Norwegian Wood - ノルウェイの森

This film is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's most famous novel. The director is French/Thai, but the cast and most of the crew are Japanese. The film is in Japanese, but the titles and credits are bilingual, so it's very obviously going to get international release (which makes sense given Murakami's stature throughout the world).

When Murakami wrote the novel, it was his attempt at writing something more normal and less "magical" or "surreal" than most of his other work. He wanted to see if he could write a realistic romantic novel. He succeeded, and the fame that followed his success drove him to flee Japan for Europe -- he couldn't stand the scrutiny and didn't want to be on variety shows and become a TV celebrity. The book was originally published in two volumes (which is common with Japanese novels), and they sported different colored covers - the first half in red and the second half in green. This follows the themes and semiotics of the book, especially since the main female character in the second half of the novel is named "Midori," which means "green." Fans of the novel took to wearing sweaters the color of the volume they preferred.

The book and film are both titled "Norway's Forest" if you translate them literally, which is a mistranslation of the "wood" in the title of the song. The song talks about the furnishings (shelves, table maybe - not chairs) in a girl's apartment - all made of "Norwegian wood." The song's title was mistranslated on the Japanese edition of the album, and so it stuck. The song holds a huge significance to the story, as the first chapter mentions it, and it appears at three other times in the story. Two scenes in the novel also recreate elements of the song with great contrast, and the line "I set a fire" is developed into two distinct metaphors at odds with one another. It's masterful and subtle, and could be easily missed if you're not reading carefully and giving Murakami credit for his craftsmanship.

Which is what happens in the film, sadly. It's a gorgeous film, from a photographic perspective. Lush but dark. Tempestuous. It captures the internal struggles of Naoko, the female lead in the red volume. And the director is definitely a red-sweater fan, because Midori gets short shrift. She's here, but her story is sacrificed to give Naoko's tale much more focus. Rather than having the two characters function like the yin and yang they are in the novel, Midori becomes a more subtle foil. Another female character nearly gets as much treatment, though in the novel she's a much more minor character.

The film is stark at times, and the director makes some choices that shocked me, a bit. The cast he's assembled are very good - the lead, Watanabe, is played by the actor who starred in Detroit Metal City and who played "L" in the Deathnote movies. He's been a rising star for quite some time, and he does an excellent job, here. Naoko is played by Rinko Kikuchi, who is best known as the deaf Japanese girl in Babel. She's also in the Japanese adaptation of Sideways, playing the Sandra Oh part. Contrasting that role with her performance here gives a really good sense of her range. Very impressive. The other two main actresses are good... but I felt they were miscast. Midori wasn't right at all, and Reiko was too pretty, and too refined. The portrayal of Reiko also undermines a scene near the end of the film, which becomes far more melodramatic than it was in the novel, and undermines its funciton as a catharsis for the whole story.

If I had to sum up what I saw in the film, it's that the director uses the wrong lense (figuratively) for his take on the novel. The novel is about 1967-1971 (or so) as seen through the filter of the early 1980's. Unfortunately, the setting gets pushed back to be almost purely color, whereas the novel is an exploration of the motives and regrets inherent in Japan's conflicted version of the Summer of Love and student uprisings. We're outside all of that, in the film, escaping from it. The novel, instead, is a rejection of it, and an admission that it is inescapable.

It's worth watching. The cinematography, as I said, was breathtaking at times. The scenes of Japanese countryside and coastlines are beautiful and sometimes surprising. The performances are better than competent... and even impressive at times. But if you're a Murakami fan, this is going to be an oddly surreal experience, as you know what's going to happen, but the characters, pacing, and thematic impact are all shifted to other purposes. If you've never read Murakami, and you like long, slow-moving films with French sensibilities, or maybe if you're a Terrence Malick fan, I'd recommend the movie.

Murakami - Norwegian Wood

The Japanese title of this novel is ノルウェイの森 (Noruwei no Mori), which means "Forest of Norway." This is a blatant mistranslation of the meaning of "wood" in the Beatles' song. But it's not Murakami's fault—it's the official translation of the song's title into Japanese. In the song, the "Norwegian wood" refers to the furniture in the girl's apartment, which is later set afire by the "I" voice of the song.

At any rate, Murakami works the forest, the fire, and the strange interaction with the girl in her apartment into his novel. It's set in the early 1970's during the student movements, and our hero (like many first person narrators in Murakami's works) seems to stand in, pseudo-autobiographically, for Murakami himself. This narrator, though, does warrant his own fictional name. He's enamored of foreign literature and foreign music and two very, very different girls.

