Stage adaptation of Murakami’s End Of The World And Hard-Boiled Wonderland values beauty over pain

End Of The World And Hard-Boiled Wonderland

HoriPro Inc
Esplanade Theatre
April 3, 8pm

Even among beloved Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s many off-kilter worlds, his hermetic and very weird early novel End Of The World And Hard-Boiled Wonderland (1985) must count as one of the most difficult to adapt for the stage.

For one, there are two kooky parallel storylines, fragments of each feeding into the other in a random, circular logic. Then there are the gold-fleeced unicorns who die en masse in winter and the stinky, sewage loving “inklings” that worship their fish god with claws. These crepuscular creatures Murakami alludes to but never fully pictures.

That is even before investing in its high-concept military industrial complex sci-fi setting and its eccentric cast of characters, from a brusque gatekeeper and a demanding shadow to a disingenuous scientist with one of the most boring and unnecessarily physics-inflected expositions.

It is a bona fide wonder that Japanese company HoriPro has managed to find a way to stage all this – faithfully, trundlingly and suffused with an unabashedly graceful beauty.

K. Ishihara’s spectacle of a set plays with perspective in a way suggestive of the weirdness of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, a cartoonish flatness to the backdrop and sloping divisions stretching distance between fixed points.

But it is also down to director Philippe Decoufle’s smart use of screens of various opacities, shadow work and even treadmills. The surreal magic infiltrates all parts, and the result – dare this reviewer say – trumps the novel with its more economical and deliberately flat prose.

Death Note (2006 to 2016) star Tatsuya Fujiwara is the celebrity cast as the troubled and set-up protagonist, employed as a human data encryptor, and chosen for the supposed strength of his inner psyche.

He is at the centre of a political maelstrom that is, when it comes down to it, by-the-by. Given some data to “shuffle”, an unconscious process, the story segues into an alternate, superficially more peaceful world of his alter ego, played by the younger Kiita Komagine.

In this dreamscape surrounded by a “perfect” wall, Komagine has his shadow separated from him and falls in love with a beautiful librarian (Misato Morita), flatly enigmatic in the trademark Murakami pixie dream girl way. He also reads dreams from glowing unicorn skulls.

The trick is in how Murakami and the play allow gradual connections between the two worlds to cohere into a psychological thesis. The trouble with such a fantastically elaborate world – effectively twice removed from the world as one knows it – is that imagination overwhelms relatability.

Both worlds are in fact the arcane inventions of a man to confront a deadened heart. That reading plays a big role in both worlds is befitting of an author used to writing and reading as escapism.

The radical invention lies in dance and choreography too. End Of The World And Hard-Boiled Wonderland is a very physical work, from the balletic, otherworldly unicorns in costume designer Ayako Maeda’s arm crutches and golden leotards to the pop and lock of the grungy inklings.

They are given solos to smoothen over transitions – a well-thought-out touch, with one dancer even intruding on pianist Mayu Gonto’s unobtrusive real-time piano playing, all minor keys and cascading muzak.

The combination mostly strikes a pitch-perfect tone save for a jarring umbrella dance interlude in the jovial major key. These bells and whistles exert a certain pressure on the acting, which must take on exaggerated, anime proportions – including gangsters Haru Fujita and Shinya Matsuda who appear conjoined and beast-like; though actual violence on Fujiwara has been elided to keep things PG.

Fujiwara plays it the most honestly, with stiff-back and a barely discernible limp, but even he overdoes it in a shouty finale that strains for heft.

But the heart and mind are fragile things – and Murakami will keep finding his lonesome souls who might find something beyond diverting in his strange worlds, even ones as filled with ciphers as this.

For those of this camp game for a mystery of what’s what, here is a ticking clock wonderland that holds a partial antidote.

Book It/End Of The World And Hard-Boiled Wonderland 

Where: Esplanade Theatre, Esplanade – Theatres by the Bay, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: April 4, 8pm; April 5, 2pm
Admission: $68 to $158 from Sistic (go to sistic.com.sg or call 6348-5555)
Info: www.esplanade.com/wonderland