Despite their humble origins growing up in working-class Liverpool, nothing could hold them back, even as sophisticated Londoners looked down their noses at these lads from the supposedly uncouth British north country. Their fantastic commercial success was something as a teenager I could dream about for myself either in music or some other still-to-be-determined pursuit.

Japanese is a foreign language to him, but Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung was able to surpass all cultural and language barriers to bring the Japanese novel “Norwegian Wood” to the big screen. In 1994, Hung first read the popular novel by Japan’s Haruki Murakami in its French translation and felt and intimate connection with the love story.