murakami books the wind up bird chronicle

These three principal characters have their own personal storylines, never actually interacting with each other for any significant amount of time, yet their respective journeys are all inextricably intertwined. While Komura steps away from the office, his colleague from the accounting department, Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo), becomes entangled in a quest with a giant talking frog (voiced by Földes himself) to save the city from a giant earthworm that threatens to set off another catastrophic earthquake. Her unexpected departure causes Komura to become listless, resulting in a week-long leave from work that sends him on a bizarre journey to the snowy island of Hokkaido to deliver a secretive package to a coworker’s sister. One day, she finally rises from the couch and abruptly leaves her husband Komura (Ryan Bommarito), an employee at a local bank. Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder) has essentially transformed into a living zombie, spending all of her time watching television coverage of the ecological disaster, noting that the death toll has now risen past 10,000. Translucent specters seem to haunt the city after the tragedy – still commuting on the subway, showing up to work and running their daily errands – yet their presence isn’t discernible to those who survived. By adapting several Murakami short stories with particularly surreal elements via animation in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, writer, director, animator and composer Pierre Földes is able to evocatively distill the mystical streak that permeates loosely connected plotlines, unfolding in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Tokyo in 2011. The vivid, often fantastical scenes he creates through prose could easily come off as awkward, incongruous or simply unsatisfying on the screen, even within the seemingly limitless capabilities of modern VFX technology. This likely has to do with Murakami’s penchant for employing elements of magical realism. There are already several wonderfully meditative, carefully realized adaptations of Haruki Murakami short stories – namely Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s Burning and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 Oscar-winning Drive My Car – yet many of the Japanese literary icon’s most famous works have long been deemed unfit for cinematic translation.

Murakami books the wind up bird chronicle