imagine...: Season 13, Episode 5

13 - 5: A Wild Sheep Chase: In Search of Haruki Murakami

Arts and culture programme. Alan Yentob explores the mysterious, offbeat, sexually-charged world of Japan's most popular and internationally acclaimed writer, Haruki Murakami. Murakami is incomparable; a literary novelist, he writes cool, witty, and often surreal bestsellers. The notoriously enigmatic and media shy author always shuns radio and television, but agreed to a rare and frank off-camera interview for this programme.

In this impressionistic film Alan Yentob travels in Japan through the strange, labyrinthine landscape of Murakami's fiction on a jazz-fuelled 'wild sheep chase' of a journey. In Tokyo and Kobe he delves into the social and political background of Murakami's work and encounters his fans, critics, translators ... and a talking cat.