Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman review: a Murakami movie for hardcore fans

You don’t have to know an ounce about bestselling author Haruki Murakami to enjoy the new animated film Blind Willow Sleeping WomanThe film is a reworking of his original work.

Murakami has a reputation for publishing a lot of books and having hefty page counts. His writing is dense with references to mid-20th-century pop culture, Japanese history, jazz, The Beatles minutiae, and the male sexual id, which is to say he’s both immediately entertaining and just as immediately off-putting. FIlmed adaptations of his writing, on the other hand, are often more contained and accessible — they’re ultimately stand-alone works from individual creators.

The streamers Blind Willow on a whim will get another solid example of Western adult animation, the kind that until recently couldn’t consistently find investment, even from indie studios. Blind WillowThe film sits with films such as Flee, TowerThen, AnomalisaThe film has a few things in common with last year’s, including its banality and nudity.

If you know Murakami. Blind Willow Sleeping WomanThis is a mashup that happens only once in a generation. This isn’t a Murakami movie; it’s The following are some of the ways to get in touch with us. Murakami film

Image: Zeitgeist Films

Murakami released the anthology Blind Willow Sleeping Woman in 2006, he wrote in the introduction that it was his “first real short-story collection.” That was a funny thing to say. Murakami had been publishing for two decades, including 2002’s critically adored short-story set The Aftermath of the Quake. To him, however Quake was “more like a concept album.” Blind Willow Sleeping WomanBy comparison, he captured his breadth and profundity of craft in 24 stories, written over the same number of years. There was little curation or connective tissue, and they were all written by one person. This was a collection of literature.

Blind Willow Sleeping WomanThe film with the same name from 2023 is puzzling. isn’tThe short story collection is adapted. Instead, French composer and director Pierre Földes uses it to restate its namesake’s purpose: to assemble a tasting menu of Murakami’s work for a new generation. Where the short-story collection introduced readers to the author’s ever-growing literary catalog, the film is a comparable starting point for the queue of Murakami film adaptations spread across your favorite streaming services.

The film borrows heavily from Murakami’s other works, even though it takes its name. The two men at the film’s center come from two separate stories in The Aftermath of the Quake: “UFO in Kushiro” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.” In the former, 30-something salesman Komura volunteers to deliver a mysterious package after his wife disappears. A meek, middle-aged, office worker named Katagiri is given the task by a human sized frog of saving Tokyo by fighting off a giant worm. (This premise will sound familiar to fans of Japanese storytelling or anyone who’s seen the recently released Makoto Shinkai film Suzume.)

Földes peppers the parallel journeys with stories from Blind Willow Sleeping Woman — like when a conversation evolves into a summary of that collection’s titular short. But more surprisingly, Foldes goes much further into Murakami’s bibliography, merging shorts, novels, and everything in between.

Image: Zeitgeist Films

Image: Zeitgeist Films

This great mashing-together of prose can be specific and literal — for instance, when Komura, searching for his lost cat, stumbles into the world of The Wind-Up Bird ChronicleThen, they stay for quite a while. Földes — who wrote and directed the film, along with contributing in art direction, the sound department, the score, and voicing the Frog — allows his characters to drift from one tale to the other and back. The effect is like having Murakami’s stories summarized by someone who consumed all of them decades ago, and now can’t quite remember what differentiated one story from another.

When this method works, which it often does, Földes helps the audience see how Murakami’s habits complement each other, how their narrative rhythms echo across decades of writing. In Murakami’s universe, anxious or depressed characters can only relax at nightfall, when the world is sleeping and the clock seems to slow down. They always drink a cold, crisp beer.

Földes also tunes into Murakami’s love of liminal spaces. Transparent ghosts live their daily lives in the movie. Maybe they’re dead from a recent natural disaster, unaware of their fate, unconsciously repeating their days ad nauseam. Or maybe they’re the living, doing the exact same thing. Maybe there’s no difference. And just like a good Murakami story, Földes punctuates this existential anxiety with speckles of the beautiful and profound, like two unlikely friends lounging in an abandoned lot, listening to classical music on the radio as thunderstorms roll in.

Sometimes, however, the stories don’t come together. They may come together, but not always well. This film has moments that feel like parodies of Murakami. They are filled with lost cats, talking dogs, an obsession with the point where reality and surrealism meet and men who can’t seem to get their act together.

Image: Zeitgeist Films

Image: Zeitgeist Films

We get lines like two co-workers chatting at a bar: “Do you fuck her? […] Once in a while a wife needs a good fuck.” We see flashes of sexual fantasy devolve in an instant to sexual violence. Murakami’s willingness to crash eroticism into unfettered male sexual frustration positioned him as a bold literary voice. These habits are becoming a crutch for his writing. Someone who’s never encountered that tendency by reading him may find the idea’s expression here fresher than longtime readers weighed down with the baggage of his repetition.

The final result is watching one talented artist try to capture another one’s soul, like trying to catch a swarm of gnats with a net. Some are caught. Many flit through the small holes.

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman The fourth Murakami adaptation in the last five years. Two of those films — BurningThe following are some examples of how to get started: Drive My Car — will be remembered as some of the best films of the decade. They use the author’s text as a launching pad and reach for something as good, if not greater, than their source material.

But Földes instead feels like he’s aiming to go nowhere in particular. He relishes Murakami’s work, and hopes you will too. We hear a lot of critical discourse these days about “movies made for fans.” But here is a movie made by a fan, an artist given the freedom to explore and mend and even lightly critique a collection of writing that seems to haunt him like all those ghosts walking the streets — not a threat, but never going away. It’s a bleakly beautiful (or beautifully bleak) world Földes has created, from his writing and direction to his character design and score. It’s the work of a man obsessed with art.

Like the men at the center of its story, the movie can’t help but ask: Why look for a new home when you like the one you have?

Blind Willow Sleeping WomanMakes its American debut at New York’s Film Forum14 April.