Review: Hear the Wind Sing (book: 1979; movie: 1980)

Author: Haruki Murakami; Director: Kazuki Omori

Must be difficult to be asked to write and direct the film adaptation of a novella which had already won a prestigious Gunzo literary award. Then again, director Kazuki Omori, who would go on to direct Godzilla in two Heisei-era romps (vs. Biollante in ‘89 and vs. King Ghidorah in ‘91), would not know that he would be handling the debut work of an author who would later win several prizes and be dubbed “among the world's greatest living novelists” among other accolades. He would however know what a task it would be to write and adapt a book essentially about nothing.

To be fair, Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood) didn’t write his book about the same nothing as Seinfeld’s. Rather, Hear the Wind Sing is a pastiche of characters who seemingly wander from one in-novel set piece to the next, interacting with each other as if delivering monologue. This quiet-cool, hard boiled style has earned Murakami accolades as well as criticisms from those who accuse him of being a stylistic one trick pony.

The novella feels like it could have been at least partially autobiographical for Murakami in 1979. It essentially follows a nameless protagonist’s return to his hometown during a break from school. Within in the narrative are scenes and ruminations on relationships, music (jazz and rock and roll), beer, cigarettes, class inequality, french fries, and pinball. Hear the Wind Sing feels aimless but at the same time fits a post-modern “going nowhere but looking good while doing so” aesthetic.

The movie Hear the Wind Sing then is an attempt to ride that aesthetic visually. At first, the cast don’t seem up to the task of replicating their text counterparts. Kaoru Kobayashi, normally an excellent actor, looks rather nebbish for the part and narrates Murakami’s prose rather woodenly. Kimie Shingyoji, who resembles a younger, more beautiful Eihi Shiina (Audition, Tokyo Gore Police), plays her character, a recurring woman in the narrator’s short return home, seemingly with ice running through her veins. Koichi Makigami, a highly talented musician and vocalist (see YouTube clip below), certainly looks the part of his character (named “The Rat”) with his rodent-like wide cheeks and squinty features but hardly emanates the coolness of a Murakami character.

Director Omori, who also wrote the screenplay, however, did try to create visuals which matched the quirkiness of the novella. There are several sepia-toned and black and white flashbacks, stock clips of ‘60s Japanese student movement riots, a funny and surreal film-within-the-film sequence, and even animation scenes that reflect the novella’s sometimes patch-work like construction. While interesting, the shifts can sometimes feel jarring and sometimes add unnecessary visual noise. Somewhere along the way, however, Omori manages to put both disparate elements in his film together and make them work. It can be said that some novels but especially Murakami’s have to exist in their own worlds. The casting and stylistic issues seem at first like missteps because they feel too much a part of a movie world and not Murakami’s world, a shift that does not occur until halfway through. If Omori had been able to figure out how to start in Murakami’s world earlier, the movie would have worked better but once the first chords of “California Girls”, a recurring piece on the soundtrack (which has an eclectic mix of bop, free jazz, early electronic music, and rock), kick in for the first time then we know Omori has made the shift.

Murakami’s work has been likened to music (c.f. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words by Jay Rubin) not surprisingly considering he constantly references musicians, primarily western ones, in his stories. Stylistically, as any musician can tell you, what’s not played is as important as what is played. A drumbeat, for example, is typically definable by the space between beats as much as the beats themselves. Murakami’s style very much fits this metaphor in that he gives the reader just enough to be able to fill in any spaces left empty in the narrative. That Omori could take this style and make a good film out of it is a feat akin to making something out of nothing.

Hear the Wind Sing, the novella, was never released outside of Japan. An English-translated version exists but is currently out of print. The movie also was never released outside of Japan but can be viewed on YouTube without subtitles here.

