Merging matter and memory in cinematic adaptations of Murakami Haruki’s fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent cinematic adaptations of the fiction of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) visualize a central narrative theme in his work: the division in Japan's historical imagination between its tumultuous past and its contemporary post-industrial consumer culture. [i] Tony Takitani (Tonî Takitani, 2005) by Japanese director Ichikawa Jun (b. 1948) and Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no mori, 2012) by Tran Ahn Hung (b. 1962) depict how the memory of war, recovery, and activism come to bear on the experience of rapid development in Japan. However, based on the popularity of Murakami's fiction in the larger region of East Asia, the impact of modernization on national memory is a theme that does not just resonate with audiences in Japan. Korean director Lee Chang-dong's (b. 1954) adaptation of Murakami's 1992 short story 'Barn Burning', Burning (Beoning, 2018) depicts the fractures formed between South Korea's hypermodern present and the cultural experiences that were suppressed in the process of the nation's rapid development. Much like adaptations of Murakami's fiction set in Japan, Burning upsets the self-evidence of the highly developed condition of present-day South Korea by making the material experience of an affluent Seoul landscape somehow less real, while giving tangible form instead to the virtual effects of the nation's divisive history. The melding of the virtual dimensions of the past with the materiality of the present in Murakami adaptations set in both Japan and Korea suggests a similar experience with the illusory nature of rapid development in the historical imagination of both these national traditions.