Noruwei no Mori
Tran Anh Hung (2010)
In Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood, the young protagonist Toru Watanabe is caught up in relationships with two girls, Naoko and Midori. He knew Naoko from adolescence; when their mutual friend Kizuki committed suicide, Naoko had a breakdown from which she’s never recovered. Watanabe has to get away; he starts university in Tokyo but without achieving any emotional distance from Naoko. Midori is also a student at the university. Her mother is already dead and it transpires that her father is terminally ill but Midori is determinedly undaunted and eccentrically vivacious. Watanabe’s choice is, in essence, between death and life and Murakami perhaps uses the story to reflect his own snagged feelings about the Japanese psyche – his anger and impatience with its tradition of thanatos getting the better of eros (reflected in the art and the life of a writer like Mishima). You wouldn’t guess from this description how richly entertaining the book is – and the entertainment is fundamental to Murakami’s thesis: it’s a realisation of his life-affirming point of view. The story takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s and this too is crucial. Watanabe (Murakami’s contemporary) is a student in Tokyo in the years shortly after the city hosted the 1964 Olympics, when Western pop music and clothes and fast food were increasingly influential, and anti-establishment protests were in vogue too. I’m not sure how highly Murakami rates any of these but they add to the texture of the lives of Watanabe’s generation. The novel is full of references to what people are eating and wearing and what they’re hearing on radios and turntables. (This aspect of the book reminded me of the abundance of cultural detail in The Group.)
Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation is remarkably lacking in these things (and the student protests are perfunctory background). Because I love the vibrancy and variety of Murakami’s narrative, I found the film, from a screenplay by the director, infuriatingly monotonous and gloomy – the antithesis of what the novel was about. (I wasn’t hopeful once I’d seen the trailer.) Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is no longer the central consciousness; the events seem to be taking place in the bereft, penumbral, death-bound mind of Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi). There are some very compelling landscapes in the hills outside Kyoto but their beauty – regardless of the season – is bleakly intimidating. The hills loom above the asylum where Naoko lives and is befriended and cared for by another patient, an older woman called Reiko (Reika Kirishima). When Naoko eventually commits suicide and Watanabe is grieving and haunted by dreams of her, he’s lying among and dwarfed by rocks above a crashing sea. Tran Anh Hung doesn’t juxtapose, let alone balance, this crushing expressionism with existential images of life and movement in Tokyo. There are hardly any outdoor scenes in the city and the interiors are often as dark-toned as the rooms of Naoko’s morbid habitat. There are British and American rock and pop songs but this part of the soundtrack feels merely imposed on the material; it has no connection with what we see on the screen. The real theme music is the elaborately mournful score by Jonny Greenwood. The only sequences with any tonal variety are the sex scenes, which are composed thoughtfully but are at the same time sensually strong and expressive.
A week after the Japan earthquake and tsunami, when you catch the front pages of newspapers with features inside about how the Japanese have learned to live with disaster and pessimism is an integral part of the national character, it’s difficult at one level to see the thoroughgoing grimness of the film of Norwegian Wood as false – but it definitely falsifies the source material. The fact that Watanabe, even when he’s temporarily immersed in metropolitan life and relationships, can’t get Naoko out of his head gives the novel a sustained and intrinsic tension. In the film this obsession is no longer underlying – it’s never obscured. In the book, you’ve no doubt that Watanabe enjoys Midori (Kiko Mizuhara)’s company infinitely more than his gruelling visits to Naoko in the asylum, even though she gets in the way of the relationship with Midori going deeper. Here Naoko is such a dominant influence that her shadow hangs over nearly every moment that Watanabe spends with Midori. In both book and film, she has to wait for Watanabe to start loving her – wait until Naoko, who can almost never go through with sex with Watanabe (or Kizuki before him), has consummated her relationship with death. Yet I had the sense reading Norwegian Wood that part of Watanabe was resistant to Naoko’s importance to him – that it was more a case that his world revolved around her than that she was his first and only love. Tran Anh Hung doesn’t get anything of this complexity. For what it is, the film is well acted by the four principals but three of these roles have been considerably reduced from the book. It’s Naoko’s show.
19 March 2011
