Haruki Murakami TV adaptation revisits 30 years of watershed moments

Japan Times

03-04-2025

For decades, Haruki Murakami has captivated readers worldwide with his brand of offbeat existentialism and urban malaise, exploring Japan's psyche through surreal intrigues that blur past and present, the ordinary and the supernatural.
His short stories and novels have inspired a wealth of stage and film adaptations, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Oscar-winning 'Drive My Car' (2021). It isn't until now, however, that the author is making his first foray into television with NHK's new four-episode miniseries, 'After the Quake,' which will air Saturdays from April 5.
Directed by studio veteran Tsuyoshi Inoue and scripted by Takamasa Oe, the series adapts four tales from the author's short story collection of the same name and brings Murakami's singular sensibility to life through an impressive ensemble cast and thoughtful world-building. Oe and executive producer Teruhisa Yamamoto previously served as co-writer and producer, respectively, of 'Drive My Car.'
'Grasping the concepts that dwell within the passages of Murakami's stories and transforming them into images is a challenge like swimming in a vast ocean,' Yamamoto tells The Japan Times over email. 'The ocean is deep but also tranquil and beautiful. It's probably because of our previous experience that we were able to swim across it at all.'
'After the Quake' brings author Haruki Murakami's work to television for the first time, with episodes adapted from the eponymous story collection. |
© NHK
'UFO in Kushiro,' the first episode that is scheduled to air this Saturday, transports the viewer to the immediate aftermath of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. Young Tokyoite Komura (Masaki Okada) observes stoically as his wife Mimei (Ai Hashimoto) maintains a days-long vigil in front of the TV, stricken dumb by round-the-clock reportage of the devastation and growing casualty toll.
Komura returns home one day to find their home stripped bare of his wife's belongings. 'You have nothing inside you that you can give me,' she writes in her parting letter. 'Living with you is like living with a chunk of air.' So begins a series of events that culminates in Komura's solo trip to Hokkaido with a mysterious package in tow, his life shaken to its core by the belated realization of how little he and his wife knew of each other.
The stories in 'After the Quake' were written in the years following the 1995 earthquake and explore the event's ripple effects across Japanese society. As longtime Murakami translator Jay Rubin writes in 'Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words,' the disaster and its aftershocks force characters who live far from the epicenter 'to confront an emptiness they have borne inside them for years.'
The NHK drama begins in 1995, but each successive episode shifts forward in time, adapting the source material to skirt the edges of other major events from the past three decades, including the Great East Japan Earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic. In effect, the scope of Murakami's reflection on fin de siecle Japan is extended into a retrospective of contemporary history and large-scale incidents that have shaped more than one generation and left their imprint on the nation at large.
Like in the original stories, the characters remain on the peripheries, but the gravitational pull exerted by each catastrophe has bearing on their destinies. Though the disasters occur off-screen, the routine rhythms of individual lives are violently disrupted, surfacing long-hidden tensions that all but demand release — and often leave in their wake more questions than answers. In every 45-minute episode, Inoue deftly captures the outline of a world — and the essence of the people who inhabit it — that Murakami conveys in his characteristic straightforward prose.
'UFO in Kushiro' offers a view onto the strangeness and stifled sorrow of the characters' inner lives through nuanced portrayals by Okada, Hashimoto and Erika Karata (who plays a character named Shimao). Other memorable performances from the series include Shinichi Tsutsumi in the role of disheveled artist Miyake in 'Landscape with Flatiron,' and Daichi Watanabe as the adult version of Yoshiya, a young man who has all but renounced his devout upbringing, in 'All God's Children Can Dance.'
"After the Quake" brings Haruki Murakami's singular sensibility to life through an impressive ensemble cast and thoughtful world-building. |
© NHK
Multi-instrumentalist Yoshihide Otomo's score, by turns melancholic, whimsical and sinister, adds further texture to the narrative landscape. According to Yamamoto, Otomo visited the production in person and improvised on electric guitar. 'The musical world was made possible by Otomo's wonderful sensitivity,' Yamamoto says.
The characters and stories are linked across space and time by a handful of totems: a plain white box, a refrigerator, a frog. The wonder and dread characteristic of a megalopolis like Tokyo are handily expressed through striking visuals such as a tilt-shift shot of the Shinjuku skyline and an unsettlingly swift pan to follow a train racing down an underground passage. Meanwhile, other settings like coastal Ibaraki Prefecture and a secluded religious compound are also well-delineated in their quietude and wistfulness.
Where the adaptation falters slightly is in the visual effects, which are thankfully sparse until the fourth and final episode. The episode in question was conceived as a sequel to 'Super-Frog Saves Tokyo' from the story collection, following up with the same characters in 2025. Though some degree of stylization is unavoidable when an anthropomorphic talking frog (voiced by Non) is an integral part of the plot, the episode's departure into a subterranean realm is not as impactful as the human dramas enacted in the previous stories.
At a press conference last month, Okada, Hashimoto and Karata each expressed a sense of bewilderment at but reverence for Murakami's abstruse themes and peculiar characters. 'I read the story and screenplay over and over again,' Okada shared in a public statement. 'But I still feel like I'm constantly thinking about it, even though the shoot is over. ... Perhaps there is no end to this story.'
[bio]'After the Quake' airs Saturdays, starting from April 5. For more information, visit nhkworldpremium.com/en.[/bio