Starring Issey Ogata and Rie Miyazawa. Directed by Jun Ichikawa. In Japanese with English subtitles.

In the parallel worlds of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the magic happens between the lines. His spartan lyricism, rendered in deceptively plain and airy prose, tends to shade without warning into deep, dizzying melancholy. It's hard to fully grasp the chemistry of this process, and presumably harder still to transpose it to another medium. Last year's Complicité stage production of The Elephant Vanishes was a triumph of outside-the-box adaptation that didn't so much capture as intensify the Murakami mood (its brash poignancy, if anything, recalled the novelist's more demonstrative cinematic cousin, Wong Kar-wai). Not counting a few stray shorts, film versions of Murakami have been non- existent (apparently he doesn't permit them). For this rare attempt, director Jun Ichikawa smartly opts for a distilled minimalism, starting with his choice of source material: a mere wisp of a short story called "Tony Takitani" (which first appeared in English in The New Yorker three years ago).

Both protagonist and story are barely there, but "Takitani" is Murakami in miniature, a brief, precise inventory of the novelist's themes: cosmic loneliness, the shadow of mortality, jazz, the coincidence of materialist abundance and spiritual barrenness. Ichikawa retains a portion of the text as voice-over. Given a Western name by his trombonist father (the suggestion of an American friend and the cause of some hostility in post-war Japan), the title character also inherits, as if by genetics, a lifelong burden of solitude. Growing up motherless and self-sufficient, he becomes an illustrator, specializing in meticulous sketches of machines. In early middle age, Tony (Issey Ogata) falls for and marries the much younger Eiko (Rie Miyazawa). Notwithstanding her expensive couture habit-before long, her racks of designer wear have taken over an entire room-the newlyweds enjoy a companionable relationship, until Eiko's bid to restrain her shopaholic tendencies results in a fatal accident. This union, an idyll so fleeting and so alien to everything Tony had known as to be almost illusory, neatly bisects the film. Before Eiko, Tony fails to recognize how alone he is; after her death, he's forced to confront the possibility that loneliness may be his natural condition. (Ogata is a remarkably versatile stage actor who played the Japanese business associate in Edward Yang's Yi Yi and Emperor Hirohito in Alexander Sokurov's The Sun, and his performance here is wondrously subtle.) Tony first attempts to fill the void by hiring a secretary (also played by Miyazawa) with identical measurements as Eiko to wear her outfits while on the job. Soon enough, he changes his mind and disposes of her wardrobe-in the most haunting shot, Tony lies alone in her dressing room, empty and seeming now like his mausoleum (it echoes an earlier shot of his father, also played by Ogata, in a Chinese prison cell in the 1940s).

Shot in a wan, neutral palette that emphasizes its protagonist's muted desolation, Ichikawa's film is, in more ways than one, a model of economy: The elder Takitani's Shanghai stint is conveyed in a series of sepia stills; most of the interiors utilize a single, repeatedly re-dressed set. Languid, left-to-right tracking shots, one image wiping into the next, give the impression of a picture book's slowly turned pages. Ryuichi Sakamoto's spare, insinuating piano score conjures an atmosphere of dreamlike suspension, as does the low-key voice-over, which at times trails off, only to be picked up by the characters. Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.

Notes from Jun Ichikawa

Director of TONY TAKITANI
I belong to the same generation as Haruki Murakami and consequently have read his novels since his debut. The themes of loss and solitude that recur in his literature have great resonance for me as one of a generation that experienced both the excitement of the late sixties, and the sadness of their inevitable end. Murakami's "TONY TAKITANI", a short novel published over a decade ago, is a fable of isolation. This isolation carries a genetic quality, passed through generations and is something that can't be undone alone.
When I adapted the piece for film, I realized that the idiosyncratic source material meant that the emotions of the characters could not be easily read by the viewer. Therefore I treated the characters in a symbolic manner to convey the sense that they are creatures of the imagination. Paradoxically, I also wanted the audience to feel familiar with them, so I used well-known actors, Issey Ogata and Miyazawa Rie in two roles.

I have made films based on novels before, but I knew that I could not express the particular tenor of this one, which is both lucid and mild, by taking my usual naturalistic approach. Therefore, I used the narrator as a distancing tool. I also felt that the low tone of his voice would suit the atmosphere. Finally the narrator allowed me to express parts of the narrative without damaging the serenity of the text or forcing the visual aspect of the movie to be too story-bound.

In my efforts to evoke Murakami's world, which is solid, but also floating a few centimetres above reality, I found myself using various strategies. I composed shots with blank spaces, like the paintings of Edward Hopper. I built a simple theatre stage for the shoots and used the same stage for most of the movie, only altering the angles and dressing. I used very few actors and in fact, asked the leads to play two roles each. I decolorized the print to mute the shades. The result is extremely different from my previous films, with a very strange texture. My hope is that the experience will be a very new one for the audience of "TONY TAKITANI".

Jun Ichikawa - Director and Screenwriter

After graduating from Harajuku School and then Art School Jun Ichikawa started work for an advertising company, gradually working up to become a director. He made a name for himself by directing distinguished and well known commercials, culminating in the Grand Prize at the Cannes International Advertising festival in 1985; a prize which he went on to win for 3 successive years in a row. Very soon after this he directed his first feature film "Bu Su" in 1987.

Haruki Murakami - Author

Born in Kyoto in 1949, Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe and graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) won him the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers. This novel, together with Pinball 1973 (1980) and The Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which got him the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers, form The Trilogy of the Rat. He is also the author of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987), Dance, Dance, Dance (1988), South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), After the Quake (2000), and Kafka On the Shore (2002). Murakami spent four years in the United States in early 1990's where he taught at Princeton and wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994). This book won him the Yomiuri Literary Prize. After the Hanshin earthquake and the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995 Murakami returned to Japan and wrote his first non-fiction Underground (1997). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages worldwide. To date, Tony Takitani is the only feature film adaptation of his work Murakami has sanctioned.