This poetic film about the world of the elusive author of best-sellers, Haruki Murakami, transports us into Japan of today. Visual sequences, as intensive and magical as the novels of Murakami, allow his surreal stories to come alive. Time seems to stand still when school kids, pedestrians or literary critics recite his tales. In Tokyo and in the country we meet Murakami’s admirers and experts, everyone with his own opinion of the significance of his literary work.
"… It is a visual feast, with scene after scene that makes me think `How did she get this? How did she know about this?´; the slow motion sequences done with intense clarity make the viewer look and look and look and lose the ability to stop looking, and because the looking is so careful and intense and clear, it feels like an absolutely fresh and new look at Japan (or should I say `the world´?).
The mood has that strange Murakami humour. It's totally set in the realistic, pragmatic world, but it views that world in a slightly skewed way, just as Murakami does. I don't think I've seen an interpretation of Murakami that is so faithful to the works themselves." (Jay Rubin, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, 2007)