Nakata has a helper, too, a truck driver named Hoshino (Tsutomu Takahashi) who behaves like another sort of archetypal fairy-tale character, the The doorstep of a serial cat killer who calls himself Johnnie Walker (Masato Shinkawa), Nakata begins to act, unknowingly, as a kind of surrogate for But he can talk to cats, so he makes a modest living tracking down lost ones. (Kafka, the name the protagonist has chosen for himself, means “crow” in Czech.) Another, with whom he never actually crosses paths, is an odd,Ĭhildlike man named Nakata (Katsumi Kiba), who, as a result of an other-worldly affliction during the Second World War, lost the ability to read and to Strength and courage, who keeps reminding him that he’s “the toughest fifteen-year-old on the planet” and can handle the emotional challenges of the One, Crow (Hayato Kakizawa), is the voice of his inner Sakura (Anne Suzuki) whom he meets on a bus en route to Takamatsu.

Kafka has a number of guide figures to help himĪlong the way, including Oshima (Naohito Fujiki), a woman living as a gay man, who invites him into the community of the library, and a young woman named Same time you step into the one inside you.” This is, of course, the experience of any fairy-tale hero. Is a fairy tale in which the protagonist undergoes a double journey because, in Murakami’s words, “When you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the Question of Miss Saeki’s relationship to Kafka doesn’t have a realist answer.) (Since Murakami is working on an ambiguous, oneiric level, the Mourning over the long-ago death of her lover, may or may not be Kafka’s long-absent mother. The head librarian, a reclusive figure named Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) still lost in

If this culturalīack-and-forth is a little disorienting, that effect seems perfectly appropriate to a stage version of Murakami’s haunting, dreamlike work.įifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura (played in the Ninagawa production by Nino Furuhata), who is under an Oedipal curse, runs away from his father, a famousĪrtist, and winds up working at a small private library in Takamatsu. Theatre Company seven years ago the Ninagawa Company has returned it to the Japanese (Shunsuke Hiratsuka did the translation). Frank Galati adapted Haruki Murakami’s 2002 magic-realist novel for the Steppenwolf In July), is an unconventional example of East-West translation.

Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore, which I caught during its brief stop in London at the Barbican (it will perform at the Lincoln Center Festival Kafka on the Shore is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel.

Johnnie walker kafka on the shore