Pi Theatre

Haruki Murakami and Frank Galati

Adapted for the stage by Tony Award winner Frank Galati, After the Quake is based on two of Harui Murakami’s internationally renowned short stories, “Honey Pie” and “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” from a collection of the same name published in Japan in 2000 and released in English in 2002. The stories look at life and love in the wake of the major earthquake in the city of Kobe in late 1995, which killed 6,500 people and left 300,000 homeless. This adaptation brings the well-known author’s mix of realism and surrealism to life on the stage. In Murakami’s vision, people collide with the aftershocks of disaster through encounters with larger-than-life characters (such as a six-foot talking frog). Murakami sets his stories in locations that reflect the mundane existence of day-to-day life, while at the same time using the narrative techniques of film noir to explore the metaphysical anxieties of our age.

Frank Galati most recently directed The Visit as well as Seussical and the acclaimed production of the opera based on A View From The Bridge for the Chicago Lyric Opera. He is the director of Ragtime both on Broadway and on tour. Mr. Galati won the 1990 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Director for his dramatization of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. Mr. Galati is Associate Director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago. In 1994, he directed a revival of The Glass Menagerie at the Roundabout Theatre starring Julie Harris and Calista Flockhart. He has also directed for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the Chicago Opera. His adaptation of Arthur Miller’s An American Clock was seen on TNT and he was nominated with Lawrence Kasdan for an Academy Award for his screenplay of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.

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.”

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Murakami, who is also a translator, 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.

Murakami’s approach to bridging cultures is to portray modern Japanese people, and show the universality of their experiences. He says

There probably is a non-nationality about it, but it’s not as though I am after a sense of non-nationality. If that were really what I was after, I think maybe I would have set my novels in America. It would be easy if I were really to have them take place in New York or San Francisco. But, you see, what I wanted was first to depict Japanese society through that aspect of it that could just as well take place in New York or San Francisco. You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too ‘Japanese.’ That is what I really want to express.

It is this aspect of Murakami’s work that we think will interest and engage our audiences.

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Watch author Frank Galati on Haruki Murakami:

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Murakami has some interesting things to say about art and politics in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Literary Prize:

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies — which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true —the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it.

You can read the entire speech here.

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The San Francisco Chronicle interviews Haruki Murakami.

Q: Readers are very passionate about your work. Why do you think fiction matters to people so much?

A: That’s a big question. I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching. Sometimes it’s not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake.