its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival later this month. “I read his eight novels back-to-back on that very trip and I just knew: This is it.”
As it happened, Earnhart, a former producer at “Saturday Night Live” and head of production at Miramax, had taken the trip to Asia to seek inspiration for new creative projects. Something in Murakami’s mesmerizing tale of Toru Okada, an unassuming, everyman-type protagonist whose life takes ever more bizarre turns after his cat and then his wife disappear, spoke to him immediately.
“When I got back to New York, I wrote to Murakami asking for 15 minutes of his time,” he told The Daily. “He agreed, and I jumped straight on a plane to Japan.” Earnhart — who had never previously been to Japan — had a wild plan to ask the author for the rights to adapt the novel for the stage, using an array of media including video, puppetry and dance, as well as straightforward live performance. He knew he was going out on a limb, but to his astonishment, Japan’s most celebrated author, who is somewhat reclusive, not only gave his blessing to the New Yorker to adapt what many consider his most “Japanese” novel, but told him he had expressly hoped that a Westerner would be the one to adapt it and bring it to theatrical life.
Seven years and numerous trips to Japan later, and Earnhart is finally ready to unleash his fantastically ambitious adaptation of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” on the world. Fittingly, it will play Edinburgh during a season that has a particular emphasis on Eastern culture and its intersections and collisions with the West.
The novel, which blends the hyper-real with the surreal, is a challenge to describe, let alone adapt. Its numerous imaginational feats revolve around a cast of bizarre but strangely sympathetic characters, including a “prostitute of the mind”; a thanatophiliac teenaged girl who makes wigs; a mysterious World War II veteran full of secrets who crosses the country to bring Toru Okada an empty whiskey box; and of course, that absconding cat — who eventually turns up again a year later, albeit with a differently shaped tail. At one point, Toru himself admits, “The one thing I understood for sure was that I didn’t understand a thing.” Many readers, however gripped by Murakami’s supremely engaging prose, might feel the same. So how did Earnhart and his co-writer Greg Pierce even begin to scale this huge, vaguely hallucinatory novel set in a specific moment in Japanese culture down to a two-hour, multi-media stage show accessible to international audiences?
“It wasn’t easy! At times I felt as if we were groping through the darkness, looking for answers,” Earnhart laughed. “It’s a very Japanese book in some ways. But in others, its concerns are actually quite universal. ‘Wind-Up’ is about the alienation of the individual that comes of living in a huge metropolis. It’s about the devastation of war on a nation’s psyche. And, at its heart, it’s about a man who has lived with a woman for six years but who realizes one day that he has no idea who she really was. I wanted to make sure I anchored the project in that human story, with emotions that many people might relate to.”
Nevertheless, Earnhart, who describes his production both as “a theatre of dreams” and “living cinema,” has not shied away from some of the novel’s more intriguing elements. The use of puppetry and abstract choreography help to honor the book’s many fantastical interludes, and Earnhart’s background in film has ensured that the video installations, far from being a gimmicky adjunct to the live performance, are some of the most thrilling aspects of the production. Earnhart spent nearly a year filming in Japan with the actress who plays Kumiko Okada, Toru’s vanished wife. Although she is a vital character in the plot, she will never appear on stage; audiences will see her only through her celluloid manifestation.
In his inventive merging of different media and genres, Earnhart hopes to hit the perfect balance between the real and the imagined. “I didn’t see it being only a theatrical production, but nor did I think it would be right to just make a movie out of it,” he explained. “I really wanted to get the intensity of live performance in there.”
With the dream-like chronicle going to some rather dark places, both sexual and violent, “intensity” certainly seems an appropriate word. And Earnhart is aware that in condensing the novel he has had to make certain cuts, conflate characters and commit other acts of dramatic license that may be viewed as grievous crimes by Murakami’s dedicated fans. But he is confident that, once the curtain comes down in Edinburgh, audiences will at the very least feel as though they have just been immersed “in a Murakami world.”
Just don’t expect to ever be quite the same again.
