Variety reports that French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung is planning on adapting Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel Norwegian Wood for the big screen. This is huge for me because Murakami has been one of my favorite novelists since I began reading his Wild Sheep Chase for a post-War Japanese fiction in translation class during my freshman year at Wesleyan. At the time, the professor and class didn’t exactly peak my interest, but the syllabus was really incredible. We not only read Murakami, but we also read Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima, two canonical modern Japanese writers. This started my obsession with Murakami’s work. I immediately purchased and read his entire corpus. As most Murakami fans (and there’s A LOT of them) would agree, the magnum opus is clearly The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is literary crack. I promise that you will finish the book mad quick (I’m reluctant to give an actual time frame because people read at different speeds) only to realize that you’ve just finished a mother-effin’ 600+ page novel! But besides that one, my personal favorite is South of the Border, West of the Sun.
Now most fans of literature would cringe at the thought of someone attempting turn a work by one of their favorite writers into cinema but I always found the “you have to read the book” argument a bit silly. People use it too often as a weird defense mechanism to show that they are intellectual or something. It’s really unnecessary, especially since cinematic renditions of great works of literature have indeed been executed quite successfully. Moreover, it gives the book status as original, which drives me nuts because it makes it seem like making a movie is far easier than writing a book. But this a confusion which I’m willing to guess comes from wrongly attributing the relative ease it takes to SEE a film as opposed to READING a book onto the process of creating them. Granted, it’s easy to sit back and watch a film. However, that is no reason to suggest that the nonequivalent ratio holds in MAKING a film.
Moreover, doing a good screen adaptation of a book is really difficult.
But back to Norwegian Wood: The Movie (BTW, that’s not what the producers or the studios are calling it), I’m excited about it. I would’ve been excited no matter what but I am really kind of happy about this because I had seen a film called Tony Takitani adapted from a short story by Murakami, which was kind of mehhhhh.
