Murakami's Flying Circus

If you were a British stage director looking for foreign material to adapt, you'd likely avoid anything in Japanese, a language whose subtleties have tormented translators for centuries. And you definitely wouldn't choose Haruki Murakami, whose witty, noirish best sellers about contemporary Japan ( Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase ) combine the mundane and the surreal with daunting complexity.

So, of course, Simon McBurney had to try. His London-based Complicite theater group teamed up last year with Tokyo's Setagaya Public Theatre to tackle Murakami. ("Japan's Kafka," McBurney calls him.) The result, The Elephant Vanishes , has played to packed houses...