Haruki Murakami is probably Japan's best-known living writer — a worldwide bestseller with novels translated into at least 50 languages. Yet, despite that, dramatizations of the 71-year-old author's works have been notably few and far between.
Even one of his most popular titles, the enigmatic 1994-95 trilogy "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," has only once been adapted for the theater. That was in the form of a multimedia play by Stephen Earnhart, a former director of production at Miramax Films, that ran in New York in 2010 and again at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2011 — but not in Japan.
Now, though, the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre is set to fix that omission with an international collaboration that will be the first production based on the book to be staged in its author's homeland.