I hear this production very much as a kind of chamber music work. And as it happens, Murakami ia a great music lover and even ran a jazz club in Tokyo.

Murakami has said that what always fascinates him most are the things he doesn't understand. And his work is filled with people who are in that somewhat inchoate state of being on the threshold of knowing, but not quite knowing -- which can be maddening, but which can also make you giddy.

The Pirate Queen

Murakami's characters sense the potential liquification and destruction of everything. The aftershocks are psychological, and can be seen in characters who are some distance from the epicenter of the chaos in both time and space. The rifts, the fissures -- and those words are repeated often in the text -- are inside them now: there are separations and openings in their hearts, wounds and cracks in their psyches.

I'm sad to sense that she may be evaporating into obscurity, because she's enormously important as a writer and as an influence on other writers and other artists.

Gertrude Stein -- as a lesbian, a Jew, an exile (and) a woman -- was someone who was indomitable in her unwillingness to succumb to those marginalized identities.