While I enjoyed the film adaptation of Norwegian Wood, I do think the changes (or rather, the omission of sequences in the book) lead to different characterizations and overall atmosphere of the story. The book goes into detail about Watanabe’s opinions and observations of the world around him, and while the film also does the same, because we infrequently hear his inner perspective, the audience feels more detached from the plot line and the characters. He exists more as an audience stand-in than a full fleshed character in his own right, dealing with complicated feelings of grief and morality. One character that I really took issue with the portrayal of is Midori. I think the actress did a great job representing her in tone, but getting rid of so much of her scenes in the writing diluted her instability and made her seem more “quirky” than the “unstable” traits we see in the book. No longer do we see her look on to the neighbor’s fire, the long pathological lie about her father (it is just briefly mentioned), the note she writes to Watanabe about not noticing her haircut— so much of her agency is ripped away instead for a passivity that seems uncharacteristic of book Midori.
I think another downfall of adapting to the film is the need to condense a lot of the information— to the point where the pacing no longer stands out. One of the more interesting parts of Norwegian Wood (the book) to me was the way the timing in the story would fluctuate between months going by in seconds to spending forever in a moment. Because of the shorter runtime (in comparison to the book), the changes in tempo for the plot are unnoticeable, as everything passes relatively quickly. When reading, I was struck by how long of the book was devoted to the night Reiko talked to Watanabe about her personal story, and the movie itself completely glosses over it. That being said, I do think that the material was hard to adapt so the effort seemed to have been made in good faith.
Maya Thiart
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