Generation Adrift

Norwegian Wood
directed by Anh Hung Tran

Norwegian Wood is my least favorite Haruki Murakami novel. When I heard that Anh Hung Tran (The Scent of Green Papaya) was making a film version of it, I looked heavenward and muttered, ÒWhy oh why oh why canÕt you make a movie of another book by Murakami?Ó I mean, there are three suicides within the first 100 pages, all young people, and these are bookended by yet another, inevitable suicide and more young people obsessed with sex, death, more sex and more death in between. There is none of the mind-blowing expansiveness and mystery of Dance Dance Dance, A Wild Sheep Chase, Hardboiled Wonderland or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, not even the depraved beauty of Kafka on the Shore. The original (1987) ad copy for the book went: Ò100% Love Story ÐÐ 100% Realism.Ó For the sake of my fellow Japanese, I refused to believe that this was a best seller. My sister answered my rant: ÒNorwegian Wood isÉjust Norwegian Wood.Ó

After approving the first draft ÐÐ which he reportedly returned scribbled with copious notes and additional dialogue ÐÐ Murakami gave Tran free rein in adapting his novel. Mercifully cutting the suicide rate by 50 percent, Tran firmly anchors the film in 1969. University student Watanabe passes a bunch of his fellow students in tenugui face masks and construction helmets, carrying 4x4s on their way to a confrontation with a riot squad. A neighboring apartment building dominates the view of a rainy Tokyo, seen through sliding glass doors; I can smell the musty tatami. Lacing these images with pop somgs from the era, Tran distills the story into a series of sensations and impressions ÐÐ of windswept, waist-deep summer grass, frozen trees and roars of the ocean that drown the human cry. And he made me ask, What on earth was eating these Japanese kids?

Late-Ô60s Japan: A time of student riots and university shutdowns. The security treaty with the U.S. Instead of flower power and psychedelia, the Japanese developed Òero guro [sex and gore] nonsenseÓ culture (animeÕs Katsuhiro Otomo and filmmaker Takeshi Kitano are products of this generation). There was a sort of desperate nihilism in the air, and it got only bleaker as the decade turned. The first serial rapist-murderer, the first hijacking. Twelve corpses discovered at a former student radicals' campground. The air pollution was at its worst. The Minamata disease. Rivers clogged with trash. The world did seem to be heading toward an inevitable armaggedon, made worse by the fast-accelerating postwar media saturation. Some college-age kids decided it noble to throw away their lives Òin the struggle,Ó whatever that meant. Others, like the characters of Norwegian Wood, found despair within themselves.

In the center of it all is Naoko, played by the fearless Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) as a character a decade younger than herself (like the perpetual ingŽnue Sayuri Yoshinaga, but without the sugar-coating). What unfortunately gets in the way is the ÒrealismÓ of the acting. I am not a fan of the way the Japanese young people talk now: guys with monosyllabic answers, girls with their ÒgirlyÓ voices from perpetually upturned lips. Was this the way they talked in Õ69, too? (Gee, I feel cheated.) They make NaokoÕs tortured self-analysis sound over-articulate and overdramatic. My other complaint concerns Reiko (Reika Kirishima), NaokoÕs roommate at the sanatorium. In TranÕs adaptation, the older music teacher retains very little of the humor given her by Murakami. Instead of cracking jokes at the most vulnerable moments, she joins the ranks of the trembling maidens. Even veteran hams Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi of Yellow Magic Orchestra donÕt bring comic relief with their cameos. A moody-modernist score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood plus three vintage tracks by Can immeasurably aid the film's sensual allure.

Murakami was born in1949; Tran, in Vietnam in 1962. Now, thanks to the continuous warfare of the past decade, there will be others growing up in their respective countriesÕ postwar rebuilding of societies and cultures. They might find a similar moral ennui as did the Japanese in the Ô60s. Or not ÐÐ but if they do, they might discover Norwegian Wood for themselves, on paper or on screen. Or theyÕll find a Norwegian wood of their own.

Well, my sister was right. Norwegian Wood is just Norwegian Wood. Although now, after seeing TranÕs new film, I might add that itÕs one generationÕs gift to another ÐÐ a yet-unidentified generation in a different time and place. Without resorting to didacticism, Tran made me take a time trip and appreciate MurakamiÕs laying out of the emotions of the era ÐÐ without a doubt belonging to a moment in history, but without all that screaming black ink. Like fragile pressed flowers, out of yesterdayÕs papers.
ÐÐ Rika Ohara