Theatre review: Kafka On The Shore

SINGAPORE — In what has been an unofficial Haruki Murakami week (that includes talks at the Singapore Writers Festival as well as a recent concert elsewhere), the highlight was undoubtedly the stage adaptation of celebrated Japanese author’s hit novel Kafka On The Shore, done by no less than another celebrated Japanese, director Yukio Ninagawa.

The three-hour, twin-attraction production was equally a magical theatrical experience as it was somewhat of a slog. On the page, Murakami’s off-kilter imagination has limitless freedom to run wild. Onstage, there are many moments of these translating brilliantly but overall, it feels as awkward and restless as its teenager protagonist, Kafka.

One of the two alternating threads centres around the 15-year-old angsty runaway (Nino Furuhata) who seeks refuge in a library, befriending its genre-bending library assistant (Naohito Fujiki) and falling for the mysterious older woman who runs it, Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa), in an Oedipal sort of way. The suggestions of incest and underage sex, as well as the gender-philosophising aspects of Kafka’s coming-of-age story seem tame and one-dimensional for the most part, however.

Much of the fun — and the play’s energy — is to be found in the adventures of his older counterpart, the ever-optimistic Nakata (the charismatic Katsumi Kiba), a simpleton with the ability to talk to cats (which come to life as mascots) or predict strange weather. While Kafka burrows into books, Nakata’s tale involves surreal cameos of KFC’s Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker, a Hegel-spouting prostitute and the presence of a so-called entrance stone, a kind of inter-dimensional portal that’s linked to the odd situation Kafka, Miss Naeki and Nakata find themselves in.

Ninagawa’s take — by way of the odd decision of staging a Japanese translation of an English adaptation (by Frank Galati, who first staged it) of an English translation of the Japanese original — is visually stunning.

Like a deconstructed Rubik’s Cube, he rolls out sets and props inside vitrines that fluidly shift and emphasise the fragmented nature of the story and its characters. It’s a dazzling array of stuff, from a bus and a truck to patches of forests, and this complex, non-stop mixing-and-matching of boxes by the backstage crew, who act like the kuroku folks in kabuki, was a choreographic feat in itself.

The same strategy, however, has left Kafka On The Shore a little bit on the cold side. The use of vitrines was inspired by the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, and intentionally or not, there’s an implicit act of objectification present — Kafka On The Shore is not only fragmented but also twice removed from its audience, particularly in the cavernous Esplanade Theatre. The strangeness, the vitrines suggest, is not from here; a reverse of Murakami’s twilight zone worlds, where the banal and strange take place among us.

The play stays pretty faithful to the book, almost to a fault — in respectfully hewing close to Murakami’s meandering, almost improvisatory, style, the play feels slack and unwieldy. In contrast, the stage version of the equally-meandering novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was presented here in 2012, was locked into a singular dark, Lynchian spectacle.

Kafka On The Shore runs until tomorrow. Tickets from SISTIC.