Norwegian Wood Movie Watch

[Alexandrie Gallup]

NorwegianWood, director Anh Hung Tran's adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel, will hit UK theatres on March 11. The soundtrack, out on Nonesuch March 7 in the UK and March 8 in the US, features an instrumental score by Jonny Greenwood performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Emperor Quartet, as well as three tracks written and performed by CAN, and is now available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store. Watch the film trailer here.

Norwegian Wood, director Anh Hung Tran's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's bestselling novel, starring Kenichi Matsuyama, Rinko Kikuchi, and Kiko Mizuhara, will be released in the UK by Soda Pictures on March 11. The soundtrack for the film, out on Nonesuch Records March 7 in the UK and March 8 in the US, features an instrumental score by Jonny Greenwood performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Emperor Quartet, as well as three tracks written and performed by CAN, and is now available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store.

"I love this idea of 'intersection' for inspiration when it comes to describing American music or its characteristics," classical singer Julia Bullock says in a new video from Boosey & Hawkes for its America at 250 series. "There's no apology for where those inspirations are coming from, so whether it's directly quoting or imitating the sort of collage and then the depth of expression that can come out of the layering effect, I put all these things together because it brings me great pleasure and joy and often surprises me tremendously." You can watch it here.

Personally, I'm at a loss to know why the book is so revered. It intersperses the hero's clinically described romantic woes with mundane accounts of his daily actions, and enumerations of every last sandwich and beer he consumes. The effect is at once precise and nebulous, and I've never been able to get any purchase on Murakami's book, intellectually or emotionally.

Lovelorn Watanabe visits her in the lushly forested surroundings of the mountain retreat, where the couple take long, beautifully shot walks and hang out with Naoko's confidante, an older woman named Reiko (Reika Kirishima), who serenades the lovers with acoustic Lennon-McCartney.

Watanabe also meets Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a spunky gamine with a modish wardrobe and sex on the brain (though nowhere as explicitly as in the novel: perhaps Vietnamese sensibilities are more delicate than Japanese).

Whatever else it is, Norwegian Wood strikes me as an authentically youthful film: it dramatises the way adolescents obsessively make high drama out of their relationships. Put simply, it is about a boy who misses out on the really appealing girl (Midori) because he's fixated on a gloomy ideal (Naoko) to whom he's pegged his pallid, doomed-romance fantasies. Moreover, this is one of those stories in which characters, women in particular, are fated to suffer just so that the narrator-observer-hero can learn how to be a man, as in Sophie's Choice or Betty Blue.(In this insipid case, it's more "Betty Pale Blue".)

The prevalent tone of sentimental morbidity is all the more glaring for the coolness of the execution. Perhaps it's because of that cool that the film occasionally makes grand gestures to remind us that we're watching emotionally charged material. An elegant sequence of a zigzagging stroll in the hills culminates in an explosion of histrionics from Naoko: a shame, since it aborts a stretch of lively, nuanced acting from Rinko Kikuchi. Later, when things turn tragic, Watanabe is seen languishing unsheltered and unshaven on a storm-lashed promontory: I briefly hoped that Tran was having a sly laugh at the story's romantic agonies, but no such luck.

The acting is only sometimes involving: the glum, passive Watanabe doesn't give Matsuyama scope to do much but loiter looking wounded. Kikuchi embodies a martyred-cuteness vacancy, and although the role of Midori doesn't offer much beyond seductive larkiness, Kiko Mizuhara's presence always warms the film up.

This is a visually exquisite film, in its abstract way. Many images are genuinely breathtaking: an extreme close-up of a skinny-legged spider, a panorama of forested hills that seems to fold and unfold in 3D as cloud shadows drift over, a distant study of bodies in snow. And Mark Lee Ping Bin has worked up a wider palette of greens than you normally see in cinema.

