Haruki Murakami is one of today’s leading authors in the genre of magical realism, bridging the gap between the 20th and 21st centuries, with at least 21 books to have been published and translated into English. Murakami’s books have achieved worldwide success, giving him a stellar reputation in Japanese literary culture and a canon of worldwide recognised literature that will likely survive generations.
So it might make sense that Murakami, like many of his peers writing in the genre of magical realism in this day and age, has had his art transformed into different mediums and different languages. In fact, the author might have been one of the most attended to in this regard, with a growing number of brilliant adaptations, from short films to feature-length movies, with varying levels of attachment and attention to their originals. While some Murakami adaptations have received great success, others haven’t done so well, judged on factors such as screenwriting, acting, pace, and cinematography.
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As with all book-to-film adaptations, herein lies a problem: a book can’t be judged on cinematography, acting, or screenwriting. So, as with that common situation in which someone asks, “Well, you didn’t like the film – what did you think of the story?’ is it possible to judge these films based on their story, or even the characters within it, when these might be the only characteristics it doesn’t claim to recreate? Here’s why this is a problem with adaptations in general, and why those recreating Murakami books struggle more than the rest.
What Do We Get Out of an Adaptation?
Bitters End
Many screen adaptations don’t really even claim to be a copy of the story they’re based on. Sometimes, even just associating with the loosely maintained elements of a story can change the meaning and general appreciation of a piece of media, such as the idea of The Lion King’s associations with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or the unfolding of Game of Thrones, which broke further and further away from their written origins as the series continued. One thing which Murakami adaptations generally try to preserve from their books is the characteristics of their protagonist, often a man in the mid to late stages of his life, lacking in any strong sense of aspiration, finding his quiet personality caught up in a difficult, violent, or trauma-riddled narrative.
In an interview with The New Yorker in 2019, Murakami was asked why his characters are often lost, emotionally or existentially, to which he replied. “You know, if the protagonist is happy, there’s no story at all.” Like Murakami’s literary predecessor Yukio Mishima, the idea of “evil” filling the antagonistic role in these narratives is as sometimes as absent as the position of the morally “good” character. The books are often quite realistic. Their scenarios are not black and white and are challenging to moralise or approach with the same logic as we might use in more common or easily digestible media such as basically any film from Disney, Marvel, or DC. If an adaptation wants to maintain the atmosphere of a Murakami book, that film might not be comfortable to watch.
What Makes Murakami’s Work So Hard to Adapt?
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If these stories are so uncomfortable, what makes Murakami’s fiction so attractive? Well, while there is no clear answer past the vague resemblance of good writing, one of the more easy-to-argue points found in the setup of Murakami’s stories. While the concept of the extraordinary average man is one which has been repeated almost to death in today’s entertainment industry, Murakami takes the trope, and strips it down. He shows us the average man, and then has him led through a series of unusual circumstances, without his ever being elevated onto any level above that averageness. Murakami’s protagonist is not in any way special, perhaps only past his unusual lack of emotion. He never becomes particularly special either. His actions are never visibly attached to any sense of indulgence or narcissism by the author.
Perhaps the reason this works so well in his books is for the use of first-person singular narrative. While many films and sources of narrative media today ask us to imagine what would happen if we, the average person, were to become special and worthy of attention, Murakami reassures us by asking us to imagine what would happen if we were to become the subject of unusual experiences.
In an article for The Guardian, writer Oliver Burkeman describes how Murakami’s work “exerts an entrancing, sometimes almost sedative effect on the reader, the strangeness of the plot developments dampened by an emotional flatness that can feel like a comforting refuge from the real world.” The minimalism of his protagonists gives the reader a chance to breathe, and think for themselves, rather than encouraging us to take influence from the imaginary, special chosen-one character that we will never be.
So, while there is something incredibly awkward and uncomfortable at face value about Murakami’s narratives, upon reading them as they were intended, they can quite easily become a source of comfort. We don’t need to become anyone different in order to experience unusual calls, strange visitors, to be swept away by the things we don’t know about the people closest to us.
And, as much as an adaptation might keep its protagonist quiet the way they had been in the books, as much as they attempt to express the same sense of moral ambiguity and the awkwardly explicit nature of their intimate experiences, there will always be something missing. A film will never be able to capture the first-person-singular perspective the same way as a book does. The protagonist’s thoughts in a film will always be guarded by their physicality on screen, becoming a body with a face. An impenetrable individual like any other character, shrouded with the potential for unspoken motives, mystery, and feelings which we must interpret through facial expressions.
The same connection we had with Murakami’s protagonists, the comfort of having a character through which we are able to express ourselves, will never be fully realised through an actor, no matter how open or close to a bare canvas of personality as they may seem. With the recent success of Drive My Car leaving audiences looking forward to new adaptations, undoubtedly there will be more Murakami films to come. And, in spite of all this, don’t feel discouraged from watching them: just don’t be surprised when the protagonist on screen seems a little different to the one you’d imagined between the pages.
