Book Launch: Murakami Haruki on Film

November 12, 2024
7:00-8:15pm Eastern Time

Please join author Marc Yamada (Brigham Young University) and discussants Aaron Gerow (Yale University) and Gitte Marianne Hansen (Newcastle University) to celebrate the launch of Yamada’s new Asia Shorts volume, Murakami Haruki on Film.

This session will focus on the cinematic adaptations of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s fiction. Films based on Murakami’s work include Tony Takitani (2004), Norwegian Wood (2010), Burning (2018), Drive My Car (2022), and many more. Created by directors from Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States, among other national traditions, these adaptations reference Murakami and his role as author while expanding his work to say something new about the different cultural contexts in which they appear. The topics that will be discussed during the session include: How is Murakami’s fiction influenced by film? Why is Murakami’s fiction particulalry difficult to translate into film? Which films best capture Murakami’s style? How has the process of adaptation developed the meaning of Murakami’s work? Time will also be allotted for audience members to submit their own questions to the panelists.

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Session Participants

Marc Yamada

Author, Murakami Haruki on Film

Marc Yamada is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He received a PhD in Japanese Literature & Culture from UC Berkeley. Marc has published articles and books on modern Japanese literature, film, and manga. His recent books include Kore-eda Hirokazu: Shared Spaces of Filmmaking (University of Illinois Press, 2023) and Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film: The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades (Routledge, 2019). 

    Aaron Gerow

    Aaron Gerow is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Film and Media Studies and of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He specializes in East Asian film and media, teaching courses in Japanese and East Asian film, world animation, film genre (documentary, martial arts film, comedy), Japanese film theory, historiography, television, and cultural and media theory, Japanese literature, and Japanese popular culture. He has published widely on a variety of topics in East Asian cinema, media, and popular culture, ranging from silent to contemporary cinema, from TV commercials to wartime and colonial film culture. His publications include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (University of California Press), A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan), and Kitano Takeshi (British Film Institute). He also co-authored the Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies with Abe Mark Nornes (Center for Japanese Studies).

      Gitte Marianne Hansen

      Gitte Marianne Hansen is Reader in Japanese Studies at Newcastle University. A graduate of the University of Copenhagen (BA, MA) and the University of Cambridge (PhD), her research and teaching looks at contemporary Japanese culture and literature, especially culture from bubble Japan (1980s). Hansen led the “Eyes on Murakami” research project in 2017-2018. Also interested in literary translation, she has translated short stories by Murakami Haruki and Tsushima Yuko.