On the flip of the century, an ultra-violent Japanese movie a few class of scholars pressured to combat to the demise launched teenage actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to nationwide stardom. At present, he’s nonetheless identified to many by his Battle Royale character’s identify – Boy #15: Shuya Nanahara – and his face might be present in the whole lot from gangster video video games and billboard commercials to heads of lettuce in Japanese supermarkets.
However his newest enterprise to London marks a return to dystopian storytelling of a decidedly completely different nature. On the weekend of 8-11 October 2026, he’ll play the lead within the first-ever stage adaptation of a surreal 1985 ‘cyberpunk’ novel by Norwegian Wooden author Haruki Murakami on the Barbican. Finish of the World and the Laborious-Boiled Wonderland gives a story of cyborgs, unicorns, and sewer monsters between a Kafkaesque Tokyo underworld and a wierd, walled-off city.
And whereas a Fujiwara-introduced screening of Battle Royale additionally takes place on the venue the identical weekend, the programming marks a nostalgic head-trip in additional methods than one: this was the identical stage on which the actor made his theatre debut 29 years in the past, when he was simply 15 years outdated. ‘I’d by no means been overseas. I knew nothing of the world. I didn’t actually have a passport,’ he tells Wallpaper*. ‘I didn’t actually admire the dimensions of it, and the way spectacular it was to take a title position on stage on the Barbican – however that’s how my theatre life started.’
That 1997 Yukio Ninagawa stage manufacturing of Shintokumaru predated even his star flip in Japan’s infamous Y2K Lord of the Flies, however was no much less spectacular a feat. The revered theatre director, identified for work of ‘astonishing visible bravura’ and for harmonising jap and western traditions, stated The Guardian in 2016, had plucked Fujiwara from auditions of over 5,000 hopeful children to supply him the title position; a casting course of that legendary crime movie auteur Kinji Fukasaku would echo three years later in Battle Royale.
Tatsuya Fujiwara as Watashi
(Picture credit score: The Barbican)
In Shintokumaru, Fujiwara would play an remoted youth grieving his lifeless mom whereas wrestling with a turbulent, confused attraction to his stepmother. For Battle Royale, Fujiwara cohabited along with his younger co-stars on the distant island the place the movie’s lethal college video games have been staged. ‘These have been two very completely different worlds,’ the actor remembers, ‘however the two nice maestros [behind them] have been comparable, in a method. They’d actually drive us as actors in direction of emotional extremes, and push you more durable to provide one thing additional. The distinction was that one was in entrance of a digital camera, and the opposite was in entrance of an viewers.’
He turned a significant display screen star following Battle Royale’s launch. (Manga adaptation Demise Word – reimagined as a musical on the Barbican earlier this summer time, and returning for an additional season in 2027 – was one other Fujiwara-led display screen smash in 2006.) And he would additionally return a number of occasions to the Barbican with Ninagawa within the years that adopted – together with for a manufacturing of Yukio Mishima’s Yorobashi in 2001, and to carry out Shakespeare in 2015. The latter was a supply of private anxiousness:
‘To convey Hamlet from an Asian nation to the homeland of Shakespeare was nerve-wracking,’ he remembers. ‘It’s like a British firm making a kabuki play after which bringing it to Japan.
‘We’d heard scary tales about UK audiences ever since we have been younger,’ he continues. ‘That if it wasn’t good, folks would rise up and go away in the midst of it… The director drove the solid actually onerous to have the ability to reply to such vital eyes on that manufacturing. We rehearsed and rehearsed to construct our confidence.’
In time, the theatre would even reunite Fujiwara along with his Battle Royale co-lead, Aki Maeda: she performed his disillusioned schoolteacher’s long-suffering spouse in a Japanese manufacturing of Chekhov’s Platonov in 2019.
