Although End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland isn’t even the first Haruki Murakami adaptation to play at the Barbican, I nonetheless maintain that his works are unadaptable.
By that I mean that it’s almost impossible to replicate Murakami’s tone, wherein his protagonists – typically deadpan thirtysomething male loners from Tokyo – live boring lives that are encroached upon by baffling metaphysical forces. It’s magical realism, but it’s magical realism where beautifully precise descriptions of the protagonist making lunch are as important as the strange alternate worlds they find themselves entering. Put it on stage, and it’s inevitable that the magic overrides the mundane.
French director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé heads an otherwise Japanese adaption of 1985 classic Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (I have literally no idea why the name has been swapped around) that does an impressive job of conjuring the twin, cryptically interlinked strands of the novel.
The End of the World is a mysterious walled town – revisited by Murakami in his recent The City and Its Uncertain Walls – populated by herds of unicorns and people without shadows. We witness it through the eyes of regular guy Boku (Kiita Komagine), who has his shadow (Shuntaro Miyao) severed by the town’s Gatekeeper (Shinya Matsuda). Decouflé deploys dreamy projected backdrops and stilt-augmented dancers to play the unicorns. They look great, and both director and adapting writer Ako Takahashi do a good job of expressing the town’s otherworldliness, even if it never manages to convey the sense Boku is actually living there, and the strange deadpan marriage of ordinary chap and impossible place. The dance sequences depicting the unicorns and severed shadows are clarifying but again, not necessarily very Murakami.
The other plot feels less explicitly identified as Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but let’s call it that. It’s set in a Tokyo that is both prosaic and familiar but also dystopian – flesh-eating monsters live in the sewers and protagonist Watashi (film star Tatsuya Fujiwara) is a Calcutec, a sort of living encryption device (who is also just a regular Tokyo guy). A lot of weird shit happens to him – so much weird shit that I think we can say ‘sucked into a web of intrigue’ and leave it at that. But where Murakami plays it all with an incredibly straight bat, Decouflé and his cast often go for laughs, which to be honest I’d say sells the author’s vision short in the name of accessibility.
But my point stands that Murakami is essentially unadaptable: he’s sold 150 million books, but the fact only the realist Norwegian Wood has been turned into a feature film speaks volumes. So let’s be clear: Decouflé, Takahashi and team have done a bang-up job in both putting the stranger bits of this novel on stage, but also turning it all into a fairly digestible story. Ultimately it’s less moving than the book, and the final few sections get bogged down frantically tying up loose ends. But it’s an entertaining and audacious endeavour – the book is better, but there’s room for both.