“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”: Animating the World of Murakami Haruki

The story begins some days after the Great East Japan Earthquake takes place.

Komura’s wife Kyōko disappears after watching endless programs about the earthquake, even through the night.

One night when Katagiri goes home, he finds Frog waiting for him.

Komura takes his teenage cousin for treatment for his hearing on a bus he used to catch to go to high school.

Kyōko was once the girlfriend of Komura’s friend.

Komura keeps thinking about the words that Kyōko left : “Living with you is like living with a chunk of air.”

In a flashback to her twentieth birthday, Kyōko delivers food to the owner of the Italian restaurant where she worked.

Komura travels to Kushiro in Hokkaidō to deliver a box to his colleague’s sister, and he has a meal with her and her friend. He hears about a man they know whose wife disappeared after a UFO encounter.

A woman Komura meets on his journey tells him a strange story.

Katagiri falls to the ground on a back street in Kabukichō, as though he has been shot.

When Komura gets a call from his mother while he is making pasta, he remembers that the cat Watanabe has gone missing.

Komura meets a young girl and waits in her garden for Watanabe to pass by.