How Justin Siu Made a Jazz Musical About Haruki Murakami

“Anyone who knows anything about [Haruki] Murakami knows his work always has some sort of darkness in it,” says Justin Siu, explaining his motivation to write a trilogy of theatrical works inspired by the bestselling Japanese author. “It’s one of the reasons why he resonates with a lot of people, because obviously we all have messes in our lives.”

It was Murakami’s words that came to Siu when he experienced a brush with mortality that had the potential to change the course of his life forever. “My son almost died,” he says stoically. It was 2023. Siu had taken his children on a blow-out, post-pandemic skiing trip. His eldest son suddenly broke out in a severe allergic reaction — in the middle of an isolated, mountaintop village in Switzerland. 

“It was the worst attack that we have ever encountered in his life,” says Siu. “He was on the floor, couldn’t stand up. He could barely sit upright because his larynx was just closing up so much. It was just so inflated inside he couldn’t breathe, and at some point he’s like, ‘Dad, I can’t make it, I love you, but I really can’t make it.’”

An ambulance arrived — but the 45 minute drive to the nearest hospital was a journey Siu will never forget. It’s the shadow of this averted tragedy that the musician credits with inspiring him to compose his first theatrical work. “It was dark. It was heavy. Just like a Murakami novel,” he remembers. 

He references the 1983 short story “Firefly,” underlining that death is not the opposite of life, but an integral part of it. “That really helped me to internalise these sorts of situations so that I don’t have to feel as if [death] is a threat. It’s not an extraordinary event that will take me by surprise. And when it does come around, I think I am more ready to face it. I started reading it, and I thought, you know [Murakami] is such a great jazz fan — I want to do something with that.”

From pain to purpose

On his first readings, Siu didn’t pay attention to the multitudes of jazz references in Murakami’s work. “When I first read Murakami in college I didn’t know anything about jazz,” he remembers, “and whenever I saw all these tunes I would just skip it — that was the days before Spotify, right?” 

Despite being a prolific performer today, Siu didn’t discover jazz until his late 20s. Rereading his works later, the double bassist discovered fresh resonances. Before he became a writer, Murakami ran a Tokyo jazz bar called Peter Cat, a formative experience which shaped an oeuvre rich in references to famous jazz tunes and performances. 

“Murakami is very jazz — whatever he’s feeling about certain things, whenever there’s a scene that calls for a certain vibe of music, he will just drop it into the text,” explains Siu. “Now I have so much personal understanding of all the jazz mentioned, and it’s given me such a different perspective. I can even sing it in my head while I read it, picture it like a movie — which is why it was so easy for me to visualise how it would translate onto a theatrical stage piece.”

Rather than just programming a concert based around a Murakami-conceived setlist, Siu began penning his own original narrative linking scenes and pieces from various novels, riffing on images and dialogue from the source material. First he pulls out the specific music he has mentioned and in what context, he says. “Then I find all these texts and put them together and say, can I string a story through it?” 

The result was Let’s Hear: The Jazz Winds of Haruki Murakami, a stage work “first about jazz and then about death,” which premiered in 2023 and was revived in 2024. As well as playwright and music director, Siu serves as live musician and star — despite never acting before — delivering the script in a mix of Cantonese and Japanese, in which he is fluent. (English and Chinese surtitles are also provided.) “It was a great vehicle to promote jazz,” says Siu, “because a lot of the audience were fans of Murakami. They don’t necessarily listen to jazz, but they found it to be very rewarding and enriching.”

Now the same cast and band have reunited for a sequel, Hear Not: The Jazz Winds of Haruki Murakami. Authorised by the Haruki Murakami Library, the script incorporates images from novels including Kafka on the Shore and A Wild Sheep Chase.

Siu views the new piece as the middle part of a trilogy, with each chapter focusing on one of three leads. The first show dealt with the suicide of the other male character, a Murakami composite played by Japanese saxophonist and fellow first-time actor Yu Hagiwara. The second focuses on a female character, invented by Siu and played by pro Hong Kong actress Zoe Lau. Set for 2028, the final chapter will move onto Siu’s character. 

