Murakami’s Gun

Therapy and Intertext in Drive My Car (2021)

Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura in Drive My Car (2021)

Haruki Murakami’s work, best known as combination of surrealism, absurdism, and literary trickery, is notoriously difficult to cinematise. The long history of on-screen Murakami adaptations begins with Kazuki Õmori’s 1982 film of Hear the Song of the Wind, and to date includes art installations, short films, and even the 2017 video game Memoranda. Until 2018, the most notable film based on Murakami’s material was Anh Hung Tran’s 2010 version of Norwegian Wood, whose Jonny Greenwood soundtrack perhaps outstrips the film itself.

Then arrived Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning, based on Barn Burning, from the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes: a deeper and more sumptuous offering than the Murakami adaptations that had come before. Only three years later came Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s magnificent Oscar-winning Drive My Car (itself inspired by several short stories from Men Without Women). Both are expert, sensual adaptations with a great deal of intertextual depth. I shall be reviewing Burning in the near future — it is retrospectively a dark, fiery inverse of many of Drive My Car’s themes.

For now, here is an analysis of Hamaguchi’s masterful Drive My Car, with a focus on therapy, intertext, and why it is such a fantastic, sumptuous adaptation of Murakami’s work. (Have a read of the plot summary for Drive my Car here — we’re getting straight into analysis!)

Drive My Car is an intelligent and sensitive film with a lot to say, but feels accessible and — crucially — unpretentious. The same goes for the best of Charlie Kaufman’s work (Eternal Sunshine as the prime example — and Synecdoche, New York as the prime counter-example.)

It is a masterful study on love, grief, and the therapeutic powers of art and human connection. The text of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is so deftly woven into the film that watching Yûsuke and his fellow actors interacting with it, being changed by it, is almost like watching a dance. Perhaps that is why the scenes of Yoon-A’s (Park Yu-Rim) communication in Korean sign language are so breathtaking: she brings a layer of intimacy beyond the ability of the spoken word.

The cast (including, of course, the titular red 1987 Saab) is impeccable. Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yûsuke is at once deeply sympathetic and often verging on the comically passive-aggressive — especially in his initial interactions with Masaki Okada’s young, impulsive pretty boy Kôshi, and his new driver Misaki (Tôko Miura, brilliantly carrying hidden depths).

The multi-lingual bonanza of Yûsuke’s dramatic productions is complemented by a dynamic range of the smaller parts, an “archipelago of lives” as Bradshaw put it. All are played to perfection: Jin Dae-yeon as Yoon-su brings an infectious warmth of expression; his tight-lipped colleague is locked into hilariously corporate speech.

Eiko Ishibashi’s score is a perfect accompaniment to Drive My Car’s expansive vistas: sparsely employed, acting almost as a meditation to each section of the film, coming to a beautiful and unsophisticated resolution as the credits roll.

The film’s premise, and the central relationship between Yûsuke and Misaki, are drawn from Murakami’s short story of the same name from Men Without Women. Other elements are derived from other stories in the same collection: Oto’s story of the schoolgirl with a former life as a lamprey is taken from Scheherazade; Kôshi’s off-screen beating of a man resulting in his death has been said to mirror the off-screen violence in Kino.

Murakami’s characters from separate stories are being made to interact with each other in the film. Just as the metamorphic character of Noboru Watanabe appears in multiple short stories within The Elephant Vanishes, the characters from separate stories in Men Without Women cross-pollinate, enrich each other, and learn more about themselves in Drive My Car. The same happens on the level of the film’s plot, between Yûsuke and Misaki in particular.

The film’s intertextuality extends beyond mere sleight of hand. The pairing of Murakami with Chekhov is quite simply a genius move. To start with, the two authors are tonally similar. The aura of melancholy which pervades all the great Russian writers has clearly influenced Murakami: his characters are often restless, wrestling with ‘how things are’ in the universe (Murakami has spoken along those lines: “If anything, I take great care not to dwell too much on the meaning of existence, its importance or its implications.”) His characters are left to deal with a reality that does not bend to them, but which, paradoxically, they can make their own. The Russian connection is often explicit: one thinks of the insomniac wife in Sleep, who begins to read and re-read Anna Karenina obsessively, or Tengo’s thought about the state of Russian literature in 1Q84.