It's striking for the ear as well: Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood contributes a stark soundtrack that ranges from delicate acoustic guitar to the bleakly monolithic orchestrations familiar from his There Will Be Blood score. It's also smart to include vintage tracks by 1970s experimenters Can: using a German band famous for its Japanese singer chimes nicely with a Japanese drama made by a Vietnamese director raised in France.

In fact, Norwegian Wood doesn't quite feel like a real Japanese film, more a French imagining of one. The world Tran creates is like a virtual Japan, inhabited by infuriatingly shy ghosts. And the film is something of a shy ghost too, politely declining to step out from behind the pale screen of its own sublime reserve.

apanese writers are very aware of what we're doing on this side of the Pacific and very well informed about American fiction, about American culture," says the novelist Jay McInerney. "Yet we're terribly ignorant in this country of Japanese fiction, Japanese culture. It is, I think, far more accessible than we might imagine."

In an effort to correct this cultural trade imbalance, PEN, the writers' organization, brought Mr. McInerney together in New York with Haruki Murakami, a best-selling novelist in Japan, who is a visiting fellow in East Asian studies at Princeton University. Following are excerpts of the conversation between Mr. McInerney, whose novel "Ransom" is set in Japan, and Mr. Murakami, two of whose novels ("Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" and "A Wild Sheep Chase") are available in English translations. Mr. McInerney and Mr. Murakami later expanded their observations for The Book Review.

Jay McInerney: I happened to pass the marquee of the play "Why I Hate Hamlet," which put me on a train of associations having to do with the anxiety of influence and patricide. And it made me think of the invitation we sent out that stated that Haruki Murakami was the heir to Yukio Mishima. It's a notion that I've seen advanced before in American reviews and articles about Murakami's work, a notion that nicely represents, to put the mildest spin that I can on it, a relative innocence about recent developments in Japanese fiction.

Haruki Murakami resembles Mishima mainly by virtue of being Japanese, and after that the affinities get pretty tenuous. Mishima was one of literature's great romantics, a tragedian with a heroic sensibility, an intellectual, an esthete, a man steeped in Western letters who toward the end of his life became a militant Japanese nationalist.

Even when he's writing about relatively fantastic subjects, like spirit possession in sheep, Haruki Murakami's sensibility is that, I think, of a skeptical realist. His narrator is inevitably Everyman, contemporary Tokyo edition, a kind of thirtyish urban male in a low-key white-collar job, like advertising or public relations, a somewhat passive fellow who doesn't expect much out of life and who takes what comes to him with jaded equanimity.

His motto might be "No big deal." Like most Japanese, the typical Murakami protagonist believes himself to be a man of the middle, the product of, to quote from Mr. Murakami's novel "Norwegian Wood," "a regular workaday family, not especially rich, not especially poor. A real run-of-the-mill house, small yard, Toyota Corolla."

Remarkable things do tend to befall these antiheroes of Mr. Murakami's fiction. Their girlfriends commit suicide. Their friends turn into sheep. Their favorite elephants disappear into thin air. But they will be damned if they're going to make a big deal out of it.

Like the narrators of Raymond Carver's short stories -- and I should mention that Murakami is Raymond Carver's translator in Japan -- they are unremarkable men, less driven by the ethic to succeed and less enmeshed in the powerful webs of family and business and community than most Japanese. And in this, I suspect, may lie some of the tremendous popular appeal of Murakami's novels for Japanese readers. If I'm not mistaken, "Norwegian Wood" has sold in the neighborhood of four million copies in Japan.

Haruki Murakami: Actually, two million copies is the correct figure. Since readers in Japan dislike thick books, what would be sold in America as one volume is divided into two volumes when sold in Japan. So if you think of Part One and Part Two as one volume, then only two million copies have been sold. The reason Japanese readers dislike thick books is that they're heavy and hard to read on commuter trains. Also in Japan it generally takes three years for a book to come out in paperback after it is released in hard cover, so many people end up having to read the hard-cover edition. Well, even two million is an astounding number, at least to me.

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