“It’s a very Murakami-esque way of constructing a story where everybody is on a different timeline,” adds Siu. “So the band is on a different timeline universe, then there’s two characters from the books, which is another timeline, and then there’s the girl who’s on another timeline — but it’s all suggested, all open to interpretation.”

Life, improvised

Concertgoers to the Murakami show will also have the opportunity to buy a vinyl-shaped token to redeem later for a physical copy of Siu’s imminent debut album, Trade War. It’s a long overdue statement from an artist who has been a stalwart of the local scene for more than two decades — even if he remembers receiving a frosty welcome when he began gigging locally. “The first few years I was doing gigs, I could hear people throwing insults at me, telling me off for doing this and that.” he remembers. “I was shit, I was completely shit — I just went in head first.”

Because jazz was a late love. Born and raised in Hong Kong, at age nine he began playing cello, simply because an older brother had already claimed the violin. He credits a good teacher with early success — “winning all the local competitions, basically” — playing classical repertoire. “I was a great cellist, but a bad student,” he remembers. 

The result? Siu was shipped to a UK boarding school, age 16, in the sleepy town of Dorset. There, he first encountered jazz, performing an evening of Gershwin songs at the BBC Proms as part of The National Youth Orchestra. “With the drummer swinging, I was so turned on to that stuff,” he remembers. “The whole time I was playing classical music, I loved it — but that stuff is the next level.”

Without other distractions, top academic grades suddenly flowed, and Siu went on to University of Cambridge to study the completely unjazzy discipline of computer science. “I’m from a Hong Kong family, where they don’t allow anything that is impractical,” he says. Despite that, he still joined the university orchestra and beat all the music students in a competition, performing a Shostakovich cello concerto. However, after graduating with his prized degree, a lucrative career working in Silicon Valley followed. Siu arrived in the early 2000s, at the heart of the dot-com era, enjoying “job offers all the way down the road.”

In Northern California, Siu finally had the opportunity and means to experience jazz in its most developed forms, with spare cash to watch legends including Ahmad Jamal, Stanley Clarke, Diana Krall, Mike Stern and Brad Mehldau passing through famous Oakland eatery Yoshi’s. However, work was bringing him no joy and he found himself increasingly pursuing dangerous thrill-seeking behaviour. “I became an adrenaline junkie because everything else felt too mundane,” says Siu. “Every weekend, If I wasn’t listening to jazz, I would drive up to the snowy mountains. I was chasing something.”

Soon he found himself returning to work on Monday morning aching and often injured after weekends spent snowboarding and mountain biking. Eventually, his boss, a frustrated jazz drummer himself, encouraged Siu to follow his own path, “He was saying, ‘You are becoming a liability,’” says Siu. “So I am like, there is something biological that is giving me a signal that I need to change my lifestyle drastically.”

It came to a head when he blacked out for five minutes after flying off a mountain bike, sustaining a facial injury requiring 27 stitches — a wake-up call that ultimately sent him home to Hong Kong, where he discovered his father, an amateur violinist, had a “cheap plywood bass” that set him onto the path we find him today. 

“At some point I felt that I had to dig deeper into what was becoming of myself, because I could see what I could very easily become,” he remembers. “Being in the Bay Area I had a comfortable job, the lifestyle was amazing, the weather was superb, the environment was great. It was one of the best times of my life. But something deeper was missing — and I wanted to find out what that was. I knew the avenue to do that would be to go down the path of music.”

In pursuing that path, arguably no one has done more to celebrate, document and propagate jazz in Hong Kong than Siu. Conceived as a pandemic distraction, his YouTube channel live-streaming performances from his studio endures six years later; the result is an unrivalled video archive of more than 200 performances by local musicians. Since late 2025, he’s opened these shows up to the public, under the Blue Study Live banner, with a small number of tickets sold to attend each performance. These encounters may inspire the next generation, the way Murakami inspired him. 

Hear Not: The Jazz Winds of Haruki Murakami takes place at Hong Kong Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre, 19–20 June 2026. More information here. Follow the Blue Study Live here.