Poets & Writers Theater

Drive My Car is a film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and starring Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura. The film, which won best screenplay at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and the 2022 Oscar for best international feature film, follows the relationship between a widowed theater actor-director and a young woman hired to be his chauffeur.

Burning is a mystery thriller about a lonely aspiring writer whose life changes suddenly when he bumps into a childhood acquaintance and she introduces a suave stranger into their lives. Adapted from the short story “Barn Burning” by Haruki Murakami, the film is directed by South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong and stars Yoo Ah-in, Jeon Jong-seo, and Steven Yeun.

“He always plays with this tension between the life above and the life below.” In this short animated film, artist Ilana Simons presents a biography of Haruki Murakami and highlights moments in his life that have influenced his writing.

This trailer reveals a sneak peek of Memoranda, a video game inspired by twenty of Haruki Murakami's short stories and created by development team Bit Byterz. Currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, the 2-D point-and-click adventure game is a series of puzzles where players try to find what each character has lost.

"Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language." Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, was released today by Knopf.

Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf and Pantheon, talks about his cover design for Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. Note the Spirograph drawings behind his desk (three of them were featured in Kidd's design of the January/February 2010 cover of Poets & Writers Magazine). And read Ken Gordon's take on the girth of Murakami's huge book and others in the current issue.

1Q84, the eagerly anticipated tome by Haruki Murakami, will be published by Knopf next month. The image of the book at the end of this trailer doesn't do it justice: The novel is nearly 950 pages long.

Despite a bestelling novel as its source—and a score that was composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood—the film adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, directed by Anh Hung Tran, has been met with decidedly mixed reviews that boil down to: The book is better. The movie was released in Japan and Russia last December and in the UK in March.