Murakami Haruki on Film
By Marc Yamada
Association for Asian Studies (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-1952636547 (epub)
Review by Thomas Caffrey
Put mildly, Murakami Haruki is a hot commodity. This year alone, he has confirmed the completion of his latest novel (in The New York Times), interviewed popstar Harry Styles (in Runner’s World), and released a film adaptation of his work globally via Netflix (Inoue Tsuyoushi’s After the Quake). Murakami is an unavoidable meeting point between the (sometimes) disparate worlds of literature and popular culture. After all, it is no coincidence that Murakami interviews popstars: he interviews them because he influences them (pop songs like Camila Cabelo’s Chanel No. 5 and BTS’ Butterfly quote and/or namedrop Murakami). Elsewhere, a stage adaptation of his epic Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is embarking on an ambitious world tour, while his novels have infiltrated the high street, inspiring Uniqlo collaborations.
But it is in film that Murakami’s crossover appeal is most apparent: with increasing frequency, he finds himself adapted for film, often to great success. The best of these – Drive My Car (2021), Burning (2018), and Norwegian Wood (2010) – are excellent, melancholy pieces of cinema. But beyond such high-profile works, there exists a wide ecosystem of other, older, and more obscure Murakami adaptations, many of which remain unknown even to Murakami superfans. A hefty debt of gratitude to Marc Yamada, then, whose short book Murakami Haruki on Film provides an indispensable analysis of the world of Murakami cinema.
Yamada’s book is a timely intervention in Murakami studies that is as culturally astute as it is literary minded. Across five chapters (including introduction), Yamada traces film as both generative of and generated by Murakami’s fiction. In a precise introduction that aptly sets the bounds of discussions to follow, Yamada recounts Murakami's student days. Studying at Waseda University, central Tokyo during the 1960s, the young Murakami steered clear of the myriad student demonstrations that defined the era. During one particularly heated period of protest, Waseda was shut down. In this time, ‘Murakami saw more than two hundred works of American, French, and black-and-white Polish cinema, along with Japanese classics by Kurosawa Akira and Naruse Mikio’ (p. 5). By contextualising Murakami as a writer influenced by cinema, Yamada sets the groundwork for a transformative reading of all cinematic adaptations of the writer’s work. Cinema after all is employed as a motif and theme throughout Murakami’s oeuvre: Yamada points to the novel After Dark (2007), which employs camera directions and cinematic technique as narrative style. Elsewhere, Murakami’s protagonists find themselves visiting the cinema at key moments of revelation or introspection. Yamada’s following chapters are enervated by the introduction, which establishes and identifies Murakami’s scopophilia.
The remainder of the book is smartly comprised of essays that build on the introduction, while standing alone and mostly independent of one another. The first of these centres on adaptations of the twin short stories The Bakery Attack and The Second Bakery Attack; the next examines Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car; this is followed by a study of representational memory in Tony Takitani (2004), Burning, and Norwegian Wood; while the final chapter considers Murakami in animation, with primary emphasis on Pierre Foldes’ Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022).
Each chapter engages with existing Murakami scholarship to cultivate new arguments and approaches to interpreting both the master’s work and adaptations of it. Memorably, Yamada draws on Matthew Strecher’s reading of Murakami and metonym to examine how linguistic connections in literature can be refracted and represented on-screen for cinematic adaptations. Strecher, alongside Rebecca Suter and Wakatsuki Tomoki (mentioned elsewhere in the book), is a leading voice in Murakami scholarship and Yamada efficiently mines their research to surprising ends, such as when Deleuze’s idea of the “time crystal” encounters Strecher’s study of the recurrent portal motif in Murakami. Yamada’s reading of cinematic temporality, augmented by quotations from Tarkovsky, results in detailed, deep analysis.
On the subject of temporality, adaptations of Murakami’s fictions are rapidly snowballing, accumulating at an increased pace. Because the terrain of Murakami cinema is so subject to change, Yamada cannot account for recent additions such as After the Quake. Meanwhile anime director Shinkai Makoto has acknowledged that his latest film Suzume (2022) took extensive inspiration from Murakami’s short story Super-Frog Saves Tokyo. Doubtless further Murakami adaptations and adjacent texts will arrive – as the two films mentioned are fascinating texts, it is a shame that Yamada was unable to discuss them in this volume. Of course, this is a natural limitation that accompanies publication on such a high-status
author.
As much as Yamada’s book is a vital entry to the rapidly expanding canon of Murakami scholarship, one cannot but hope that Yamada will someday return to this material for a follow-up or revised second edition. There are spectral connections between these chapters that could be fully realised in an additional climactic chapter. For example, the Drive My Car chapter refers pointedly to repetitions and doppelgängers, but does not mention that this motif extends beyond thematic resonances. Nishijima Hidetoshi, the star of Drive My Car, previously served as narrator in earlier Murakami adaptation Tony Takitani. Elsewhere, Okada Masaki, who appears in Drive My Car, would later appear in a pivotal role in After the Quake. Cinema allows for a casual visual representation of the doppelgänger effect Yamada identifies, while building on the idea of a Murakami-land or shared universe between the writer’s various short stories (an idea that Yamada gestures toward).
However, given that the book is published as part of The Association for Asian Studies ‘Asia Shorts’ series, these grievances may simply represent my appetite for further writing by Yamada on the subject. Given the brevity of the book, the depth of analysis achieved here is simply incredible. This is an excellent addition to the widening field of Murakami studies, situating Yamada as a first-class Murakami scholar. Essential reading for all Murakami fans.