Blog Post #3 - Cassandra Berrette

When reading Norwegian Wood, I found Naoko to be a very compelling character to me. Her sadness and complexity was something that I sympathized with. To me, Naoko was a woman plagued with grief and trauma, in addition to struggling to conform in a very homogenous society. Her struggles with mental health and suicidal ideation gave a lot of depth to her character, which I enjoyed reading about. 

Going into the movie, I was very curious with how my version of these characters (in my head), specifically Naoko, would play out on screen. The filmmaker was consistent with depicting her mental health trouble, which I felt was a vital aspect of Naoko. Both the film and the novel showcases the melancholic nature of this character. Additionally, I found there were cinematographic choices that affirmed the complex nature of Naoko. Various shots throughout the film highlights the isolation and detachment Noaka feels with herself and the world around her, which is affirming of how I depicted her myself from reading Norwegian Wood. Focusing on her emotional strife was a solid choice for me. Even though this film was not really to my taste, I enjoyed the valid portrayal of characters (and their characterization) in the novel on screen.  

-Cassandra Berrette

Blog Post #3: Norwegian Woods Movie

The movie really gave me a chance to set myself in the scene. "Where" and "when" we were almost becoming an afterthought while reading the book, however seeing the settings and the fashion was very fun and changed the way I thought about some aspects of the story. For example, having the protesters in the background of a lot of Toru’s daily life reminded me that the student movement was an important aspect of the story’s historical setting. It never really occurred to me in the book that the protests were a big deal. 

It was an interesting decision to leave out Reiko’s story in the movie, in fact, in the movie she seems like a totally insignificant character, while in fact Toru spent a lot of time with her at the institution and writing letters back and forth. Her story took up a big chunk of the book and while it's disturbing to hear, there were many other disturbing aspects of the book highlighted in the movie. 

The movie adaptation also gave me a really different perspective on Toru and Naoko’s relationship. While I did read their first sex scene as being odd and the consent being somewhat grayed in the book, this was made even more clear in the movie. Seeing how distraught she was while they were having sex made me look at their whole relationship differently. In the movie, she seemed more unwell the whole time and much less capable of making decisions and engaging in a relationship. After she breaks down multiple times in the movie, I began to judge Toru more and more, he seemed to be latching himself onto a woman who is clearly unwell and would not be capable of ever being with him.

I also didn’t like the way Midori was depicted in the movie. I realize that her character is somewhat of a manic pixie dream girl, but I read her character as being much more of a force and vibrant than her character in the movie. In the movie, she just comes across as overly sweet and almost ditsy?

- Sarah Rosenthal

Blog Post #2- Norwegian Wood, Impressions

I liked this book! It was an exciting contrast to Wild Sheep Chase, which was very interesting but the magic realism in it made me feel like I had to decipher Boku’s every action and description, and so throughout the novel, I was hyper-aware of everything I was reading– if that makes sense. Norwegian Wood flowed more traditionally and so I was able to lose myself in the storyline. And although the main character is from a completely distant time and place, I felt that I could relate to how he navigated growing up and becoming an independent person at university. 

I liked the discussion in class we had about the comparison of the “world of the dead” in both Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood. And while the obscurities and differences between the “real” world and the “other” world are less obvious in Norwegian Wood, I liked the nods to mythology– the gates/fences, the eating of the food, the stillness of time, etc. While the Rat and Naoko represent different things for the protagonist, they both seem to give their friend a purpose. Without Naoko’s friendship, Toru would have little motivation– he doesn’t show a particular interest in school or making friends. When he visits each in their respective world, time seems to escape him. He feels a sense of serenity, tempting him to stay with them, however in the end the protagonist makes the transition back to the world of the living. However, in Norwegian Wood at least Toru has someone to return back to– Midori. 

The love story, although tragic and disturbing at times, was also beautiful, and although I couldn’t quite see the progression of Toru and Midori’s relationship, I liked the naivety of it and how they both care for each other in small ways. Toru cares for her sick father and Midori gives him companionship when he has little in his life. This novel had a sweet and compassionate quality that I haven’t yet seen in the other Murakami stories we’ve studied. I felt that the protagonist had much more depth in his relationship with other people. In Sheep Chase, for example, everyone around him seemed to exist for his own entertainment or pleasure, while Toru seems to make genuine connections. 

- Sarah Rosenthal

blog post 3 - a rant about the movie

 I’ll start by saying that I didn’t like this movie. I don’t know if the movie itself is bad, or if it’s just because I read and really liked the book. Compared to the book, the movie adaptation of Norwegian Wood falls flat and highlights the worst parts of the book, especially the manic pixie dream girl qualities of both Naoko and Midori. With both girls, many of their scenes are cut short or eliminated entirely, and we thus get much less of their back stories. They don’t stand on their own as real characters, and are instead just love interests to Watanabe, which I think does them a great disservice. Furthermore, cutting so much of these plotlines lessens the impact of the potential romance plots. An example of this is with Midori’s father in the hospital: this scene seemed very important to me in the book as a step in their relationship, yet it is entirely bypassed here and she just seems like a liar for claiming her father was in Uruguay and never elaborating further. The way Reiko is minimized so much in the movie also surprised me, and it made the ending with her and Watanabe feel very out of nowhere (even more than in the book). 