With a lot expertise working with storytelling trailblazers, it may appear inevitable that a chance to interact with ‘Japan’s biggest residing novelist’, as Barbican head of Theatre & Dance Toni Racklin places it, would in the future come up. Besides, Murakami’s cryptic 1985 dual-narrative novel appears a difficult selection.
Tatsuya Fujiwara as Watashi and Misato Morita as Librarian
(Picture credit score: The Barbican)
Laborious-Boiled Wonderland and the Finish of the World, as it’s titled in Murakami’s unique novel, is the story of a human information processor who encrypts info inside his personal mind, and ultimately finds himself on the centre of a mysterious conspiracy. As he tries to make sense of the chaos round him, he additionally develops a deep connection to an alternate, superficially peaceable world the place his reminiscences and individuality are progressively stripped away. Although advanced, the 41-year-old textual content feels keenly related at this time, with themes of data-mining, surveillance, and fast-developing applied sciences arguably much more potent now than on the daybreak of Tokyo’s technology-fuelled bubble-economy years when it was first printed. However both method, most would certainly agree, beneath Murakami’s intricate narratives are at all times a lot deeper and extra profound preoccupations at play.
‘He’s a beautiful author and artist,’ says Fujiwara. ‘I’ve learn his works since I used to be younger, and there has at all times been one thing very heartwarming about them.’ A part of that enchantment is Murakami’s distinctive potential to conjure up liminality, longing, or nostalgia for ‘issues that have been virtually misplaced’, he continues. And that impact is seemingly simply as potent on the writer himself: ‘Murakami informed me that he wrote Laborious-Boiled Wonderland… so a few years in the past that he had forgotten about it himself,’ says Fujiwara. ‘And but he came visiting the rehearsal and the present a number of occasions.’
‘He’s a beautiful author and artist. I’ve learn his works since I used to be younger, and there has at all times been one thing very heartwarming about them’
Tatsuya Fujiwara on Haruki Murakami
Produced by the identical leisure firm behind Fujiwara’s Ninagawa performs – in addition to the theatre director’s 2015 manufacturing of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (which didn’t contain Fujiwara) – the Horipro stage manufacturing Finish of the World and the Laborious-Boiled Wonderland is directed by Philippe Decouflé, a choreographer and mime artist maybe finest identified for his music movies for New Order and High quality Younger Cannibals. ‘To adapt Murakami for the stage will need to have been an enormous strain for Philippe,’ says Fujiwara. ‘In actual fact, every time Murakami got here to the rehearsal, he’d say that “God is descending on us”, and we’d all get very nervous.’
Simply as along with his collaborations with Ninagawa, this 2026 manufacturing has been outlined by lengthy rehearsals and onerous work – with the reimagining of such a wealthy and sophisticated world necessitating strict self-discipline among the many dancers and performers, says Fujiwara. However the outcomes have already been rapturously acquired in Japan and in Singapore: ‘Unabashedly swish magnificence… [and] surreal magic infiltrates all components, and the outcome – dare this reviewer say – trumps the novel,’ stated The Straits Instances in April. With the story’s distinct worlds depicted in black-and-white and color, and incorporating dance choreography, shadow work, and even treadmills, the Barbican’s Toni Racklin now hails it as a ‘true spectacle’ on the eve of its European premiere.
However for Fujiwara, this headline occasion throughout the Barbican’s two-month ‘Haruki Murakami season’ – comprising movie screenings, jazz music performances, and even an ‘in dialog’ occasion with the writer himself – additionally gives pause for reflection. ‘The most important think about my very own progress and growth, when it comes to the methods I specific issues as an actor, was the delivery of my little one ten years in the past,’ he says. ‘And he or she is now nearing the age that I used to be after I made my debut right here.’ It’s, maybe, the most recent cyclical movement in a profession that appears to derive power from folding again upon itself, bringing Fujiwara again to the identical levels and themes, however by no means fairly as the identical actor.
Finish of the World and Laborious-Boiled Wonderland shall be carried out on the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 8 – Sunday 11 Oct 2026
