Reporter | Yin Qinglu
Edit | Jiang Yan
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Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the film "Driving My Car", adapted from Haruki Murakami's novel of the same name, won the 94th Academy Award for Best International Film. While people seem to pay more attention to the anecdotes of Will Smith slapping the host than who wins the award, the film has maintained a moderate level of attention since its release, and it has continued unabated. This gentle attention may come from the restraint and meaning of the film itself, which retains the unspeakable temperament of Murakami's works, which is one of the keys to its success.
Analogous to sensory experience, the film is like a tribute to sandwiches in Murakami's long story The End of the World and Cold Wonderland, "fresh, bouncy, neatly cut with a sharp, clean knife." And the richness of the film's text is like a sandwich, and the protagonist of "The End of the World" puts cucumber slices, ham and cheese into his mouth in turn, just like the experience of watching the movie as we go back and forth in the text polyphony.
Stills from "Drive My Car" Image source: Douban
The main line of the story is not complicated, it tells the story of the stage actor Iefuku who embarks on a trip to the theater station in Hiroshima after encountering the derailment and accidental death of his wife Yin, and gradually untiesses the knot in a conversation with the female driver Tori. This is typical of Murakami's narrative: a lonely and independent male who is accidentally involved in a series of mysterious events and has to fight it before he can return to his original life. And this narrative often corresponds to the same theme, that is, how to heal the trauma and confusion of the reality of the "other side" by summoning an unreality located on the "other side".
The age difference between Hamakul and Murakami is nearly thirty years, which is not a contemporary, but as world war II students, they have experienced a highly capitalist society, as well as events that symbolize daily collapse such as the bursting of the bubble economy and sarin gas, presumably hiding in them the trauma of Japanese intergenerational inheritance, which can be seen from the attention paid to the narrative of disasters in their past works. However, this article is not intended to be discussed separately from the film itself, and I am more interested in how this theme happens through "Driving My Car", and how Hamaguchi's video adaptation makes it more three-dimensional and moving, probably only in this way can we go deep into the core of the story that it strives to show.
Passive: The Woman as a Psychic Medium in Murakami's Works
The process of summoning the unreal is also the process of solving puzzles, and the key to solving puzzles is often women. In one interview, Murakami mentioned: "In my work, women assume the role of psychic medium, and her task is to elicit something through her own existence. ”
This seems to explain why Murakami's female characters are always dead and missing, and critics often criticize this, arguing that women seem to be just props for narrative purposes. However, this assessment is obviously unfair, because it is through them that the protagonist (along with the reader) can obtain something similar to the revelation, not so much as a tool, but rather murakami as a stand-in for the revered, divine figure, as well as the sound in the novel.
In the original, the mystery is obviously the derailment and death of the sound. Jiafu thought that his life was happy and happy, so he was puzzled by his wife's infidelity, but because of his wife's death, he could no longer know the reason for her betrayal of him. In the movie, Hamaguchi grafts on another short story, "Yamaruzod", and tells it through the paraphrasing of the sound, thus making the role of the sound more complicated. The story is about a middle school girl who sneaks into the home of a boy she likes and leaves a keepsake each time, sometimes unused tampons, sometimes a few of her own hairs.
But why did Hamakul make such a change? We may wish to think again of the "psychic medium" in Murakami's mouth, the occasion when the psychic media plays a role is often a ritual, which refers to the sexual behavior of the family blessing and the sound, but the ceremony also needs the myth as the matrix, and the two corroborate each other, and one is indispensable. So, after each sexual act, the sound seems to be awakened by something and begins to tell a wonderful story like a myth. There are two versions of the myth, in "Mountain Ruzod", the girl no longer goes to the boy's house, and the fever-like love for him gradually recedes; and the version in the movie is even more frightening, the girl kills the thief who is also an intruder, but she is not discovered, she is not tried, and the only change in the boy's home is that there is an additional surveillance camera.
The latter version of the story is told from the mouth of Takatsuki, the object of Otome's derailment, and in the car that hangs low at night, Takatsuki himself seems to have been affected by the power of the story, and has entered a temporary state of "out of his mind", even almost to tears. There is a similar scene in the original work, when Takatsuki talks about sound, "words float up from some deep special place in Takatsuki's heart", and the man with an empty shell really opens himself, although it is only for a very short time.