In the original Japanese (and later British) release of the novel, it was published in two volumes. The first volume was red and the second green. The first volume details the narrator's strange courtship with the girlfriend of his dead best friend, who committed suicide near the end of their high school years. As the strange relationship grows, in the midst of student activism and in the absence of the dead friend, it twists and crumples, leading to the moment when the two make love—the crisis of the first volume (and maybe of the novel) directly inspired by the lyrics of "Norwegian Wood."

Murakami has said that he wrote Norwegian Wood as an experiment, to try to write a typical, un-surreal, Japanese romantic drama story. He succeeded, in a spades, from a commercial standpoint. The novel became incredibly popular. Fans of the book took to wearing red or green sweaters to show which volume of the novel they identified with the most. Murakami was so overwhelmed by his success that he fled Japan, avoiding TV invitations and interviews, and trying to escape a fame that he never wanted. He lived in Europe and then Hawaii before returning to Japan many, many years later.

The second volume, the green one, is about the narrator's budding relationship with an loud and "genki" girl in one of his classes. Her name is Midori (which means "green"). She lies with abandon, but confesses her lies, creating narratives and exploring potentialities while constantly testing our narrator's limits of patience and openness. The two develop a friendship of convenience and circumstance that blossoms into something more fierce and powerful, with resentments, passions, disappointments, and promise. The fire from the song becomes a house fire near Midori's house, where she's made lunch for the two to share, and while watching it, they share their first kiss. It's a forbidden thing, as they're both involved with other people, but it's the spark that grows to consume them both, and in some ways it destroys their friendship. But it is also the beginning of a passion that has the potential to replace that friendship with something more.

Norwegian Wood is a powerfully sad novel. It's about suicide and loss. It's about futility, disillusionment, and the hollow future for many of Murakami's generation. It's about broken people who often share little beyond their brokenness, but create bonds from those fragments they have left and find some solace. It's about liminal spaces on the edge of things—the entry to the forest, the foot of the mountains, the moment before the match strikes against the box, the space between life and death for the suicide survivor and their family and friends, the political upheaval of the times, and the transition from youth to adulthood. It's also an unapologetic rejection of tradition and the norm, while it avoids embracing the popular flavors of change of the day. Ultimately, like much of Murakami's work, it celebrates (quietly with a bottle of wine, a few beers, and small meal set against a backdrop of American music) the individual in a collectivist society, a society that seems to drive most such individuals out of the country or toward taking their own lives.

In some ways, this is standard Murakami storytelling, as far as narrative style and mode, but the narrator here is a bit more impassioned and angry at times than most of Murakami's (usually much older and unnamed) first person narrators. But it avoids the surrealism and language play that infuses much of Murakami's other works. It definitely has, though, one thing that Murakami always seems to bring to play, and that's nostalgia and an ache for something lost or wasted. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a good place to start reading Murakami, but if your taste doesn't run to surrealism or highly metaphorical allegory, then this is probably the one Murakami novel to pick up.

A film version of Norwegian Wood is currently in production.

Murakami in Translation

Since I got to Japan, I've finally taken up the advice of my great friend Gordon all those years ago at BGSU and I'm reading Murakami Haruki's works, mostly fiction, in translation. I'm also collecting the very iconic and well-designed Vintage paperback editions of his books. They're published in England, so the import costs and generally ricockulous price of books in the UK makes them a little steep, but the designs are excellent. See here: CoverLove at robaroundbooks

So in the coming weeks I plan to post reviews of these books. Some will be resharpening my litcrit skillz. Some will be sheer mad drunken celebration and sadness. Some will be endless series of questions about what happened in translation. Most will be spoilerific, so sorry for that, and you've been warned.

One title that isn't in the Vintage collection because it's never been published in English outside of Japan (ironically) is 風の歌を聞け - Kaze no Uta wo Kike - translated as "Hear the Wind Sing" but which seems to work better more literally, "Listen to the Song of the Wind." This is the first Murakami book I read, and it's also the first book he wrote. It also happens to be the beginning of the series of stories that involve guys who hang out at Jay's bar, The Rat and his friend (who is our narrator). The sequence is Listen to the Song of the Wind, A Wild Sheep Chase, and Dance, Dance, Dance.