New chat w/Haruki Murakami for The Nikkei
Movie animates Murakami's portraits of empty lives
American writer Nathaniel Rich once claimed that Haruki Murakami, lauded internationally and regularly short-listed for the Nobel Prize in literature, actually writes "genre fiction," the commercial label for stories that repeat formulas, conventions, plots and sometimes whole casts of characters to satisfy reader expectations (think "Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter"). Genre works are distinguished from the less predictable and less marketable aims of literary fiction -- and have a much better shot at the bestseller list.
The kicker, according to Rich, is that Murakami created his own genre, absorbing literary conceits into a blend of other recognizable storytelling tropes from the realms of noir, fantasy, horror and sci-fi.
The most salient hallmark of the Murakami genre is its fluid shifts between a ruthlessly humdrum reality and poetic, often borderline erotic and prophetic dreamworlds. These shifts can be so seamless and mesmerizing in Murakami's strongest writing that we no longer care about unresolved plots or flat, clunky sentences. But they also make Murakami's works notoriously "unfilmable," ill-suited to the more literal representations of visual media. They are best conjured in the mind, not on the screen.
That hasn't stopped filmmakers from trying. Movies based on Murakami's stories have risen in prominence in recent years, most notably with South Korean director Lee Chang-dong's 2018 "Burning" (adapted from the story "Barn Burning") and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 2021 "Drive My Car," both of which garnered prestigious awards, the latter an Academy Award for best international feature film in 2022.
The kicker, according to Rich, is that Murakami created his own genre, absorbing literary conceits into a blend of other recognizable storytelling tropes from the realms of noir, fantasy, horror and sci-fi.
The most salient hallmark of the Murakami genre is its fluid shifts between a ruthlessly humdrum reality and poetic, often borderline erotic and prophetic dreamworlds. These shifts can be so seamless and mesmerizing in Murakami's strongest writing that we no longer care about unresolved plots or flat, clunky sentences. But they also make Murakami's works notoriously "unfilmable," ill-suited to the more literal representations of visual media. They are best conjured in the mind, not on the screen.
That hasn't stopped filmmakers from trying. Movies based on Murakami's stories have risen in prominence in recent years, most notably with South Korean director Lee Chang-dong's 2018 "Burning" (adapted from the story "Barn Burning") and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 2021 "Drive My Car," both of which garnered prestigious awards, the latter an Academy Award for best international feature film in 2022.
Still, having followed Murakami's career for 30 years and interviewed him periodically over 25 of them, I find that all the live-action adaptions miss a key element of the author's sensibility: his lightness of touch.
I wasn't fully aware of this absence until I saw the latest feature film based on Murakami's prose, Hungarian-British director Pierre Foldes' animated "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman," released in Japan on July 26.
The film combines six short stories from three collections into a single narrative, floating above its source material at an artful distance and letting the audience in on the artifice. It practically winks at the viewer when a charismatic talking frog, adapted from Murakami's "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," suddenly flattens his body into a paper-thin sheet to slip through the slits of a door frame and rail carriage window. Like Murakami's fiction, "Blind Willow" carries some heavy ideas without being weighed down by them.
Murakami, who has publicly endorsed the film, says that he even appreciates the scenes Foldes created to augment his original work. "Pierre has added a number of episodes that are not in any of my stories he adapted," he told me in an exclusive interview. "I love that kind of freedom, and I think it's important for filmmakers to exercise it."
I wasn't fully aware of this absence until I saw the latest feature film based on Murakami's prose, Hungarian-British director Pierre Foldes' animated "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman," released in Japan on July 26.
The film combines six short stories from three collections into a single narrative, floating above its source material at an artful distance and letting the audience in on the artifice. It practically winks at the viewer when a charismatic talking frog, adapted from Murakami's "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," suddenly flattens his body into a paper-thin sheet to slip through the slits of a door frame and rail carriage window. Like Murakami's fiction, "Blind Willow" carries some heavy ideas without being weighed down by them.
Murakami, who has publicly endorsed the film, says that he even appreciates the scenes Foldes created to augment his original work. "Pierre has added a number of episodes that are not in any of my stories he adapted," he told me in an exclusive interview. "I love that kind of freedom, and I think it's important for filmmakers to exercise it."
The magic of animation is that it forces you into a dream from its opening frames. Not unlike literature itself, which is finally just lines of symbols on a page that mean nothing until you decode them, animated worlds require you to abandon your sense-perceptions of reality in order to decipher and embrace their stylized imagery.
