Haruki Murakami's After the Quake: A Surreal Play

Celebrated author Haruki Murakami, born in 1949, is one of many artists pointing outside Japan for inspiration to exist in the modern world. Isolation is his enemy. A highly recommended surreal play drawn from Haruki Murakami’s novel "After the Quake". Adapted for the stage by Frank Galati.

Vancouver’s Pi Theatre and Rumble Productions present the Canadian premiere.

Doubtless the most celebrated (inside and outside the country) modern-day Japanese internationalist author, Murakami indulges in flowing prose that can, at times, seem very like the so-called “magic realism” in Central American fiction. He has often asserted that good writing needs rhythm and melody, like an improvised jazz song, saying that he uses a ‘free improvisation’ style of writing, where his story just comes out through some sort of special channel like automatic writing. His characters move effortlessly between the surreal and real, inspiring many an office worker to read him on long trips to and from the office every Monday through Saturday in Japan.

"After the Quake" is based on bestselling author Haruki Murakami’s stories about life in the wake of disaster. 

In this touching play, Junpei is a timid writer who enchants Sayoko, the love of his life ever since early University days, by conjuring up stories now to soothe the anguish of her young daughter Sala, a girl who is having nightmares about the Earthquake Man. In Junpei’s soothing and fun stories, Talking Bear makes the very best honey pies, and Katagiri, a bank loans officer who must cope with underworld bank customers who are reneging on loans, struggles to distinguish between what is real and what is not when six-foot Frog, visiting Katagiri in his dining room, asks for help to fight off giant Worm for the safe future of Tokyo. Together, these stories explore the emotional aftershocks of disaster, and offer a message of hope, self actualization and healing.

From Wikipedia: “Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim, and he is the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize for his novel Kafka on the Shore. He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature, and The Guardian praised him as one of the “world’s greatest living novelists.”

Coming of age during the tumultuous student uprisings of the late 60s, Murakami has always been anti-establishment. He worked at a record store and as the owner of a jazz bar in Tokyo before taking on writing fulltime. He’s never opted for the traditional Japanese career path, and neither have his characters. In so doing they question the Japanese salary-man stereotype while facing headlong into the contemporary challenges Japan faces, such as suicide, depression, isolation and divorce.

Murakami, says that his work aims “to break through the isolation the Japanese have cherished for so long…so that we can talk to the rest of the world in our own words…The Japanese people have achieved material success all over the world, but they are not speaking to other people culturally…There should be a midway place where we could go to exchange information with people from other cultures.” After the quake does go to a very palpable “midway place” and find potent dreaming, nightmares, hope and self realization.

All through his work Murakami is fond of quoting great poets, philosophers and novelists, particularly foreign ones. So I offer my impressions of the play with the tools of the following quotations from Murakami writings. This appropriately surreal production enhances the fine actors, all of whom perform and embody the various roles they must enact with a kind of remove that characterizes those who dare to examine their lives, something Murakami admires immensely. The direction by Craig Hall and Richard Wolfe is on the mark and grounds the words, giving them a kind of stark framing that coordinates the acting and embodies the surrealistic elements, giving them dramatic depth.  

Memories are what warm you up from the inside, but they're also what tear you apart.
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore) 

“They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don’t believe that,” he said. Then, a moment later, he added: “Oh, the fear is there, alright. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else.”
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories) 

Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands (Salon, 20 February 2009).
— Haruki Murakami 

Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus 'Mack the Knife.' That's what my life would be like without you.
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

You got to know your limits. once is enough, but you got to learn. a little caution never hurt anyone. a good woodsman has only one scar on him. no more, no less.
— Haruki Murakami (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
— Haruki Murakami (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.
— Haruki Murakami (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I've got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that's not the question, is it?
—Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase) 

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
—Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

On now until Dec. 5, 2009

Studio 16, Granville St. at 7th Ave. 

Cast:

Manami Hara

Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica’s Gaeta)

Kevan Ohtsji

Tetsuro Shigematsu

Leina Dueck

Direction by Craig Hall and Richard Wolfe

Set Design by Yvan Morissette

Lighting Design by Itai Erdal

Costume Design by Sheila White

Sound Design by Yota Kobayashi

Stage Management by David (DK) Kerr 

Production Management by James Foy

Publicity by Bridge Communications

Illustration by Edward Kwong

Photography by Ken Bryant