Dream world

"In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment," says Toru, the main character in Haruki Murakami's 1994 novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. They're only 15 words in a book that exceeds 600 pages, but they're indicative of a dream-like state that suffuses the atmosphere of the celebrated author's lauded tome – a Japanese classic that's been treated to a lavish stage adaptation and will receive its world premiere at this year's Edinburgh International Festival.

One of Murakami's most popular novels, the production fits neatly into the Festival's 2011 mission to represent a dialogue between East and West. Writer-director Stephen Earnhart and much of his creative team are American, while many of its actors are Japanese or of Japanese origin. Moreover, the play was developed in the US and Japan, is performed in English and Japanese (with English surtitles), and Bunraku—a three-person operated style of Japanese puppetry—plays a major role in its more surreal sequences. Much of this cross-cultural ethos stems from Murakami himself, who has otherwise been uninvolved in its seven-year development.

"I first met Haruki in May 2004," Earnhart explains, "I flew to Japan, spent the day with him and told him about my crazy idea to adapt the novel. He seemed really intrigued by the concept and we hit it off but I thought it would be a hindrance that I was not Japanese. I asked him if he'd prefer that the project originated from Japan and I even said I would move here, but he insisted it should be made in my country. He wrote the novel here in America and I think it fulfilled some sort of a cycle for him. He actually went to his agent and said he wanted me to have complete permission to do whatever I wanted."

Earnhart is a former producer at Miramax but has an eclectic background rooted in live performance. He first read Murakami's novel in 2003 on a trip to South East Asia, and was instantly struck by its dramatic potential. He says, "I thought this is a way I can combine all of the things I really love: live performance, film and sound design. It was a chance to do a more ambitious project than I've ever done before and yet put together all of these disparate loves into one project."

Still, the intricacy of its structure—together with a complex funding process—has been a strong contributor to the show's long development. "I was so naïve," he says. "It took a while to recalibrate my aesthetic and to understand that in live contexts you can't give people too much to look at any one time, it makes people anxious that they're going to miss something. Now we're working with much less technology and we're using puppetry, which operates as a bridge between the performers and the film."

The man behind the puppets that play such an important role in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is Tom Lee, a principal puppeteer in the Metropolitan Opera who's also working on the Broadway run of the National Theatre's War Horse this year. Operating as both puppet director and set designer, Lee has tried to emphasise the hypnagogic quality of Murakami's novel in his original design, without overshadowing its simple central narrative.

"Toru experiences a series of unfortunate events that lead him to lose his wife," he explains. "He goes into a place where he's unsure of what is reality and what is a product of his own sexual fantasies. What the production tries to do is to offer a visual palette for that to happen. There's not a lot of large physical scenery. They're more like pieces of gauze drawn over, like you're watching something you're not supposed to see from behind a gauzy curtain. As the show goes on, these layers of gauze and mesh are peeled away and every once in a while, the action snaps back to Toru's mundane life."

For Earnhart, it's the tension between these two worlds that lies at the heart of Murakami's story. "What I love about reading Murakami is the worlds that he creates," he says, "this feeling of the other world that you find yourself in when you're reading his novels. It makes you look at reality in a different way. Even when you stop reading, you're sort of still living in that world. One of my approaches to film is a collision between gritty realism and dreamy surrealism. And so I wanted to take what I'd got from Murakami's text and, using a film aesthetic, create a world the audience could disappear into in a live context. I feel that film is very much like a dream and the experience of going to the cinema is very dreamy, so I wanted to try to bring that feeling to the stage."

For Earnhart and his co-writer Greg Pierce, one of the primary challenges was tackling The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle's considerable length. Through several script drafts, the two have managed to slim down the weighty tome to a two-hour-long production, without an intermission. But while its visual aesthetic and narrative structure have been carefully controlled over its seven-year development, some factors have been completely out of the creative team's control.

"The March earthquake and tsunami in Japan have absolutely affected the show," Earnhart admits. "Water is the central metaphor in the piece. Long before this year, we used to use the term 'tsunami' in development – that a metaphorical tsunami had ripped Toru's life apart and now he's drifting around in the wreckage of his life. We used to use that term all the time and suddenly it almost felt blasphemous. After the tsunami, some of our cast members went back to help. Our lead actor helped with translations and to talk to people first hand; one actor from Japan decided not to continue with the project.

"Japan has a huge history of not wanting to speak about atrocities and things that might embarrass the country, but pretty much all of our Japanese collaborators really encouraged us to continue using images of water. The play is so much about loss, and unexpected loss and we spent a lot of time talking about what it feels like when the ground just gets physically sucked out from under your feet. So even though they're not directly related, the event has definitely found its way into the piece."

Lee adds: "It was a pretty crushing time for many of the cast members who had family in Japan. But the piece is about the cultural identity of modern man inside modern Japan and while I don't know that the events of this year have made the actual production any different, I do know that all of us felt at the time that we wanted to do our best work."

It's an effort that Murakami, who recently donated €80,000 of prize money to victims of the disaster, is sure to appreciate – even though the notoriously shy author might never actually see the piece himself. "He sent some people to our New York preview this year and they gave him a favourable report," Earnhart says. "I went over last May, too – I took my laptop and basically edited six years of my life into a 15-minute video. I put headphones on him in his office and made him watch it. Later, I found out that only one ear of the headphones was working, but he said he was really was impressed. I'm hoping that at some point he'll be able to come and see it."