I would like to see films made of The Fuck-Up and Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World . The latter is by Japan's best-selling author, so all the film rights must have been bought by now, and the former is a property of MTV Books. Guess I'll just keep waiting.

Excellent wishlist. You had me go and check, and sure enough, there hasn't been a single film (far as I can tell) based on a story or novel by Murakami.

Still one of my favorite opening sentences of any review of anything at all at any time:

"With all due respect to Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Beverly Cleary, Muriel Spark, Günter Grass, J.D. Salinger, Stephen Dixon, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Gore Vidal, Gabriel García Márquez, Rachel Ingalls, Tom Drury, Thomas Pynchon, Eudora Welty, J.P. Donleavy, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Naguib Mahfouz, David Foster Wallace, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Don DeLillo, some people my editor cut, Alice Munro, Dale Peck, José Saramago, Edmund White, E.L. Konigsburg, John Updike, W.G. Sebald, Russell Banks, Stephen Millhauser, Kazuo Ishiguro, Amy Bloom, Robert Cormier, Kenzaburo Oe, Francesca Lia Block, Rick Moody, Donald Antrim, Amos Oz, Paul Auster, Cynthia Ozick, Harry Crews, Denis Johnson, Gary Indiana, Howard Norman, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Lethem, J.G. Ballard, Dorothy Allison, Mary Gaitskill, and - of course - me, Haruki Murakami is our greatest living practitioner of fiction."

Too bad plays don't count. I know what I want to see/make.

How doth one find out about rights in this crazy, mixed-up world?

David, who wrote that review? I love anyone who loves Murakami.

Ooops. Missed the link. Don't mind me.

Ah, good, sakana.

Matt, about rights, one good place to start might be the publisher of the play you've got in mind. It's a start!

Yeah, I will. Though it's not like I can actually afford to buy film rights to anything.

I should probably make an original something first.