Once you do, your psychological guard against "uncanny valley" expectations of visual representations is dropped and a portal opens for dreams and the emotions they generate. Isao Takahata's deeply moving animated masterpiece "Grave of the Fireflies," for example, about two orphaned siblings struggling to survive in postwar Japan, is severely diluted in its live-action television and film adaptations. Illustrations give us the paradoxical distance from realism that allows us to experience powerful emotions intimately.
"Blind Willow" starts with two earthquakes: a real one in Tohoku, the northern region of Japan's main Honshu island, echoing the disaster that struck the region in 2011, and a nightmare quake in youthful salaryman Komura's mind, set in a crumbling underground passageway he descends via a barely sketched staircase, suspended in the dark of his dreams.
Once you do, your psychological guard against "uncanny valley" expectations of visual representations is dropped and a portal opens for dreams and the emotions they generate. Isao Takahata's deeply moving animated masterpiece "Grave of the Fireflies," for example, about two orphaned siblings struggling to survive in postwar Japan, is severely diluted in its live-action television and film adaptations. Illustrations give us the paradoxical distance from realism that allows us to experience powerful emotions intimately.
"Blind Willow" starts with two earthquakes: a real one in Tohoku, the northern region of Japan's main Honshu island, echoing the disaster that struck the region in 2011, and a nightmare quake in youthful salaryman Komura's mind, set in a crumbling underground passageway he descends via a barely sketched staircase, suspended in the dark of his dreams.
Komura wakes at 3 a.m. in his suburban Tokyo apartment to find his wife Kyoko staring listlessly at nonstop disaster reportage on television from a blood red sofa, a cat curled up beside her. She does not speak to Komura. He opens the window to smoke a cigarette while a jet flies silently overhead.
Murakami readers will recognize the scenario from "UFO in Kushiro," one of six intertwined narratives in his most cohesive and pitch-perfect story collection, "After the Quake," first published in 2000 and translated in 2002.
Murakami had written the collection in response to Japan's two disasters of 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake in his native hometown of Kobe and the sarin gas attacks by religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo, his adopted city, two months later. The English translation resonated with American readers in particular after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S., and Murakami told me at the time that he recognized the universality of the stories. "If the book was only about the earthquake, the sympathy would be weaker," he said, "but it's a book about the violence in nature and in human beings. I feel like I'm walking in a deep forest, in the darkness of the underground."
Director Foldes, who also wrote the film's screenplay and score, performed its music and voice-acted the talking frog, fully grasps the obsessions binding the Murakami genre, and his decision to adapt six stories from three different books elevates "Blind Willow" from what would have been a captivating anecdotal short film into an epic portrait of three empty lives in suspension.
Komura bears a striking resemblance to a younger version of Murakami. He also shares an office with Katagiri, the older, balding everyman salaryman of "Super-Fog Saves Tokyo," who will encounter the talking frog in his cramped apartment and be called on by the amphibian to save the city from a massive quake, caused by a giant enraged worm living underground. The story practically begged to be animated.
Komura and Kyoko's cat, Watanabe, disappears into their neighborhood's grass thickets and abandoned homes, sending Komura searching through the deep forest of Murakami's metaphor. Kyoko, too, will disappear, leaving Komura with a line of dialogue whose recitation haunts the film like a bleak diagnosis: "Living with you is like living with a chunk of air."
The animation incorporates a blend of techniques that make its visuals seem at once hyper-realistic and spectral. Foldes used an intuitive process he now refers to as "live-action animation," shooting actors performing the storyboarded scenes and dialogue, then making 3D sculptures of their heads to give his animators the freedom to recreate characters' emotions through the expressive lines of 2D drawing. The result may initially remind some viewers of the rotoscoping approach used in films like Richard Linklater's "Waking Life," but as the film proceeds it becomes clear that "Blind Willow" is altogether more subtle and minimalistic, reducing the visual data of live action imagery to the pared down minimalist aesthetics found in classic manga and anime, as well as traditional woodblock prints and scroll paintings.
Komura bears a striking resemblance to a younger version of Murakami. He also shares an office with Katagiri, the older, balding everyman salaryman of "Super-Fog Saves Tokyo," who will encounter the talking frog in his cramped apartment and be called on by the amphibian to save the city from a massive quake, caused by a giant enraged worm living underground. The story practically begged to be animated.
