Earlier this year, “Drive My Car,” a movie adapted from another Murakami short story, became the first Japanese film to score a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Prior to that, the two best-known Murakami movie adaptations, one of which is “Burning,” came from Vietnamese and Korean directors. Filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng took a stab at bringing Murakami’s bestseller “Norwegian Wood” to the big screen, but by dint of the very medium perhaps, the movie failed to capture the essential spark of the novel and its narrator’s internal monologue.

By sheer coincidence, the first time I opened a book with Murakami’s name on it and started reading, I happened to be standing in Kinokuniya Books, the same store in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where the author bought the pen and paper for his first novel. I quickly devoured “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” and several other Murakami novels, “Norwegian Wood” included, but it wasn’t until after seeing “Burning” that I went back and read the short story “Barn Burning” from his collection “The Elephant Vanishes.”

“Burning” showed that a great Murakami adaptation was possible and could go beyond its Japanese roots to gel with a Korean sensibility (similar to “Oldboy,” itself adapted from manga) before finding even broader international appeal. As sad as it is, there’s something universally relatable about being alone with your thoughts and a photo of someone who’s not there. Jong-su fantasizes about Hae-mi while gazing outward from the window of a chilly, dark room, and it’s not so different from the imagined scenarios of online life — or the inner life that keeps us all marooned in our own separate heads, pondering who we allow to live rent-free there and what we infer from the walls of silence that surround us.