It's unusual for Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (
South of the Border, West of the Sun
) to permit anyone to film his fiction; but he's allowed director Jun Ichikawa to adapt his short story "Tony Takitani" (which appeared in a 2002 issue of the New Yorker), and the resulting film is nothing short of jaw-dropping, after its quietly fastidious, less-is-more fashion.
***image2***You don't need to know the difference between
kanji
and
katakana
to surmise that the name of
Tony Takitani
's protagonist sounds… well, made-up, or at least Westernized. As it happens, though, Tony's father Shozaburo (renowned stage actor Issei Ogata, who plays both father and son), a jazz musician, decided giving his son an American name would offer him an advantage in post-war Japan. The nameless, authorial narrator (Hidetoshi Nishijima) lets us know that it had exactly the opposite effect, serving to estrange and alienate Tony even more; we watch him attain adulthood and then middle age, becoming increasingly lost in his technical illustrations.
Entrez la femme
: Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), a young woman whose carriage and clothing attract Tony's aesthetic attention; "I've never met anyone who inhabits her clothes with such obvious relish as you," he tells her, in fascinated tones which reveal just how far gone he is. Eiko marries him-whether out of pity, love or necessity we're never sure, but perhaps she ***image3***isn't sure either. Cautiously relaxing into the security of companionship, Tony has just begun to experience a reprieve of his lifelong asceticism when the third act kicks in, as it always seems to, and safety is yanked out from under him, leaving him bewildered and a thousand times lonelier than before.
How he responds to his bereavement is the film's anguished yet limpid heart; Ichikawa's visual and auditory portrayal of suffocating absence recalls (like Murakami's work at its best) Beckett in its definition of experience through negative space-a study of omission appliquéd and laced through with minute, deft instances of the quotidian. Characters speak as part of the narration, and the interweaving is light and absolutely seamless. Ichikawa's actors are, by comparison to their blunt-instrument
gaijin
counterparts, scalpels and lasers-you don't even notice that they play multiple roles. His palette is deliberately washed-out, his sets are claustrophobically cavernous, and his sound editing eliminates all extraneous noise, leaving you with a nearly unbearable, stifling sense of anomie. Scored with Ryuichi Sakamoto's clear, Satie-inflected piano lines,
Tony Takitani
is one of the most haunting films I've ever seen.