A Quick Filmic Look Back Into the Last Decade

I was recently asked to list ten of my favorite Japanese films of this decade and here’s what I came up with off the top of my head and in no particular order:

Distance (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2001)
9 Souls (Toshiaki Toyoda, 2003)
Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World (Isao Yukisada, 2004)
Eureka (2000, Shinji Aoyama)
Tokyo Sonata (2008, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)
Vibrator (2003, Ryuichi Hiroki)
Hana and Alice (2004, Shunji Iwai)
Heart Beating in the Dark (2005, Shunichi Nagasaki)
Tokyo Godfathers (2003, Satoshi Kon)

It should be noted that there were several releases that really should have made this list (whether Kurosawa’s Bright Future deserved mention over Tokyo Sonata was a chore in itself) and certainly many more I have not even seen (early indicators suggest that Koreeda’s recent Air Doll might have supplanted Distance on my list, for example). The point of this list is that the 'noughts' have shaped up to be one of the most prolific decades in Japanese film since the fifties and there is plenty of talent to be excited about for the upcoming decade.

So what are your favorite films, Japanese or otherwise, of this decade?

Review: The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (2006)

Director: Jake Clennell

The Great Happiness Space looks at the world surrounding Rakkyo, a "host pub" located in the neon playground of Osaka, and its 22-year old owner, Issei. As expected, the movie is rife with scenes of effete young playboys with teased Final Fantasy-like hair slinging BS lines to young girls eager to relieve their paychecks for some fun and companionship. Meanwhile in the background, the champagne flows, the cheap techno beats bounce, and the money trades hands like cards on Valentines Day. At one point, Issei, portrayed as the smoothest of the hosts, smugly states, “…they’re just happy to be with me. Even if we don’t have sex, it’s enough to heal them.”

Healing is an important theme to The Great Happiness Space (this title is probably meant to evoke the concept of “The Floating World”). Only a third into the documentary, several patrons are revealed to behostesses themselves, prostitutes, and soapland attendants, contrasting with my expectations that they would be bored, rich college students or office workers. With this reveal, the film casts the adult nighttime industry in a human light. These are people whose jobs involve the fulfillment of other's physical needs sometimes at the expense of their own emotional needs. Thus, these women turn to Rakkyo as an oasis of sorts to fulfill their emotional needs with the hosts' attentions and needs. In a sense, Clennell presents an interesting dilemma: that these two needs are never truly fulfilled since they boil down to business transactions and sessions and not necessarily relationships. Even Issei himself admits that "Work is work....once you get feelings involved, you lose" meanwhile his biggest customers admit to spending thousands in one night.

The “pleasure” industry in Japan, once controlled by the government, has developed along a single dichotomous, but not mutually exclusive, line: the water trade (mizu shobai) characterized by flirtatious social interaction and drinking. Its hardcore counterpart (fuzoku) meanwhile deals with the carnal pleasures associated with the "pay-to-lay" aspects of the industry. Since its privatization, the industry has fallen into less savory hands (though it is debatable that, for example, the yakuza are more or less savory than the government) and certain segments such as prostitution have been criminalized or forced to exist euphemistically (i.e. there are massage parlors and ‘massage’ parlors). It was not until Japan's eventual contact with western societies, sex simply was not something associated with sin and debasement but just as a facet of life like worship and shopping. Incidental encounters with the industry are, in fact, not all that uncommon. Chirashi leaflets are stuffed seemingly by the pound into residential mailboxes, handed out in packs of tissues near train stations, and arrive in electronic form in every device that can receive them whether via email or text message. Furthermore, it's not an uncommon scene to pass a soapland, love hotel, and/or cabaret on the way to your local temple or store.

With his directorial debut, Clennell manages to document a subsection of Japanese society that people know about well, but not understand: the 'pleasure' industry. I will admit when I first heard about this documentary, I sort of cringed. If there is one thing that I have grown to loathe, it’s the gross exaggeration of modern Japan as a society of perverted and/or oversexed freaks. Surely a documentary about Japanese host clubs (think of a hostess club but with the role reversal female clientele and male employees instead) would do little to dispel that notion. However, The Great Happiness Space, like other successful documentaries of its kind, manages to show us that its flawed subjects are not apart from but rather a microcosm of the greater society.