japanamerica

 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman' is an immersive journey into Murakami's world The first time I met Haruki Murakami, on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1999, he greeted my question about film adaptations of his fiction with a shrug. I knew the author had studied film as an undergraduate at Waseda University and was something of a Jean-Luc Godard aficionado, but the only two directors he said he would green-light immediately were David Lynch and Woody Allen — the latter of whom had apparently tried to contact Murakami’s office years earlier when the author was out of the country. Murakami was hard to find back then, especially in Japan. Notoriously camera-shy after he shot to fame domestically with his hugely popular third novel, “Norwegian Wood,” Murakami refused to appear on television or magazine covers, and had given only one public reading to support victims of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in his native hometown of Kobe. As Murakami’s fame and readership grew, film...

‘Tokyo Cowboy’ strikes balance between cross-cultural comedy and fish-out-of-water tale Thirty-six years ago, American director Marc Marriott lived in Japan as a missionary and worked as a filmmaking apprentice to Yoji Yamada, the legendary director of the “Tora-san” film series. When Mariott returned to the U.S., he came across an article in an American magazine that stirred his imagination. During the late 1980s, the height of Japan’s bubble-era economy, a Japanese beef company purchased a cattle ranch in Montana to expand its operations and better serve a meat-mad Japanese consumer base. To educate its staff in the ways of American cattle farming and teach Americans about the Japanese palate, the company sent a handful of salarymen to live and work on the ranch. “That idea of this clash of cultures, Japanese cowboys on an American ranch,” Marriott tells me. “I just thought: There’s a movie in there, a great story.” At a company meeting, Hideki proposes his plan to revive the fortune...