Murakami Haruki on Film (Marc Yamada)
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122 pages. Paperback print ISBN: 9781952636530. E-Book ISBN: 9781952636547.
Murakami Haruki on Film offers a timely look at the cinematic adaptations of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s fiction over the past forty years. Films based on Murakami’s work (including Tony Takitani (2004), Norwegian Wood (2010), Burning (2018), Drive My Car (2022), and many more) manifest a contradictory impulse to faithfully capture the author’s literary worlds while expanding and developing these worlds at the same time. Created by directors from Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States, among other national traditions, these films demonstrate the way adaptations are fundamentally creative works that say something new about the different cultural contexts in which they appear. Though the creative reworking of Murakami’s literary worlds threatens to distance us from the author and his work, however, this book argues that the very process of “translating” Murakami from one medium to another references the theme of transformation that is central to his work.
“As Murakami increasingly becomes more than his own written word, this is a very timely piece of research that links literature and film. A must read for anyone interested in Murakami Haruki studies.”
— GITTE MARIANNE HANSEN, Reader in Japanese Studies, Newcastle University
“Murakami Haruki on Film is a very welcome and timely addition to a growing body of scholarship on contemporary Japanese fiction in a transnational and transmedial perspective. Through a nuanced analysis of a plethora of examples, from globally famous films like Yamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car to lesser known ones like Attack on a Bakery and The Second Bakery Attack, Yamada convincingly shows how the adaptations of Murakami Haruki’s stories expand on the author’s own multilayered approach to the writing of fiction, while also encouraging the viewer to acquire a critical perspective.”
— REBECCA SUTER, University of Oslo
“This is a marvelously illuminating little book that works in two directions at once: ‘[T]he relationship between literary fiction and film for Murakami involves a reciprocal exchange: just as his writing has inspired filmic adaptations, so too have the visual techniques of cinematic representation influenced his literature.’ (p. 4). Marc Yamada illustrates this central premise in more detail than one would have thought possible in such a compact work of analysis, opening new perspectives on both the fiction and the films that comprise the Murakami world.”
— JAY RUBIN, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
“A timely and wide-ranging exploration of the growing list of film adaptations of Murakami Haruki’s fiction, Marc Yamada’s Murakami Haruki on Film skillfully examines how filmmakers navigate the intricate balance between fidelity to the original text and creative infidelity in their cinematic interpretations. Yamada demonstrates how directors emerge as co-creators, reinterpreting Murakami’s signature blend of magic realism and his complex engagement with history into new visual mediums. Essential reading for scholars, students, cinephiles, and Murakami fans alike.”
— JONATHAN DIL, Associate Professor, Keio University, Author of Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy: Stories from the Second Basement
MARC YAMADA is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at BYU. 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).