Haruki Murakami finally gets his film: Japan Times column

 '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, filmmakers came knocking. He said yes to Vietnamese-born French director Tran Anh Hung, who met with Murakami in Tokyo to win approval for his 2010 movie version of “Norwegian Wood.” (Murakami told me that he liked Tran’s sense of time and storytelling rhythms, which felt distinctly Asian to him.) In 2018, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s brutal “Burning” (adapted from Murakami’s “Barn Burning”) featured Korean American actor Steven Yeun, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s lugubrious “Drive My Car” picked up an Oscar for best international feature film in 2022.

 Though I admire the craft and sometimes clever diversions from source material in each film (Hamaguchi’s multilingual “Uncle Vanya” staging is particularly deft), none give me half the pleasure of Murakami’s best writing. As standalone films, they might work perfectly well, but as adaptations of his fiction they all feel lopsided — too reverentially desperate to convey the writer’s alleged profundity without capturing his bemused mockery of such pretensions, his essential, ultimately life-affirming and sometimes giddy cheekiness. They privilege his Chekhovian voids over his Kafkaesque crazy.

 

Drive My Car

 

Over the years, Murakami has insisted to me that he is “not an intellectual,” that he chooses simple words to write about regular people, and that he far prefers readers to critics or academics. All a writer really needs to survive, he has often told me, is enough readers.

While I generally prefer books to movies, I do understand that they are two radically different types of media, and that the hardest thing to transpose onto the screen is a writer’s tone, the feel and atmosphere of a unique voice on the page, crafted through their word choices and the cadences of good prose.

Yet for a certain kind of reader, it’s exactly a writer’s tone, slippery though it may be to define, far more than plot, character development or descriptive embellishment, that keeps us turning pages. We return again and again to a specific author’s worlds simply because we love the words that make them.

For me, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” the latest feature-length adaptation of Murakami’s fiction (in theaters from July 26) and the first to be animated, comes the closest to nailing it.

 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

 

 Directed by Paris-raised Hungarian British writer, composer and painter Pierre Foldes, “Blind Willow” incorporates six Murakami short stories from three books into a single intertwined narrative that looks, feels and moves like we’re in Murakamiland. It wryly refuses to take itself or its world too seriously, which, like Murakami’s best fiction, makes its openly emotional scenes heartbreaking.

One of the author’s most likable and memorable characters is an oversized talking frog named Frog (how’s that for anti-intellectual?) from “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” a story seemingly tailored to the art of animation. Foldes’ inclusion of Frog in his cast of main characters, a trio of lonely Tokyoites named Komura, Kyoko and Katagiri, injects the film with color and self-aware humor (a Murakami hallmark), enabling him to subvert the stories of three dissatisfied but otherwise dully ponderous middle-class humanoids with playful deviance.

As in the original story, Frog gleefully misquotes Nietzsche and namedrops “Anna Karenina,” suddenly slamming his webbed palms on a kitchen table during a quiet conversation over tea as he urges the balding, self-pitying 40-something Katagiri to help save the city’s residents from an imminent earthquake. “I am not crazy, and you are not dreaming,” Frog says to a gobsmacked Katagiri. “This is positively serious!”

The disaster, he explains, carefully enunciating with the faint condescension of a pedant, will be caused by Worm, who is magnificently realized onscreen as an eyeless, segmented, sharp-toothed and legless centipede roaring to life underground.

“Worm is a symbol of the evil inside us, the evil within,” Murakami told me in 2002, and the illustrated version of Worm in “Blind Willow” is enough to make viewers shudder at its parasitical rage.

 

 

Helping enormously is Foldes’ early establishment of his narrative parameters. The porous border between reality and dreams is introduced in the opening scene during a nightmare sequence that incorporates the earthquake motif — an urgent reminder of what’s at stake in the lives of its otherwise weakly motivated principals. Indeed, if any aspect of the story feels dated, it’s the self-absorbed redundancies of Murakami’s stock human characters, whose soft-focus regrets and habitual ambivalence feel a little late-1990s when seen in the 2020s, a bit boorishly Boomerish. Frog’s battle with Worm and his unlikely partnership with the timid Katagiri lend the film the urgency of a good role-playing game, a medium Murakami has cited as a modern model for literary storytelling.

Still, not even Foldes expected Murakami to join him onstage last month for a live dialogue after a screening of the film at Waseda’s June Literary Festival in Tokyo, hosted by the International House of Literature, home to the author’s archives. Murakami praised the film (he saw it twice) and noted that he first included Frog in his 2000 story collection “After the Quake” when the character “just appeared from another world,” and he had to convince his wary editor to keep the amphibian in the book.

 

 

 

In 2003, I helped Murakami practice reading the English translation of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” in New York City, advising him that a frog’s croak in Japanese (“kero, kero”) is “ribbit” in English. In “Blind Willow,” Foldes himself provides Frog’s pitch-perfect voice. “I love Frog so much I couldn’t refrain from playing him in both French and English,” Foldes told me after the Waseda event. “That Murakami loved my film and my Frog is immensely gratifying.”

It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that Frog defeats Worm and saves Tokyo. But he may have also saved this brilliant and beautiful movie from being another solemn Murakami adaptation that misses out on the fun.

 

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Japanese-dubbed and subtitled versions of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” will be released in cinemas nationwide from July 26. For more information, visit eurospace.co.jp/BWSW (Japanese only).

Roland Kelts is a visiting professor at Waseda University and the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” and “The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus.”