Murakami Haruki on Film offers a timely look at the cinematic adaptations of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki’s fiction over the past forty years. Films based on Murakami’s work (including Tony Takitani (2004), Norwegian Wood (2010), Burning (2018), Drive My Car (2022), and many more) manifest a contradictory impulse to faithfully capture the author’s literary worlds while expanding and developing these worlds at the same time. Created by directors from Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States, among other national traditions, these films demonstrate the way adaptations are fundamentally creative works that say something new about the different cultural contexts in which they appear. Though the creative reworking of Murakami’s literary worlds threatens to distance us from the author and his work, however, this book argues that the very process of “translating” Murakami from one medium to another references the theme of transformation that is central to his work.
