From left Manami Hara, Tetsuro Shigematsu and young Leina Dueck star in After the Quake. (Ken Bryant/Bridge Communications)

Vancouver's Rumble Productions has scored an all-Japanese cast to star in its stage adaptation of a play based on the works of Haruki Murakami, one of Japan's best-known writers.

It will be the Canadian premiere of After the Quake, a play based on a collection of Murakami's short stories of the same name.

Murakami, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and the Kiriyama Prize, is considered one of modern Japan's greatest writers and his works such as Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore have been widely translated.

But that doesn't make him an obvious choice for a stage production, Richard Wolfe, co-director of After the Quake, told CBC News.

"Murakami is a reclusive figure, very hard to get hold of," Wolfe said. "It's believed he doesn't like to see his work adapted for other mediums." There is a single movie of a Murakami work, Tony Takitani, from 2004.

Yet fellow director Craig Hall was keen to adapt Murakami for a Vancouver stage and was delighted when Chicago's Frank Galati created After the Quake, which combines two stories into a single play.

Galati, a Tony-Award winning director with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Co., was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of The Accidental Tourist. Steppenwolf staged After the Quake in 2006, working from the original English translation of Murakami's work by his longtime translator Jay Rubin.

All the stories take place immediately after the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, events that shook the Japanese psyche, Wolfe said.

"Murakami is concerned with the psychological trauma of these events and how they affect people day to day," he said. "All his characters are very ordinary people."

The play combines two stories — Honey Pie, about a young girl who has nightmares about the earthquake and Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, about an ordinary man who helps a giant frog battle the source of the earthquakes.

Galati ties the stories together by having a writer tell the young girl stories — one of them Honey Pie, about a friendly bear, the other about Super-Frog — to help her get over her fears.

Behind the simple stories are the many layers of nuance that make Murakami a great writer — themes like social alienation and inability to communicate, Wolfe said.

"These stories come off as simple on the surface," Wolfe said. "People can come and just enjoy them like that. But what people often say about Murakami is that the stories stay with them and they're thinking about them days later."

The story of Frog, a giant creature who must battle the evil Worm that lives beneath a Tokyo bank tower, is shot through with humour, including the witty dialogue for which Murakami is famous.

"The whole thing is a hall of mirrors, reflections of reflections. There's action, music relationships. … Frog is very funny and eloquent."

Frog is being played by an ordinary man, with green hands and a little electronic enhancement to his voice and shadow.

Wolfe considers it a coup that he's been able to cast the play with Japanese actors, including Vancouver actor Kevan Ohtsji and Tetsuro Shigematsu, an actor and broadcaster who has hosted The Roundup on CBC Radio One.

Two cast members read Japanese and are able to compare Murakami's original words with the script.

"They bring a kind of insider knowledge," Wolfe said. "They're coming at it from a Japanese perspective. Shigematsu was there in Kobe after the earthquake and he understands the psychological impact."

The Rumble Production is being co-produced in the Pi Theatre and runs Nov. 19 to Dec. 5 at Studio 16 in Vancouver.