Despite Haruki Murakami’s global popularity, only recently have film adaptations of his work gotten real prominence, with acclaimed movies like Burning (2018) and the Oscar-winning Drive My Car (2021). Now an animated film takes an omnibus approach, combining half a dozen of his short stories into one hazy, beguiling new tale. The first feature from director Pierre Földes, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman ably captures Murakami’s combination of low-key magical realism, sexual neurosis, and loneliness.
The screenplay is a clever act of remixing. Rather than a simple anthology of vignettes, each inspired by a Murakami story, this narrative combines them into episodes in the lives of three interlinked characters. Komura, the main character in the story “UFO in Kushiro,” thus also lives out the events of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” and “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women.” Katagiri, the lead of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” is his coworker, and now also takes part in “Dabchick.” Komura’s wife Kyoko is reconfigured as the protagonist of “Birthday Girl.”
Short story collections are carefully curated, and rearranging them can be risky. “UFO in Kushiro” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” both come from 2000’s after the quake, whose six works each concern the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan in a distinct way. Yet they flow together remarkably smoothly, as the various scenarios form a series of surreal events confronting people trapped in uncertain spaces in their lives. The film is set in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, wherein the characters’ shared ennui signifies a dazed collective trauma response. When the Earth itself is in literal upheaval, why would’t a human-sized talking frog suddenly appear before you?
That’s what happens to Katagiri, a sad-sack salaryman whom the frog enlists to help battle a giant worm who will supposedly cause another earthquake in a few days’ time. Far from a fantasy epic, most of this narrative thread sees the hapless chap steadfastly refusing the call to adventure. Meanwhile, Kyoko is transfixed by news about the devastation wrought by the earthquake, leaving Komura to watch the television undisturbed. A listless Komura drifts between encounters with various other characters — from a doctor appointment with his philosophically minded younger cousin to a farcical trip out of town, where he can’t get it up for an eager would-be sexual partner, to an abortive attempt to find Kyoko’s cat.
All this is rendered via an animation technique reminiscent of rotoscoping. Földes shot live-action performers acting out all the scenes, but rather than tracing these shots, animators just used them as references. The result is a deliberately uncanny vibe that fits with the mercurial, liminal world of the film. A scene can melt from realistic to fantastical or vice-versa in the same shot; a ghostly apparition of a memory can appear in a bar or an illustration of a thought may float above a bed. Murakami’s fiction can often operate according to dream logic, and this adaptation perfectly inhabits that space.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman opens in theaters on April 14.
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