Can Japanese theater travel? A Murakami adaptation tries.

If you want to produce Japanese theater internationally, it helps to have name recognition on your side. Who better than Haruki Murakami?

An all-new theatrical adaptation of the writer’s speculative science fiction novel “The End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland” took to the stage at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre last month, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the book’s publication.

The story unfolds across the parallel worlds referenced in the title. “The End of the World” is a fantasy town surrounded by a wall, where a man tasked as the Dreamreader — played by both Kiita Komagine and Ryunosuke Shimamura — attempts to uncover the world’s secrets. “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” is an alternate modern Tokyo, where a man working as a Calcutec, played by Tatsuya Fujiwara, probes the subconscious — his own and the world’s. As the two worlds intertwine, their shared mystery reveals a philosophical meditation on consciousness and identity in a minimalist, deliberate production that reinterprets Murakami’s 1985 novel through a 2026 lens. Its themes of identity and consciousness resonate with global anxieties over an uncertain future and the rise of artificial intelligence.