As Drive My Car progresses, we find more and more evidence that the characters read events in their own lives through the same kind of literary lens which we as the audience apply when watching the film. This is what makes the film such a well-observed, emotionally resonant and therapeutic experience.

There are abundant articles exploring just how intricate the relationship is between Vanya’s plight and Yûsuke’s experience. And for good reason: The interplay between Vanya’s lines, Yûsuke’s practice of them in his car, and Oto’s tape-recordings of the play, is extremely rich. Over the course of the film we watch as the text of Uncle Vanya seeps into Yûsuke’s bloodstream. The more he recites Vanya’s lines in the car, in response to the lines recorded by his late wife, the more he absorbs and internalises Vanya’s emotions and outlook. (He even shares Vanya’s age of 47.)

This process comes to a head at the film’s emotional climax, set outside in the snow, nearby Misaki’s destroyed childhood home. Yûsuke breaks down in front of Misaki and truly shares his feelings for the one and only time. The outburst feels out of place until we recognise that it is as much Vanya talking as Yûsuke. He has undergone the process he earlier described to Kôshi at the bar: Chekhov’s text is “terrifying” because it “drags out the real you”. He is describing Chekhov’s text as provoking the kind of ‘call and response’ relationship that is so often examined in intertextual scholarship.

The touchstone modern reference for intertextuality is Roland Barthes, whom Kevin Dettmar employs well in his review of Drive My Car. For Barthes, every text or piece of literature is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. Read along these lines the film’s interactions with Chekhov and Murakami are not necessarily linear. That is, it is not simply that Chekhov influences Murakami’s writing as well as this film. Drive My Car absorbs the influences of both texts and has them enrich each other’s meaning, has them call and respond to each other, and has them both act as the stage on which the characters undergo therapy.

The Classics graduate writing this piece is reminded of Ovid’s Heroides, a series of fictional letters written by famous heroines to their lovers. The letters prompt a fascinating question about authority: who has real control over the meaning of the text, the writer or the reader? The writer, because they are the one actually penning the words, or the reader, because they determine whether the letter has any use? The same question can be asked about Yûsuke’s relationship with Uncle Vanya — and, more broadly, the relationship between Murakami and Chekhov in Drive My Car. Which character — or author — has agency over the other?

For us as the audience, the various ‘source texts’ of the film — Murakami’s short stories, Uncle Vanya, even Oto’s story about the schoolgirl — have their meaning transformed when the characters of Drive My Car interact with them. In this light Kôshi serves as an intertextual crossroads in the film. When police enter the theatre to arrest Kôshi for manslaughter, Kôshi is rehearsing as Vanya, firing shots at Serebryakov. Dramatic irony also abounds when Misaki drives Yûsuke and Kôshi back from rehearsals: Kôshi tells Yûsuke the end of Oto’s story about the schoolgirl, who kills an intruder to her beloved’s home, and writes a confessional note: “I killed him! I killed him! I killed him!”

Masaki Okada and Hidetoshi Nishijima in Drive My Car (2021)

So much is going on in this exchange. As well as subconsciously confessing, Kôshi is sharing the end of Oto’s story with Yûsuke — who witnessed his wife’s infidelity with Kôshi before she died. As in Murakami’s story, Yûsuke seems initially to be playing a kind of game with Kôshi, who is unaware of what Yûsuke knows, but as they bond, Yûsuke discovers a wisdom in Kôshi, who in the same scene as his ‘confession’ gives a crucial, virtually verbatim speech from the short story:

“The proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we love them. All it can do is cause us pain. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it. So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.”