Along a similar note, the movie adaptation seems to have isolated Watanabe more than he is in the book. Side characters such as Stormtrooper and Reiko have been significantly cut out in favor of the (mediocre) romance plots, and simplifying their characters to such an extent makes them feel unnecessary. This even seems to have happened with Nagasawa—he seemed much more like a dick in the movie, when I think his character had more nuance in the book. 

The book relied a lot on Watanabe’s thoughts and inner monologue, which don’t have a clear translation into film. Without them, however, everything seems to fall flat. We are watching Watanabe’s memories, but we don’t know why they matter, and I don’t think the movie does a good enough job at making me care. It’s not like the movie was entirely terrible—I did like the way it illustrated the student protests going on—but overall I think it failed as an adaptation, and it pales in comparison to the novel. 

- Laura Hurley 

Blog Post 3 - Max Dahlstrom

 I was definitely at least entertained by the film adaptation of Norwegian Wood and thought it did alright given how much it was supposed to cover, but I certainly had some gripes with it. I thought the cinematography and music score were pretty good and the acting was decent as well. I thought the actor portraying Watanabe did a good job of conveying that detached ‘good listener’ type character. My main problem with the film was its pacing, which seems inevitable given how much plot and content it tries to cover in just over 2 hours. There were a lot of crucial parts of the plot that were skimmed over, and I know that if I hadn’t read the book in advance, I probably would’ve been pretty confused. I thought this was an issue particularly at the beginning of the movie since we’re not given much context on who Kizuki and Naoko are in relation to Watanabe. Another instance where plot was quickly skimmed over was with Reiko’s character. Her backstory is pretty much left completely unexplained, and her relation to Naoko is mostly left up to inference. The book explains a lot of things up front that can only be understood in the film from inference or from prior knowledge. While this difference may be unavoidable given the difference in expository capabilities of films and prose, it made it feel like the movie had a lot of room for improvement in terms of pacing, character development, and plot progression. In some ways, the film felt like a highlight reel of the book, focusing on moments of dialogue and more iconic or memorable scenes in the story, while excluding a lot of the subtle elements of the narrative that build up to these scenes and make them really impactful.

Blog Post #3 - Kara

  The book Norwegian Wood has the potential to be a really beautiful, melancholy movie. However, the movie I just watched was so bad. For one, the personality of the characters didn’t come through at all and all of the characters in the movie felt really one dimensional. The movie characters were shells of the book characters. For the entirety of the book, Naoko was clearly not 100% emotionally or mentally stable. In the movie, the only indication that she wasn’t ok was that she would start crying. Her suicide felt uncharacteristic. The relationships between characters didn’t develop either. I didn’t feel any chemistry between Watanabe and Naoko and there wasn’t really anything in the movie that showed a romance developing. At the beginning of the movie, it seemed like they barely knew each other and then all of a sudden they’re sleeping together. The entire movie felt rushed and haphazardly thrown together. Whole parts of the book were cut out and certain things were changed that really had no reason to be. For example, why did they change Watanabe’s gift from a sweater to a scarf? The movie seemed to completely abandon the book, including the vibes, the characters, and the plot. 

Blog Post 3 - Movie Adaptation

Though I found it entertaining, my initial impression of the movie was that it wanted to touch upon key components of the novel without dwelling on any long enough to properly develop them. There was the sense that everything was being rushed through to include all the highlights of the story, which would have made it difficult for me to emotionally connect with the characters had I not already read the book. I conceived of it more as a visual summary rather than an adaptation invoking similar emotional impressions.

One instance of the sacrifice of such fast pacing that stood out to me was Nagasawa’s characterization. In the movie, when delivering the line about not reading books that haven’t had the baptism of time and smacking Toru’s book out of his hands, without the context that him and Toru have bonded over literature and Nagasawa having already been properly established as a character, he comes across as far more childish and obnoxious than he did in the novel. While the statement can still seem pretentious, when the depth of his character has been explored, which is what really fascinates Toru and in turn can interest the reader, this bias towards older literature has the potential to become one of his more sympathetic traits since it’s an example of something he values in his predominantly irreverent life. It reveals that, despite how he treats other people, he does have his own standards. So I found that Nagasawa’s introduction in the film flattened him.

In a similar way, when Stormtrooper moves out in the film, his personality has been shown so little that the sense of loss at his absence isn’t comparable to that felt in the novel. Time and time again, Toru brightens people’s lives with absurd Stormtrooper stories, making him such a staple presence in Toru’s life that his absence is jarring. I really liked Norwegian Wood, and the film made me appreciate the novel more for how well it could build investment in its characters.

-Kate Waldron