Realized I didn't upload my third blog post about the Norwegian Wood movie, so here it is!:
Overall, I enjoyed the film. I thought that the atmosphere was fitting for the novel. There was definitely a mood of melancholy to it, a slowness and that made everything feel like a memory. And although the "frame" narrative aspect of the book was lost in the film, the fact that it has this mood does somewhat help. Some of the scenes, especially the one where Naoko and Watanabe sleep together, were so much more uncomfortable to watch than to read. I also felt like that scene happened much earlier in the film than the book, but I understand that it has to do with timing and needing to fit key sequences into a 2 hour movie. Kizuki's suicide was also quite difficult to watch. The dinner between Watanabe, Hatsumi and Nagasawa was really tense and translated very well onto screen.
It was a shame that Stormtrooper had such little relevance in the movie, as it would have definitely added some much needed comedic relief. I also didn't like Midori as much in this movie as I did when reading the book. In the book she seemed much more alive, she was funnier and more jovial. In the film she seemed a bit aloof and it really felt like the romance between her and Watanabe was more forced and explicit than in the book when it seemed like a much more normal relationship with certain romantic suggestions and undertones.
I don't know if it's possible to fully include all the detail from a Murakami book into film, and while I did enjoy the movie, having read the book I have to say that a lot is lost, and it's a shame. However, I do feel like the dynamics between the characters are well portrayed, and even if I hadn't read the book I think I would still be able to understand the importance of each character to the narrative. Emotionally speaking, the movie hit a similar note for me as the book did.
Blog #4: The self in Murakami
After reading Yoshio Iwamoto's "A Voice from Postmodern Japan: Haruki Murakami," many aspects of Murakami's writing that we have been talking about in class were crystalized to me, specifically the way that he approaches the self. Indeed, we have been talking all semester about this duality that exists in Murakami. How there are always two worlds, often one real and one imaginary one, that seem to parallel one another. Since A Wild Sheep Chase we have spoken about how characters always either imagine alternate versions of themselves, have alternate versions of themselves or contemplate their past selves as different people, and in the readings we have done in the past couple of weeks I couldn't help but identify this theme. In Sleep, the narrator thinks about her past self, about how she used to read so many books and how she used to be so consumed by them, and almost seems divorced from that past version of herself. When she starts not sleeping she seems to be able to separate her mind from her body. The person who does chores is different from the mind who reads Anna Karenina and goes on drives in the middle of the night. In The Second Bakery Attack, the main character has this past version of himself that his wife is unaware of, and the wife herself seems to have an unknown past as well. In the excerpt from Sputnik Sweetheart the main character literally sees a different version of herself in her own apartment, and in The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema, the narrator contemplates a different version of himself that exists in "a far off world." The theme seems very prevalent to me, perhaps because we speak about it in class and it is a theme that is very intriguing to me personally. I wonder, however, whether Murakami wrote these stories knowing that this is a theme he wanted to broach, or if it just ended up naturally recurring in his writing.
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