Book jacket/Still from Norwegian Wood
For a solid Murakami reader, a rendering of a Murakami novel (not to mention one as seminal as Norwegian Wood) could fall very short. Complaining should include that Midori’s hair isn’t short to the extent of spiky, despite the “concentration camp” comment in the book. She also does not have the bouncy personality or figure hugging clothing, or somewhat voluptuous shape. In fact, the actress Kiko Mizuhara is unbearably skinny, and looks less Japanese with her mixed Korean and American heritage. For a staggered Murakami fan, any one of those changed characteristics can cause a heartache. However, by the end of the movie, Tran’s great finesse at causing the viewer to feel loss and depression are captured by Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee’s lens, which sweeps across various undiluted fields of colour in the scenery of Japan: jade green, white snow, and grey rocks of the seaside. It is, overall, a successful rendition of the book, emotions are heightened rather than dimmed, ideas are portrayed rather than left.
The story of Norwegian Wood is simple: Toru Watanabe is a college student torn between loving the girlfriend of his dead best friend, Naoko, and a new, fiery love interest, Midori. Both girls want Toru to love them, but Naoko especially seems unable to fade out her feelings about her dead boyfriend, Kizuki, who had committed suicide. Toru visits Naoko at the sanatorium where she recuperates from her loss, but finds that there is a gap between what he wants and what she wants. Midori, on the other hand, seems ready to accept him, but only if he himself is going to give her his all. The story is set in 1960s Japan, during student riots against Americanism and the Vietnam War, and when retro was in fashion — portrayed more closely in the movie than the book.
Everybody knows that as a director, Tran Anh Hung is brilliant and magical in his use of lush colour (Vietnamese-inspired first in his debut The Scent of the Green Papaya). It’s also known that he likes details of nature, and silence-inspired innocence. His oeuvre seem to fit well with Murakami’s, and he understands Murakami. In reports about Tran’s acquiring of Murakami’s consent for making the film: all it took was Murakami’s assessment that Tran is a “hard nut” — so he would leave him the hell alone and go make the film without the author’s input. It seemed that the author had this intent: not only did Tran need to have his own ideas, but that once he offered up the novel, Murakami aficionados will see a different story on the screen.
The true Murakami-ite should set aside changes in the character’s distinguished traits — there is outcry in Chinese language forums that Naoko, pretty, doll-like and untouchable, is played by Rinko Kikuchi, who is a decade older than Naoko is in the novel and known to please American audiences — she’s, amongst other things, Oscar-nominated for Babel — rather than an aesthetic ideal for so-called “Asian types.” Sequences such as Toru and Midori’s adventures in a porn cinema are cut. Adopting the story, Tran takes the pain and loss associated with unrequited love somewhere deeper, darker and more intense. It also does what Murakami fans are so afraid of so well, which is to bring the Murakami experience on the screen, and therefore potentially ruining the images that had been residing in the most intimate parts of our psyches. There is one scene towards the end of the film, when Toru is completely at a loss, and travels alone to nearby the sea. What then happens as the camera lays over his solitary body amongst slimy large rock surfaces and his emotional anguish is more than what I can recall from the Murakami novel. The edition that I am reading from, the 2001 Harvill Press, pp. 325, simply says this (upon learning that Naoko’s condition was no better and that the flat he had prepared for the two of them was in vain and his hopes for the spring had been more than dashed):
I went inside and drew my curtains, but even indoors there was no escape from the smell of spring. It filled everything from the ground up. But the only thing the smell of spring brought to mind for me now was that putrefying stench. Shut in behind my curtains, I felt a violent loathing for spring. I hated what the spring had in store for me; I hated the dull, throbbing ache it aroused inside me. I had never hated anything in my life with such intensity.
I spent three full days after that all but walking on the bottom of the sea. I could hardly hear what people said to me, and they had just as much trouble catching anything I had to say.
It would appear that Tran’s sea is an re-imagining of this section, because in the novel Toru does not travel in this part (correct me if I am wrong), but in the film all but real waves crash against the rocks and the sea is right near where Toru languishes. The re-imagining is exciting and thoroughly different to what happens in the novel. One Chinese online commentator said that it was “butchered” but that’s not what I think. The feelings that Tran presents are intense; and in that one moment, the film does not belong to a novel — it now belongs to Tran, the actor and the audience feeling the emotion.
Like Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress written and directed by Dai Sijie, it reminded me of a French film but with Asian characters doing things that are for the sake of the eyes of the Westerner. (Tran is a Vietnamese-born French director). There is something exotic happening, for example the great hippy style of clothing in ’60s Japan. It made me feel that the film was obsessed with hipsters in our current age rather than in the ’60s. The sets, which are meticulous, and the hairstyles and clothes were all but too captivating. But sadly it does not match up to the stylization of films like 2046 or In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai), precisely because Murakami wasn’t about clothes and setting in this novel, but desperation and internal solitariness when young love is gone. Or the joy for when it emerges anew.
Tough as Tran is, and great as his cinematographer is (a veteran who has worked for Taiwan’s own auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien) is, there’s nothing harder than getting the mood of the original right. The protagonist of Norwegian Wood has one-sided dialogues (“Boku,” the “I,” Toru Watanabe likes to reply with “Of Course” or “Yes, of course”), he’s humorous but makes clumsy mistakes. It’s difficult when on screen, clumsiness is less cute when we do not have the cool and detached writing style helping the character along on the page. For Norwegian Wood‘s fervent readers and fans, they can be solaced by the fact that not only does Tran bumble along until he captures it, he also willingly uses huge chunks of the novel right there in the script. If anything, Tran is just as mesmerized by the dialogue and the writing as the fans are. This, assures the fans, that Tran is not butchering the novel so much as reveling in its sentiments and originality. I think that’s as much as any Murakami fan can ask for.
