Year after year many all over the world have waited in vain for the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami to be awarded with the Nobel prize in literature. Many have read all his works and recommendations where to start reading his books abound on YouTube. His themes of love, loss and loneliness apparently have deep significance for people all over the world.

The past week I have focused on revisiting the films based on Murakami’s works that I had seen before. Two of them (Drive My Car and Burning) I have written about before on this site under the heading Gothenburg Film Festival 2022 (Drive My Car) and 15-11 The Top Films of 2011-2020 (Burning) and I suffice with a slightly shortened version of those articles. I place them in the order I would recommend them if you want to get acquainted with films based on his books and short stories.

Drive My Car is a story of grief, loss and loneliness aggravated by repressed emotions. The protagonist is the theater director and actor Yusuke. He has lost his wife and artistic partner Oto to a brain hemorrhage. Two years later he is invited to set up an experimental production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at a theatre festival in Hiroshima.

He is assigned a driver for the duration of the play. The driver, Misaki, is a young, silent girl, who shows to be reliable but acts very unengaged. Misaki has a painful secret buried as well. The slowly growing bond between Yusuke and Misaki, two people with emotional scars and hurts, is at the center of the film. It allows them to open up to one another, in one’s own way at one’s own time, and to help each other to come to terms with what has happened in their lives.

Burning (2018) by the South Korean director Chang-dong Lee

Burning is a cryptic, brilliant tale of tragedy starting with a chance encounter of an aimless young writer, Jong-su, with a childhood classmate and then gradually opens a labyrinth of questions. It explores, like all of Murakami’s work, ‘the loneliness that lurks beneath the trappings of modern life’.

Jong-su, grown up with a dysfunctional family background in a rural area close to the border with North Korea, is plunged into a modern world he neither can interpret nor handle. His encounter with his childhood classmate Hae-mi makes him see a world that looks better than the one he lives in. The major part of the film is about him being more and more tormented by his inability to get there. The end of the film is a shocking reminder of the danger of this growing loneliness and frustration becoming unbearable.

Norwegian Wood (2010) by the Vietnamese director Ahn Hung Tran

This story of growing up in the 1960s, based on what is probably Murakami’s most famous book, is another moving meditation on love and loss. The film starts with sketching out the relationship between three high school students, Toru, Naoko and her boyfriend Kizuki. When Kizuke commits suicide, Toru and Naoko have to battle their heavy sense of loss and loneliness. Naoko’s mental depression deteriorates and she ends up in a psychological retreat center in the mountains. A vibrant fellow student, Midori, shows her interest in Toru, but he can’t get Naoko out of his head and heart. ”Nothing can heal the loss of a beloved”, he expresses. A thoughtful exploration of grief, anguish and fragility.  

Tony Takitani (2004) by the Japanese director Jun Ichikawa

Once again, a gripping meditation on loneliness and love based on a short story of Murakami. This minimalistic short story starts with a trombone player who after imprisonment in China during the war returns and marries his distant cousin. A year later she dies at childbirth after giving birth to a son whom he gives the name Tony. He blames the boy for the death of his wife and neglects him. Tony gets mobbed as a child because of his American name. He grows up as a loner, who at age 37 falls in love with his much younger assistant. When she dies in a traffic accident, he is devastated. A lyrical film that makes us think about how you can carry on living when everything seems to go wrong.

Rinus, April 2023

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