“Murakami Haruki on Film” by Marc Yamada

The diversification of Japanese Literature available in translation means that the release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami is not met with quite the fanfare it once was, but interest in movie adaptations of the author’s work is higher than ever. This is due at least in part to the enthusiasm with which critics have greeted recent adaptations, with Lee Chang Dong’s Burning winning the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2018, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car taking Best International Picture at the 2021 Academy Awards. Following this success is renewed academic focus on movies based on Murakami’s work, with Marc Yamada’s newly-released Murakami Haruki on Film providing the first English-language overview of the author’s cinematic adaptations.

Though not quite achieving Stephen King levels, the prevalence of Murakami film adaptations over the last few decades—including those two already mentioned, Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood (2010), Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani (2004) and Pierre Földes Blind Willow Sleeping Woman (2022) – suggests there is something in the author’s work that lends itself to adaptation, and Yamada argues that this is because “transformation” is itself integral to Muakami’s stories. Since being lambasted by the Japanese Bundan (literary establishment) early on in his career for being too influenced by western culture, Murakami has over time come to embody a hybridity in which his foreign readers relish his “Japaneseness” while being drawn in by his global cultural references. Indeed, while the term goes in and out of vogue, Murakami has perhaps one of the greatest claims to being an author of “World Literature.”

International translatability has paid dividends for Murakami, and it is this that Yamada argues makes his works so capable of crossing cultural boundaries, writing that the creative act of adaptation is “paradoxically faithful” to the author because it mimics his attempts to “transform our view of characters, narrative perspective, settings, and even ontological experiences into something new.” Yamada insists that, far from being a derivative process in which the copy becomes inferior to the source text, the redeployment of the author’s narrative elements in new cultural settings ultimately adds a perspective that enriches even the written original.

 

Murakami Haruki on Film, Marc Yamada (Association for Asian Studies, November 2024)
Murakami Haruki on Film, Marc Yamada (Association for Asian Studies, November 2024)

Rather than being discussed chronologically, the movies in Murakami on Film are grouped by theme. Initially, the book gives a general overview of the theory of Murakami’s translation into film, at the same time also providing useful historical grounding for the written originals. This includes the civil and student protests of the 1960s and 70s, as well as the rapid modernisation of Japanese society that ran into the early nineties, before the Great Hanshin Earthquake and The Sarin Gas Subway attacks, both in 1995, began to profoundly influence Murakami’s creative output. Yamada then looks at how the adaptations of the short story “The Second Bakery Attack” mirror these social conditions and those of their host cultures, providing renewed ways of viewing all of them. The book subsequently examines how translation and cultural exchange of Murakami’s work itself becomes a central theme in Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, before discussing how fallible memory and nostalgia in Lee Chang Dong’s Burning and Norwegian Wood speak to a shared sense of lost identity and social inequity in a developing East Asian society. Finally, Yamada argues that animated adaptations, such as Pierre Földes’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, replicate the “blending” of reality and fantasy in Murakami’s work, making the form an ideal vessel for the author’s magical realism.

Most interesting is the thesis running throughout Murakami on Film that the adaptations of the author’s work thrive in transformation, with Yamada noting that although he exercises creative control over his literary translations, Murakami is not as involved in his work being adapted into film. This opens the door for interpretations that may not only reproduce the source text, but also push on from it to add something new. This is especially noteworthy when considering the mixed reception of the recent re-translation of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Jay Rubin, which aims to be more faithful to the original Japanese than the Alfred Birnbaum predecessor. Where literary translations of Murakami’s work seem to be being reined-in, then, the medium of film is providing a new arena for creative play that Yamada believes “develops the meaning of the stories as they travel around the world while at the same time reviving their connections to their origins.” Artistic meaning, Yamada suggests, has the potential to come from the adaptation process itself, instead of something merely pre-existing it.

This book is part of the AAS (Association of Asian Studies) Asia Shorts series, which aims to accommodate a wide range of readers, promising to be both “substantive” for those in the field and also to “attract interest beyond it.” This is a tough ask, but while the explanatory nature of the writing may feel a little condescending for film theorists, Murakami on Film does a remarkable job at being both accessible and informative. Even while bringing sometimes difficult theoretical voices such as Gilles Deleuze to the table, the book manages to deliver its point in a clear and concise manner, and even academic readers will be thankful for its brevity. Yamada, who has already written books on Japanese films of the Heisei Period (1989-2019) and the work of director Hirokazu Kore-eda, here provides a useful primer for anyone wanting to go deeper into the theory of literary adaptation and, more specifically, into the cinematic adaptations of Murakami that continue to expand the author’s oeuvre in unpredictable but rewarding ways.


Christopher Corker is a PhD candidate at York University and a published translator of Japanese literature.