Word: murakami
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...story: boy meets girl, girl turns out to be his mother, boy kills father. Sophocles told it 2,400 years ago, as have many authors since. But few have tackled the Oedipal tale with as much wit, verve and retail success as Japan's Haruki Murakami has in Kafka on the Shore. The book sold 550,000 copies in its first month on his home soil in 2002, inspiring a sequel comprised of selections from the 8,870 e-mail critiques Murakami received and his 1,220 replies. Kafka has become a best seller in Germany, South Korea and China...
...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...
...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 and rave reviews in Tokyo, New York and London. It opened at MC93 Bobigny in suburban Paris earlier this month, and it will soon move to the Power Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan...
...them comments wryly. It is, no doubt, a physically grueling play to perform, and the Japanese actors are overdue for home leave. For now, no performances are scheduled after the Ann Arbor run, but Complicite officials say the show will definitely appear again. Considering the difficulty of making Murakami make sense onstage and McBurney's dazzling success at it, this Elephant is unlikely to vanish completely...
...luxury-goods makers, it's a high-stakes battle. Louis Vuitton's Murakami bag, for example, generated more than $300 million in sales last year. It's hard to quantify exactly how much money a luxury brand loses to counterfeiting, since investigators and manufacturers say most people who buy fakes wouldn't pay for the real thing anyway. The larger risk is that the brand will get devalued. Brandmakers fight counterfeiting "not because they feel this will steal a genuine quantifiable sale from them," says luxury-goods analyst Andrew Gowen of Lazard & Co. in London, "but because of the overexposure...