As it happened, Earnhart, a former producer at “Saturday Night Live” and head of production at Miramax, had taken the trip to Asia to seek inspiration for new creative projects. Something in Murakami’s mesmerizing tale of Toru Okada, an unassuming, everyman-type protagonist whose life takes ever more bizarre turns after his cat and then his wife disappear, spoke to him immediately.
“When I got back to New York, I wrote to Murakami asking for 15 minutes of his time,” he told The Daily. “He agreed, and I jumped straight on a plane to Japan.” Earnhart — who had never previously been to Japan — had a wild plan to ask the author for the rights to adapt the novel for the stage, using an array of media including video, puppetry and dance, as well as straightforward live performance. He knew he was going out on a limb, but to his astonishment, Japan’s most celebrated author, who is somewhat reclusive, not only gave his blessing to the New Yorker to adapt what many consider his most “Japanese” novel, but told him he had expressly hoped that a Westerner would be the one to adapt it and bring it to theatrical life.
Seven years and numerous trips to Japan later, and Earnhart is finally ready to unleash his fantastically ambitious adaptation of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” on the world. Fittingly, it will play Edinburgh during a season that has a particular emphasis on Eastern culture and its intersections and collisions with the West.
The novel, which blends the hyper-real with the surreal, is a challenge to describe, let alone adapt. Its numerous imaginational feats revolve around a cast of bizarre but strangely sympathetic characters, including a “prostitute of the mind”; a thanatophiliac teenaged girl who makes wigs; a mysterious World War II veteran full of secrets who crosses the country to bring Toru Okada an empty whiskey box; and of course, that absconding cat — who eventually turns up again a year later, albeit with a differently shaped tail. At one point, Toru himself admits, “The one thing I understood for sure was that I didn’t understand a thing.” Many readers, however gripped by Murakami’s supremely engaging prose, might feel the same. So how did Earnhart and his co-writer Greg Pierce even begin to scale this huge, vaguely hallucinatory novel set in a specific moment in Japanese culture down to a two-hour, multi-media stage show accessible to international audiences?
“It wasn’t easy! At times I felt as if we were groping through the darkness, looking for answers,” Earnhart laughed. “It’s a very Japanese book in some ways. But in others, its concerns are actually quite universal. ‘Wind-Up’ is about the alienation of the individual that comes of living in a huge metropolis. It’s about the devastation of war on a nation’s psyche. And, at its heart, it’s about a man who has lived with a woman for six years but who realizes one day that he has no idea who she really was. I wanted to make sure I anchored the project in that human story, with emotions that many people might relate to.”
Nevertheless, Earnhart, who describes his production both as “a theatre of dreams” and “living cinema,” has not shied away from some of the novel’s more intriguing elements. The use of puppetry and abstract choreography help to honor the book’s many fantastical interludes, and Earnhart’s background in film has ensured that the video installations, far from being a gimmicky adjunct to the live performance, are some of the most thrilling aspects of the production. Earnhart spent nearly a year filming in Japan with the actress who plays Kumiko Okada, Toru’s vanished wife. Although she is a vital character in the plot, she will never appear on stage; audiences will see her only through her celluloid manifestation.
In his inventive merging of different media and genres, Earnhart hopes to hit the perfect balance between the real and the imagined. “I didn’t see it being only a theatrical production, but nor did I think it would be right to just make a movie out of it,” he explained. “I really wanted to get the intensity of live performance in there.”
With the dream-like chronicle going to some rather dark places, both sexual and violent, “intensity” certainly seems an appropriate word. And Earnhart is aware that in condensing the novel he has had to make certain cuts, conflate characters and commit other acts of dramatic license that may be viewed as grievous crimes by Murakami’s dedicated fans. But he is confident that, once the curtain comes down in Edinburgh, audiences will at the very least feel as though they have just been immersed “in a Murakami world.”
Just don’t expect to ever be quite the same again.
While the show is dream-like, “The Wind-Up Bird” visits some dark areas.
