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Based on the 1987 cult novel by enigmatic Japanese scribe Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood is something of a Catcher in the Rice for all harajuku hipsters and literate westerners alike. It’s the tail of the turbulent power of love and loss as seen through the eyes of Toru Watanabe, a young student in Tokyo on the verge of manhood, and falling in love with two damaged women. By far the most widely read of all of Murakami’s works, Norwegian Wood was often put among the classic list of unfilmable books, a sprawling story of the lust and sex of the swingin’ free love 60s, with stirring sequences of richly romanticised landscape, lunatic asylums, suicides and The Beatles.
To be blunt and wrap up at the beginning (well, Japan is ahead in terms of time zones, I suppose), Norwegian Wood is a solid film, but by no means a brilliant one. While most Murakami purists will bemoan the slash and burn forensics necessary to bring a 400-page narrative to an already generous 133-minute movie, certain passages and choice conversations had to be lost in the miasma of moviegoer attention spans and bladder sizes. That said, this is decidedly not a popcorn flick, instead falling victim of the archetypal foreign film stereotypes – slow, subtitled, sparsely dialogued, and reliant on sex to give it some life.
Kenichi Matsuyama, a rising star in the land of the rising sun after his roles in the Death Note horror franchise, plays Watanabe, and nails his outré detachment as a self-imposed recluse. Moving to a Tokyo university after his best friend Kizuki kills himself, he happens upon Naoko, Kizuki’s girlfriend, and embarks upon an ill-fated romance with her. She’s hiding her own demons, severe emotional problems, and it’s not long before she’s living in an Eden-like sanitarium. Their romance continues, albeit by post and chaperoned visits, and things get a bit more complicated when Watanabe meets beatnik Midori, herself harbouring some serious daddy issues, daddio.
In being economic with the development of both relationships and almost every character, there’s a slightly disappointing flatness to Norwegian Wood. Because of this, Watanabe, for example, rather inexplicably seems able to make every woman he encounters fall madly, no pun intended, in love with him. While Matsuyama fares very well in scenes by himself, he makes for a somewhat unlikely, and unlikeable, charmer. Rinko Kikuchi also struggles as Naoko, losing most of the elemental angst that made her so magnetic in Babel. Naoko is rarely the primal force of warring emotions and inner turmoil the script wants her to be, and Midori is reduced to waiting around, looking at the phone ringing and not answering. For all we know, she’s coming up with the idea for caller id.
It is very much a filmmakers’ film, with Vietnamese-French director Tran Anh Hung creating a technical feast for the senses. Every close up or panning shot of lush Japanese forest, all dew dripped and wild, is stunning to behold (all the more so after seeing Japan so devastated in the past weeks). The score, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, is dark and dreamlike, and nods to period music are appropriate and measured. The costume work, too, is chic and mod, towing the fine line between Japan’s sense of straight-laced obedience and kooky self-expression.
But it’s not enough to tastefully tailor a story that doesn’t work, and at the end, you can’t see this Norwegian Wood for the trees.
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