Komura and Kyoko's cat, Watanabe, disappears into their neighborhood's grass thickets and abandoned homes, sending Komura searching through the deep forest of Murakami's metaphor. Kyoko, too, will disappear, leaving Komura with a line of dialogue whose recitation haunts the film like a bleak diagnosis: "Living with you is like living with a chunk of air."
The animation incorporates a blend of techniques that make its visuals seem at once hyper-realistic and spectral. Foldes used an intuitive process he now refers to as "live-action animation," shooting actors performing the storyboarded scenes and dialogue, then making 3D sculptures of their heads to give his animators the freedom to recreate characters' emotions through the expressive lines of 2D drawing. The result may initially remind some viewers of the rotoscoping approach used in films like Richard Linklater's "Waking Life," but as the film proceeds it becomes clear that "Blind Willow" is altogether more subtle and minimalistic, reducing the visual data of live action imagery to the pared down minimalist aesthetics found in classic manga and anime, as well as traditional woodblock prints and scroll paintings.
A raised eyebrow or downturned lip on the carefully etched faces of main characters can reveal a rush of inner turmoil, while surrounding characters in a cafe or train car are blurred outlines, murmuring around the outer edges of daily life.
"All of my references in animation are Japanese," Foldes said, citing a list of anime auteurs including Mamoru Oshii, Katsuhiro Otomo and Hayao Miyazaki. "I was always a great admirer of Japanese line drawings and their use of empty space. It's what's between the lines, the unsaid, that interests me -- a quality I find in Murakami's writing, too. Animation allows me to go further than live action because I can recreate a form of 'augmented reality' that my mind understands, as opposed to what I see and hear. And what my mind understands is what's between the lines."
Foldes has never lived in Japan but took copious notes during his few visits, writing the first draft of his script eating bento lunchboxes on the shinkansen bullet train as he stopped in small towns along the way and sketched the architecture and scenery of modern Japan. The backdrops are acutely captured, rendered with a perceptive freshness that perhaps only an outsider can bring.
"There isn't a scene that strikes me as false," Murakami said, praising the director's "lively and precise descriptions of Japanese places and the way people lead their everyday lives. Pierre pays attention to small details that Japanese people take for granted and just ignore."
In plumbing the inner lives of his three main characters, Foldes reveals his strengths as a storyteller, mirroring Murakami's most effective transitions from sentimentality to genuine pathos. Komura, Kyoko and Katagiri each confront their inertia through documentary-style interviews conducted by secondary characters. Komura's ailing child relative and a young woman in Hokkaido draw out his rage and dissatisfaction with life; Kyoko is provoked into action by an aging restaurant owner and curious barfly; Katagiri's wrenching confession -- "My life is horrible" -- emerges when Frog presses him to help save Tokyo from Worm's impending earthquake. "I don't have a single person who likes me," Katagiri says, his lined face crinkling in close-up as he bemoans his failures at work and in his social life along with his encroaching middle-aged illnesses, ugliness and crushing solitude: "All I do is eat, sleep and s---. I don't even know why I'm still living."
Murakami is especially fond of the way this stark cinematic realism grounds the film's dream sequences. "The tempo of the story, the way the characters talk to each other, their facial expressions -- they were all so true to life that I almost felt like I was watching a live-action film.
"This may sound a bit rude," he added, "but it doesn't feel typically anime-ish."
No particular fan of animation, as he has told me in the past, Murakami said that he watched "Blind Willow" twice. Last month he agreed to join Foldes onstage for a post-screening dialogue at the Waseda June Literary Festival in Tokyo, hosted by the university's International House of Literature, otherwise known as the Haruki Murakami Library.
Before a packed auditorium, the author told the director that the film felt so original and innovative he could not remember what he wrote in the original stories that inspired it: "I had no idea what would happen next."
Murakami is especially fond of the way this stark cinematic realism grounds the film's dream sequences. "The tempo of the story, the way the characters talk to each other, their facial expressions -- they were all so true to life that I almost felt like I was watching a live-action film.
"This may sound a bit rude," he added, "but it doesn't feel typically anime-ish."
No particular fan of animation, as he has told me in the past, Murakami said that he watched "Blind Willow" twice. Last month he agreed to join Foldes onstage for a post-screening dialogue at the Waseda June Literary Festival in Tokyo, hosted by the university's International House of Literature, otherwise known as the Haruki Murakami Library.
Before a packed auditorium, the author told the director that the film felt so original and innovative he could not remember what he wrote in the original stories that inspired it: "I had no idea what would happen next."
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