How interesting that Kôshi, who expresses to Yûsuke that he feels empty and directionless, acts most clearly as the spokesperson for a point of view in the film. In a way he serves as a personification of the text of the film, speaking aloud both Chekhov’s and Murakami’s text, expressing the need for the therapeutic process. He is almost a tabula rasa character on to which these dynamics can project — which also makes him a prime candidate for the kind of theatre Yûsuke directs.

Misaki is the Sonya to Yûsuke’s Vanya: she is the same age as Yûsuke’s daughter would have been; she is the one to witness Yûsuke’s breakdown, the one with whom he ultimately connects, and with whom he shares a moment of consolation in the snow. It is no coincidence that the camera turns to Misaki reacting to the end of Uncle Vanya, with Yûsuke as Vanya being consoled by Yoon-A’s Sonya.

Misaki’s serious past trauma from her mentally unwell mother, who demanded an excellent driver out of her, is the addition to Murakami’s character that cements the theme of living through grief, finding a way to move on, which is made possible in this case through the transformative power of theatre.

On that subject, surprisingly little attention in reviews has been focused on Yoon-A, beyond noting her smooth, deliberate, captivating performance in Korean sign language. She serves as another character in the film through which the audience understands the role of art and literature in the processing of grief (the film’s central focus) and understanding of oneself. In the exquisite dinner scene at her house, she explains how her own personal tragedies led her closer to artistic expression and the value of art as therapy, laying bare what is possible for Yûsuke.

It is interesting that in Drive My Car the final words of Sonya’s closing monologue in Uncle Vanya — “We shall rest” — are left unsaid. Things are also left unsaid between Oto and Yûsuke: she does not complete the story of the schoolgirl; she wishes to speak with him the evening she dies. Her name literally means ‘Sound’: after her death she echoes throughout the film in the form of her ‘voice’ — both literal, in the tape-recordings by which Yûsuke experiences the text of Chekhov within the confines of his car, and ‘textual’, in her unfinished, sex-inspired storytelling to which both Yûsuke and Kôshi are exposed. Yûsuke’s search for closure after Oto’s death, as well as Misaki’s reconciliation with herself and her late mother, run parallel with the intertextual closure of Uncle Vanya.

Park Yu-Rim and Hidetoshi Nishijima in Drive My Car (2021)

It is difficult to describe Oto’s character without falling into a typical description of the roles of Murakami’s female characters. It is widely acknowledged that there is an unfortunate tendency in Murakami to write female characters without agency, simply providing the means for the character development of the male protagonists. There is a frequent lack of honesty about woman and their desires, and a regrettable channelling of female trauma through sexual encounters (Norwegian Wood; Kino; to an extent Kafka on the Shore). Murakami has himself acknowledged this trend, saying “It goes beyond whether they’re realistic, or come across as ‘real-life women.’ It has more to do with the roles they play.” (In this same interview Murakami’s interlocutor Mieko Kawakami picks up on the fantastic counter-example of the insomniac, Karenina-reading female protagonist in Sleep.)

Drive My Car avoids this pitfall in Murakami’s writing. It is clear in Hamaguchi’s film that the female characters are not there to advance the journeys of the male protagonists. Misaki, Yoon-A, Oto are all well-defined people with their own motivations. The sex of the film is not cynical, and indeed avoids a male gaze.

To conclude: Drive My Car plays out as a therapeutic process for all involved through the medium of theatre, intertext, and unlikely friendships. This process takes time to unfold — which is why Drive My Car is exactly the kind of film that should be as long as it is (pace Kermode). The audience is given time to digest what is happening to these characters, how they are being transformed by proximity to the multiple texts of Chekhov, Murakami, and even Oto. It is an exquisite film.

Hamaguchi is the best voice with which to close this analysis. He is clearly a close reader of the Murakami, and speaks very closely to the themes in question:

“The short story deals with acting as its theme. To act is to hold multiple identities, which is a socially accepted form of insanity, so to speak. Doing it as a job is obviously gruelling, and sometimes even causes meltdowns, but I know people who have no choice but to do it. And these people who act for a living are in fact healed by that insanity, which enables them to continue living.”