Murakami in the Movies

For enthusiasts of Haruki Murakami, last month brought two major events in two different countries. One is the publication, in Japan, of his latest novel, “Machi to Sono Futashika na Kabe” (“The City and Its Uncertain Walls”). The other is the release, in the United States, of “Saules Aveugles, Femme Endormie” (“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”), an animated feature based on several of Murakami’s short stories. In contrast to “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” about which almost all information was withheld from the public before it went on sale, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” has been publicized with all the means available to a production of its modest scale, including a trailer that emphasizes a host of identifiable pieces of Murakamiana: prowling cats, ethereal sex, dense Japanese urban landscapes, an absent wife, a descent into darkness, and a talking humanoid frog.

That last creature appears in Murakami’s short story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” and it’s vaguely disconcerting to hear it speaking English—or French, for that matter, in the film’s original trailer. A French Luxembourgian Dutch Canadian co-production, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” was directed by the composer-filmmaker Pierre Földes, whose official Web site says he was “born in the U.S. to Hungarian/British parents” but “raised in Paris.” Despite lacking any obvious connection to Japan—Murakami’s homeland, and usually his setting—Földes comes off as just the sort of international figure likely to be inspired by Murakami’s work. In adapting that work for the screen, he adds another volume to the saga of Murakami in the movies, which, like one of the writer’s own increasingly elaborate, oddity-filled novels, compensates for its frequent lapses into inelegance with the sheer fascination of aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic incongruity.

Murakami baked that incongruity into his writing from the very beginning. In his late twenties, while running a jazz bar in Tokyo, he decided to become a novelist. He felt dispirited by the stilted dullness of the manuscript produced during his first few months of writing, and he attempted to cast off the literary mannerisms that he’d unconsciously adopted by rewriting the novel’s opening in what English he then commanded (much of which would likely have come from the cheap hard-boiled paperbacks he’d found in used bookshops during his youth, in the port city of Kobe). When Murakami “translated” his writing back into Japanese, “the result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose,” as he puts it in the memoir “Novelist as a Vocation.” “As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.”

The career-making début novel that resulted, “Hear the Wind Sing,” was published in Japan, in 1979, and a cinematic adaptation followed, in 1981. When the director of that film, Kazuki Ōmori, experienced frustrations of his own in the screenwriting process, he, too, solved them by borrowing a foreign syntax. “You cannot just let actors recite lines from Murakami’s novels, because no Japanese person actually talks like his characters do,” he told the Asahi Shimbun, in 2013. Murakami’s dialogue read to him more like Japanese subtitles below a Western film, which, along with the novel’s short, fragmented chapters, gave him an idea: “I decided, Let’s make a Godard film,” complete with oblique title cards and jarring visual transitions. But the resulting piece of Nouvelle Vague à la japonaise failed at the box office, and Ōmori, who died last year, is better remembered today for his “Godzilla” movies.

Ōmori’s “Hear the Wind Sing” remains an obscurity four decades later, but one whose formal playfulness, imitative at the time, now feels almost fresh again. Its brief, episodic scenes follow the novel’s desultory events, many of them having to do with the beers the protagonist drinks—and the troubled young women he encounters—as a college student back home in Kobe during the summer of 1970. (The form of the novel was dictated by Murakami’s writing schedule, a few hours each night after closing the bar.) But the film as a whole is even more faithful to the novel’s atmosphere: every Murakami reader will recognize the texture of more or less genial alienation, foggily dissociated from politics, in which his characters live. They listen to jazz and classical music, get into conversations punctuated with broad pronouncements (“Civilization means transmission. Whatever can’t be expressed might as well not exist”), and confine their cultural references almost entirely to things Western.

A mutual friend, the writer Roland Kelts, once explained to me that Murakami has achieved enduring worldwide popularity because he “creates his own genre.” The tropes of that genre are by now firmly established (or too firmly established, as detractors would argue). But a Westerner who happened to see “Hear the Wind Sing” in the early nineteen-eighties, when Murakami was still largely unknown outside Japan, would have found it a strange brew indeed. How curious, for instance, that the record which the protagonist struggles to give to an old classmate, having borrowed it five years before, isn’t a Japanese hit of 1965 but the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” The song takes on enough importance to the novel’s narrative, such as it is, that it couldn’t have gone unheard in the movie, and the likely stiff licensing fees for the other popular songs Murakami drops into his work could have scared off potential adapters in the subsequent decades.

According to Ōmori, Murakami was reluctant to give his blessing to more feature films. In 1982 and 1983, the young filmmaker Naoto Yamakawa turned Murakami’s “The Second Bakery Attack” and “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” into charming shorts, neither of which departs significantly from the writing that inspired it. But, when Jun Ichikawa adapted the story “Tony Takitani” at full length much later, in 2004, he did so with a near-religious adherence to the text, turning some of Murakami’s words into voice-over narration and illustrating the film with spare, closely framed images (all to a lushly desolate score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto). Even the casting is minimal: Issey Ogata takes on the dual role of both the title character, a passive but highly competent technical illustrator, as well as his father; Rie Miyazawa plays both Tony’s fashion-addict wife and the young woman he considers hiring as an assistant after his wife’s sudden death.

“Tony Takitani” is something of a parable of postwar Japan, which by the time of the story’s original publication, in the early nineteen-nineties, had become one of the world’s wealthiest countries, albeit one viewed as a place of unimaginative, culturally dislocated ostentation. Born, like Murakami himself, in the late nineteen-forties, the central character gets his unusual name from a U.S. military officer acquaintance of his jazz-musician father, who figures its “American” sound will be advantageous under the new postwar order. Murakami, for his part, got the name from a T-shirt he found at a Maui thrift store, as he explains in his recent essay collection, “Murakami T.” The “Tony” Takitani emblazoned on its chest was a Hawaiian politician, but the striking combination of given name and surname got Murakami imagining a mild, taciturn Japanese man of his generation, hardworking and successful but persistently ill at ease with his place in the world.

A similarly complex cultural situation is suggested by the name of Kengo, the young man at the center of “All God’s Children Can Dance,” the Swedish Canadian director Robert Logevall’s 2008 adaptation of Murakami’s eponymous short story. The first non-Japanese feature film based on Murakami’s work, it transplants Kengo from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Riding the bus through the industrial outer reaches of that city, Kengo talks with an elderly woman sitting nearby. “Are you Japanese?” she asks. “No, I’m American. I’m from here.” “With a Japanese name?” “Uh-huh. But I’m Chinese.” When she asks if he lives in Chinatown, he explains that, actually, he lives in Koreatown. He lives there, he does not add, with his mother, a zealous member of a quasi-Christian sect who insists that her son—with whom her own relationship hovers at the edges of the Oedipal—is the product of immaculate conception.