Stills from "Driving My Car"
It seems that through Takatsuki's words, the image of the sound becomes more confusing, and she has betrayed Iefu exactly, because she tells the most important part of the story to Takatsuki rather than to Iefuku. But after telling the story, Takatsuki felt very sincerely, "Mr. Iefuku should be grateful to live with such a beautiful person for 20 years." It was at this time that Jiafu realized that the betrayal was real, and the wife's love for herself was also true, and there was nothing mysterious about it.
In the original novel, it is handled like this, and the female driver Dori says to Jiafu:
"Your wife probably didn't have any reason to be moved, so she slept, women have that kind of place."
"It's like a disease, Mr. Jiafu, that's not something that can come up with an answer." Whether my father abandoned us or my mother hurt me, it was all caused by illness. Even thinking with your head won't help. ”
In this way, the puzzle is not solved, it is only dissipated lightly, and behind the mystery is only "nothing". Liu Ken, author of the literary criticism work "Allegory of The Spiritual History of Japan's Post-War" Period: The Theory of Haruki Murakami, believes that emptiness is not nothing, but a kind of Zen that is about to come out. In Murakami's view, the consistent self does not exist anywhere, and the purpose of writing a novel is to immerse oneself in a dynamic story, only in this way can we break free from the web of self-expression. This is also a break from the male-centric narrative, the active journey to embark on the journey, the practice of seeking answers is not feasible here, only by accepting human passivity, something close to the truth will appear.
This is reminiscent of the view of the Japanese painter Kyoko Nakamura, who believed that Japanese art is a "technique that can only be achieved through passivity." In her collection of essays published at Kyoto University, Emotion: Touching the Outer Side of Life, she contrasts the difference between Western painting and Japanese painting, which believes that everything in the world can be reduced in equal proportions to stay in the "side" of the world, while Japanese painting does not have a unified perspective point and retains the passivity of perspective. But because of this, the fear of the "other side" world has not been lost, so that the "other side" can be summoned.
《Emotions: Touching the Outside of Life
[Japanese] Ryoko Nishii and Hiroshi Kanuchi
Kyoto University Gakujo Press 2020-12
What is summoned by the ritual of sound is the trace of the "other side" coming, and this trace cannot be present in a form that we can understand, so it can only appear as emptiness, but it is true that something has been changed. Therefore, the story of "Driving My Car" can only be realized through the complete absence and passivity of the sound. In the end, Jiafu finds that he is still in love with Yin, and the feeling of betrayal has not disappeared, but through his own journey, Jiafu has in a sense flipped the story of sin told by Yin and is able to continue to live in this world.
Keep living: Silence like sign language and snow in Hokkaido
The brilliance of Hamakul's adaptation is that the place that is only mentioned slightly in the original work has become the focus of the video. One of these places is Tori's hometown of Twelve Falls, and the other is the play "Uncle Vanya", and interestingly, the two appear in the film as an intertext, announcing the end of the three-hour-long narrative.
The female driver, Tori, comes from a fictional town in Hokkaido, the town of Kamikoshi Waterfall, a location that is very important in the genealogy of Murakami's works, and in his first long work, "The Adventure of Finding Sheep", Dr. Yogo's hometown is the town of Kamikoshi Waterfall, and Murakami also devotes a large section to describing the history of the town from pioneering to ruin. Although this is not a coincidence, in the end, the short story "Driving My Car" can only be regarded as a collage of many "Murakami elements", and it does not matter how Watoshi's life is. However, Hamaguchi salvaged the fragment and directly used Hokkaido as one of the stages of the film, thus secretly cutting through a key thread in Murakami's work, that is, the criminal consciousness of the Japanese people after World War II.
According to the "Adventure of The Sheep Hunt", the town was originally inhabited by the ainu indigenous people, but with the Meiji government's implementation of industrial structure changes, it caused a staggering rate of abandonment of farmers and population loss. Lin Shaohua also mentioned in the preface to the translation that the history of Shangshi waterfall town is the history of the Japanese government desperately promoting modernization, resulting in local tragedies, which also includes the war of aggression, because the Hokkaido government is vigorously promoting sheep breeding in the local area, and its purpose is to achieve self-sufficiency in cold wool when invading China. Therefore, "looking for sheep" actually means looking for the source of Japan's modern militarism.
