It hasn’t come up in a while, but I’m a big fan of author Haruki Murakami, having first read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle nearly twenty years ago and having devoured several other novels and short story collections in the years since; in fact, as I write this, I have a copy of his short story collection First Person Singular sitting next to my bed. As such, when I settled into the theater to see Master Gardener, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an upcoming screening of a new animated feature that would consolidate several of his short pieces into a single narrative. The common elements of the stories that make up the aforementioned Singular is that they are all from the point of view of an unnamed protagonist, none of whom are the same from piece to piece but all of whom are quintessentially Murakami. Not universally, but among them are people seeking missing cats, characters fascinated by wells, men who share Murakami’s interest in running, people who meticulously cook delicious-sounding meals from simple ingredients, lots of discussion about staying in shape by swimming at the local natatorium, detailed descriptions for the care and upkeep of vinyl records, and, above all, men who yearn. From the lowliest television fee collector’s son to the everyday salaryman to the reclusive artist, all of Murakami’s men yearn — for the lives that they might have lived, for the loves that they never had or that they had and lost, for meaning. I can’t say that it never would have occurred to me that any number of these men could have ever been the same man because, in a way, they were all always Murakami to me, even when they had names, various fractals of the man who has been the weaver of many of the images and ideas that have gotten stuck in the craw of my consciousness over the years. 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the great crossover between six different pieces of short fiction, familiar and unfamiliar, and was adapted, produced, directed, and scored by Pierre Földes, who has largely worked previously as a composer; I didn’t recognize his name, but his C.V. contains two melancholic films I recall from my teenage years: L.I.E. and 12 and Holding. The film establishes three major characters: Katagiri, a perpetually overworked and overlooked accountant who lives a lonely life as the result of his inability to bond with others; his colleague Komura, a younger man whose future with the company looks bleak and whose life is further rattled by the sudden departure of his wife Kyoko, who leaves him a note comparing life with him to living with a “chunk of air;” and Kyoko herself who, after several days of watching constant news coverage of the 2011 earthquake, packs her things and leaves. Although the film is divided into numbered chapters, the stories are not discrete but melded together, and done so inventively. Most notably, there is one story that was almost too familiar, an adaptation of the story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which was initially published in 1986 in The New Yorker before appearing as the first story in the 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes and which was later reworked into the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was published in 1994 in Japan and 1997 in the U.S. Ironically, this actually comprises the final section of the film, placing what has always been treated as an introduction as a conclusion instead. 

Set in 2011 in the wake of that year’s devastating earthquake in Tokyo, most of the narrative follows Komura, with the film opening on his married life to Kyoko at a time just when their marriage is falling apart; for days, she has been unresponsive in front of the TV, watching news coverage of the attempts to save trapped citizens. When Komura is at work, she leaves him, writing a note asking him not to contact her, to look for her cat, and that she is never coming back. This sets up two plot elements: a trip that Komura takes to visit his younger teenage cousin to accompany him for a hospital visit, and a second trip that Komura is encouraged to take by his co-worker Sasaki. The former is the title story from the Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection and was originally about an unnamed man who accompanies his cousin to the doctor and takes the opportunity to relate how he would accompany his best friend to visit his girlfriend after an operation and is largely focused on time, daydreams, and recollections; here, this narrative is recast as the story of how Komura and Kyoko met, putting her in the place of the ill girlfriend who settled for Komura when her boyfriend died, at least in this version. The second of these is largely the plot of “UFO in Kushiro,” the first story in after the quake and the story from which Komura’s name is drawn. In it, Komura travels to Kushiro at the behest of his friend to deliver a small, nondescript package, and there he is drawn in by his colleague’s sister Keiko and her friend Shimao, who tries to draw Komura out of his funk. Alongside these two journeys is an adaptation of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” in which Katagiri (who, it should go without saying, had no connection to Komura in any of the source materials) is visited by a man-sized frog who requests the timid man’s moral support in Frog’s upcoming battle with Worm, the creature who caused the recent earthquake (in the story the January 1995 earthquake) and whose ongoing efforts threaten to fully reduce the city to rubble. Elsewhere, Kyoko relates the story of a strange offer she received on the night of her twentieth birthday, in a story (“Birthday Girl”) also taken from the Blind Willow collection. 

The animation here is unsettling, even when it’s not intended to be. Director Földes apparently filmed the whole thing as a live action “reference” and then covered the heads of the actors with 3D models, which were then traced and animated. Other people who exist in the background or in the space through which our main characters move are thus translucent against the solid background. It’s an image that calls to mind the way that children draw things: a table first, and then the objects on it, so that the table and the wallpaper shine through the phone and the lamp drawn over them, but here it’s not the mark of a child’s process of learning about object permanence and layering images but is instead an evocation of the ephemerality. Whether or not Katagiri’s interactions with Frog are real is left to the interpretation of the reader (or viewer, as is the case here), but this is a world that is haunted, where the people who are not interacted with are ghosts and wisps. I hesitate to call it ugly (although it is, at times) and instead will simply call it unique. That method, combined with the easy pace at which the film progresses, makes the whole thing seem dreamlike. I’m sure that there will be others for whom this feels like a slog, but the film picks up the pace as it progresses, and every part of it feels as if it’s crafted with care, even if the aesthetic is intentionally haphazard. Ironically, however, I think the people least likely to enjoy this may be Murakami fans. Not that the author’s readers are a toxic fandom who will hate this melting together of different stories, but because transforming these from prose to film necessitates the loss of much of the narration that creates the rhetorical space in which his literary mannerisms flourish. His dialogue is still here, however, as is his sense of what makes people “tick,” and I still think it’s well worth visiting for fans and novices alike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond