You don’t need to know anything about best-selling author Haruki Murakami to enjoy the new animated film Blind willow, sleeping womanwho adjusts his work.
Murakami is known for being prolific, both in terms of publishing output and the number of raw pages for each book. His writing is replete with references to mid-20th century pop culture, Japanese history, jazz, details of The Beatles, and the male sexual id, meaning he’s both immediately entertaining and just as off-putting. On the other hand, film adaptations of his writing are often more contained and accessible – they are ultimately self-contained works by individual creators.
Those who stream Blind willow gets another solid example of Western adult animation on a whim, the kind that until recently couldn’t consistently find investment, even from indie studios. Blind willow sits next to movies like To flee, TowerAnd Anomalyalthough it has most in common with the latter film, with its intoxicating conversations about the banality of adult life, some nudity and a few splatters of freakish gore.
But if you know Murakami, Blind willow, sleeping woman is much more, similar to a once-in-a-generation mashup event. This is not a Murakami movie; are the Murakami movie.
Image: Zeitgeist movies
When Murakami published the anthology Blind willow, sleeping woman in 2006 he wrote in the introduction that it was his “first real short story collection”. That was funny to say. Murakami has been publishing for two decades, including the acclaimed 2002 short story series After the earthquake. But for him Earthquake was “more of a concept album.” Blind willow, sleeping woman, by comparison, captured the breadth and depth of his craft, which spanned 24 stories written over as many years. They had little connective tissue or even healing, except they came from one man. It was grab bag literature.
Blind willow, sleeping womanthe 2023 film of the same name, enigmatic not an adaptation of the storybook. Instead, French composer and director Pierre Foldes uses it to reiterate its namesake’s goal: to create a tasting menu of Murakami’s work for a new generation. Where the collection of short stories introduced readers to the author’s ever-expanding literary catalog, the film is a similar starting point for the lineup of Murakami movie adaptations scattered across your favorite streaming services.
Although the film takes the name of the story collection, it largely borrows from other Murakami works. The two men in the middle of the film come from two separate stories After the earthquake: “UFO in Kushiro” and “Super Frog Saves Tokyo.” In the former thirties, salesman Komura volunteers to deliver a mysterious package after his wife disappears. In the latter, Katagiri, a meek, middle-aged office worker, is tasked by a human-sized frog to save Tokyo from an earthquake by fighting off a giant worm. (This premise will sound familiar to fans of Japanese storytelling or anyone who’s seen the recently released Makoto Shinkai movie. Suzume.)
Földes intersperses the parallel journeys with stories from Blind willow, sleeping woman — like when a conversation evolves into a recap of that collection’s titular short. But more surprisingly, Foldes goes much further in Murakami’s bibliography, piecing together shorts, novels and everything in between.
Image: Zeitgeist movies
Image: Zeitgeist movies
This great hodgepodge of prose can be specific and literal – for example, when Komura, in search of his lost cat, enters the world of The wind-up bird chronicle and then stays for a long time. Földes – who wrote and directed the film, along with contributing art direction, the sound department, the score and voicing the Frog – allows his characters to drift from one story to the next and back. The effect is as if Murakami’s stories were condensed by someone who consumed them all decades ago and now can’t remember exactly what set one story apart from the next.
When this method works, which it often does, Földes helps the audience see how Murakami’s habits complement each other, how their narrative rhythms echo through decades of writing. In the Murakami universe, depressed and anxious people relax only at the darkest time of the night, when everyone else is asleep and time seems to stand still. And they always have a fresh, ice-cold beer to cater for.
Földes also tunes in to Murakami’s penchant for liminal spaces. In the film, transparent spirits start living their lives. Perhaps they are dead from a recent natural disaster, unaware of their fate, and unconsciously repeating their days ad nauseam. Or maybe it’s the living who do the exact same thing. Maybe there is no difference. And like a good Murakami story, Földes accentuates this existential dread with specks of the beautiful and profound, like two unlikely friends lounging in a deserted lot, listening to classical music on the radio as thunderstorms roll in.
However, sometimes the stories don’t come together. Or maybe they come together too well. In these moments, the film feels like a parody of Murakami, brimming with missing cats, talking animals, a fixation on that point where the mundane and the surreal meet, and a bizarre ability for losers to release a magnetic sexual charge. for beautiful, younger women.
Image: Zeitgeist movies
Image: Zeitgeist movies
We get lines like two co-workers chatting at a bar: “Do you fuck her? […] Every once in a while a woman needs a good fuck.” We see flashes of sexual fantasy turn into sexual violence in the blink of an eye. Murakami’s willingness to crush eroticism into unbridled male sexual frustration positioned him as a bold literary voice. But these habits increasingly felt like a mainstay in his books. One who has never encountered that inclination by reading it may find the expression of the idea fresher here than old readers weighed down by the baggage of its repetition.
The final result is watching a talented performer try to capture another’s soul, like trying to catch a swarm of mosquitoes with a net. Some are caught. Just as many flutter through the holes.
Blind willow, sleeping woman marks the fourth Murakami movie adaptation in five years. Two of those movies — Burning And Drive my car – will be remembered as some of the best movies of the decade. They use the author’s text as a launching pad and reach for something as good, if not better, than their source material.
But Földes instead feels like he doesn’t want to go anywhere. He enjoys Murakami’s work and hopes you will too. We hear a lot of critical discourse these days about ‘movies made for fans’. But here is a film made by a fan, an artist who has been given the freedom to explore and restore and even slightly criticize a collection of writings that seems to haunt him like all those ghosts that walk the streets – no threat , but never go away. It’s an eerily beautiful (or beautifully bleak) world that Földes has created, from his writing and directing to his character design and score. This is the work of an obsessed artist.
Like the men at the center of the story, the film can’t help but ask: why look for a new house if you like the one you have?
Blind willow, sleeping woman makes his American debut at the Film Forum in New York on April 14.