At the end of the film, Iefuku and Dori drive to Hokkaido, which undoubtedly implies the search for the truth. In Dori's words, it was already "a place where there was nothing", leaving only a white expanse of snow and the ruins of home. But it was also in this place that the two faced their inner trauma together.
What does snow mean? In the critical book "Haruki Murakami and Women, Hokkaido.... In the book, the author, Makiko Yamazaki, describes the snow scene in Hokkaido this way: the world after the snow is new and touching, but the road blockage and cold caused by the snow make people feel the sadness of fate. This sadness is indeed linked to the fate of the locals, because it is a cold land, it must be frosted once a few years, crops are difficult to harvest, and farmland is gradually replaced by woodland, which has become very depressed, like a dead city, in 1978, when the protagonist went to find Dr. Sheep.
Although Dori was not directly involved in the history of her hometown, her identity may have given it a certain symbolism—both as a perpetrator and a survivor of history. This echoes the experience of Tori herself, whose mother died in a landslide, but she did not save her mother in time, which made her unable to forgive herself and became a "perpetrator", and remembered this memory with scars on her face; but she herself was a survivor of a cruel and loveless family of origin.
Because he wanted to escape the truth about his wife's cheating, he returned home late, only to find that his wife was unconscious, "I killed her!" Jiafu thought so, however, he also survived a devastated life. The two survivors understood each other in the snow and hugged each other tightly, at least, the snow at this moment was beautiful and comforting.
However, the biggest adaptation of the whole film is also the section of the rehearsal of Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya", from Jiafu practicing his lines in the car, reading the script with the actors, to the final repertoire, this drama has become a parallel narrative throughout the film. There are not many comments on this part, and here we will briefly discuss the intertextual part, which is Sonia's sign language monologue in the last scene of the film. It can be said that Vanya's story, as another "non-reality", forms a mirror image of the "reality" in which Dori and Jiafu are located. To understand this, look at what Uncle Vanya says.
Vanya was a lifelong and diligent little man who worked hard with his niece Sonia to run a manor and sent all the proceeds of the manor to Professor Serebryakov. They thought that this scholar was a high-ranking figure, and that his dedication to him was deserved. But in the end, he found out that the professor was just a mediocre person, who not only had no academic achievements, but also had no gratitude for Vanya's efforts. After waking up to the fact that she was working for a false idol, Vanya finally rose to the occasion, but the rebellion was futile, and his and Sonia's lives were already ruined after all.
After the professor left, the two sat at the desk, and then Sonia wrapped her hands around Vanya and "said" the famous monologue, the silent sign language like a quiet falling snow, conveying the same belief of "living". The play tells the story of the "impossible to achieve happiness", from being in a state of happiness but obscurity, to the hope of being dashed and returning to the original point, where the fates of Vanya and Jiafu overlap.
In an interview, Hamaguchi talked about the reasons for choosing sign language actors, he believes that sign language is a kind of middle ground between language and dance, and when he reads Chekhov's words, the words seem to enter his body, making the originally immovable body move. I believe that the audience who has seen this film will also have the same feeling, it is the musicality and physicality of the film that first touched us, the melody of the narrative is intertwined, and it is no longer possible to distinguish whether it belongs to Murakami, Hamaguchi or Chekhov. From this perspective, no amount of analysis is superfluous.
Resources:
"Fables of Japan's Spiritual History in the Post-War Period: Haruki Murakami", Liu Yan, The Commercial Press, 2016-9
On Chekhov's Theatrical Creation [Russian] Yermilov by Zhang Shoushen translated by China Drama Publishing House, 1985
The End of the World and the Cold Wonderland [Japanese] Translated by Haruki Murakami by Lin Shaohua, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2002-12
"The Adventure of Finding Sheep" [Japanese] Haruki Murakami by Lin Shaohua Translated by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2001-8
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami by Zhu Jiarong / Jiang Jianqiang / Yue Yuankun / Lu Qiushi / Lin Shaohua / Mao Danqing Translation Shanghai Translation Publishing House 2015-2
"Afectus: Touching the Outside of Life" [Sun] Nishii Ryoko / Kabauchi Tadashi Koukai Kyoto University Gakujo Press 2020-12
Haruki Murakami and the Woman, Hokkaido..."[Sun] Makiko Yamazaki, Sairesha 2013-10