Colin Marshall

Chan is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982)

Jo, a middle-aged American-born Chinese ("ABC") cab driver and tinkerer, goes in with his nephew Steve to buy a new taxi license. They've found a bargain-priced one on the gray market, but they have to go through recent immigrant Chan Hung to get it. After they entrust him with their total savings of four grand, Chan, yes, goes missing. In search of the lost fresh-off-the-boater ("FOB"), Jo and Steve pound the pavement of San Francisco's Chinatown talking to everyone who knew Chan: cooks, grad students, businessmen, politicians, professors, his wife. But it soon emerges that all of these friends and acquaintances seem to be describing a different person. A fatal scuffle at a parade adds even more confusion to the proceedings.

* * *

This movie is so good. It's good in the way that any 16mm, black-and-white, unpaid-actored, no-license-to-shoot movie is good when it's made by a bunch of people who really care about the project and helmed by a director with cinematic skill to burn. It makes me wonder when, exactly, Wayne Wang took a wrong career turn — and why. This and Smoke — and maybe Chinese Box, which I haven't seen but which seemed good when Jeremy Irons talked to Charlie Rose about it — rocket him straight to the top one percent of filmmakers, to be sure. But Anywhere But Here? Maid in Manhattan? Last Holiday? Perhaps the real Wayne Wang is dead, replaced by an automaton: it walks like a man, yet it makes Because of Winn-Dixie. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers looks neat, though; hope springs eternal.

The appropriate clichés would be to call Chan is Missing "immediate", or maybe "raw", which, though tired, do get at the central reality of the film as well as the energy with which it conveys that reality. When Jo and Steve walk down the street plotting their next move, they're walking down actual Chinatown streets while actual Chinatown people — no hired extras here — pass by. The individuals they visit aren't actors; they're real members of the Asian-American community that Wang and his theater troupe buddies happened to know. They're not reciting lines; they're doing improv. That "Samurai Night Fever" t-shirt is real. That bad comb-over is real. And when a crowd of dancing old Filipinos shows up, boy howdy, you can rest assured that they're real.

But as much as I love reality, reality isn't enough; if it were, Andy Warhol's Empire would be the pinnacle of cinematic experience. I also happen to hold aesthetics near and dear to my heart, but a well-expressed aesthetic sensibility and nothing else doesn't do it for me either. The best films — hell, the best art of any kind — combine verisimilitude and aesthetics. "Real" and "stylized" are, to my mind, not mutually exclusive descriptors. Chan is Missing is real, and it's also stylized.

It's all the more impressive that Wang and co. achieve a distinctive look, feel and mood with severely limited resources. They may be using a 16mm camera and black-and-white film, but they wring that gear for beauty for all it's worth. San Francisco is not a non-photographed-to-death city, but I feel like this film gives a few views of it that I've never seen before, or at least have never been presented as strikingly before. (If you don't believe me, check out the shot with Jo's car parked below the Golden Gate. I just dare you to tell me that's not stunning. If you try, I will laugh.) With its style, the movie establishes a distinctive mood, and through it lets the viewer catch a glimpse of a one-of-a-kind place and one of its its even one'er-of-a-kind subcultures.

Another plausible, if broad metric of quality film is to what extent it makes the viewer want to make a movie of their own. I'd be shocked — shocked, I tell you — if Chan is Missing hasn't inspired at least one or two generations of aspiring auteurs to take up the camera, whether or not they've got money, filmmaking experience, cordoned-off locations or professional actors. Among near-zero-budget projects, it's in a class above Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi and Kevin Smith's Clerks in that it really embraces what it is — "stands on its own two feet", to whip out another cliché. It's more in the league where you'd find Charles Burnett's early pictures; they're not just indicative of potential filmmaking skill; they're realized filmmaking skill.

* * *

15. Realism of material and aesthetic stylization can and should be combined. Keeping the subject matter of a work true to life is important. Crafting a work with a solid, expressive sense of aesthetics is also important. But one isn't much without the other! Realism absent aesthetics can be bland can formless, while aesthetics absent realism can be false and empty. Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing, Tim Roth's The War Zone and most of Abbas Kiarostami's films and Haruki Murakami's novels do this especially well.

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Two grandparents, Shukichi and Tomi, travel from their home in sleepy seaside Onomichi to the metropolis of 1950s Tokyo to visit their children. But in their hustle to live modern life and keep up with the Joneses — or whatever the Japanese equivalent of the Joneses are; maybe the Satous — the kids don't have much time to spend with the 'rents. Only Noriko, the long-suffering widow of the son they lost in World War II, goes out of her way to entertain them.

* * *

Tokyo Story often gets held up as Ozu's finest, but it also seems like fodder for a certain stripe of filmgoer, the one that eschews movies too saturated and with foreign customs and culture as unrelatable. Why, they might ask, would a 23-year-old white American guy in 2008 care about the family dynamics of a bunch of midcentury Japanese people? I mean, those grandparents must have been born in the 1880s! And what could westernization possibly mean to viewers who are themselves western? I'm not sure I have a good answer explaining why, as a 23-year-old white American guy in 2008, I neverthess found the film gripping. I usually whip out that one Terence quote, but by this point friends respond to that by socking me in the gut.

Still, I don't think it matters all that much to what extent the viewer can relate to the story's bemused grandparents, harried children and bratty grandchildren. From what I've seen, Ozu's stuff works on a purely aesthetic level, and Tokyo Story's no exception. It's no mistake that the man is revered by cinephiles. Even when shooting simple things — and simple things are nearly always what he shoots — he manages to make whatever's onscreen utterly fascinating. Ozu's work tends to take place in simple rooms in simple houses in simple neighborhoods populated by normal characters, but — and I make no claim of having the words to accurately describe this phenomenon in any kind of fine-grained way — he makes you feel like you — you, personally — are there. Maybe it's his low-height camera placement. Maybe it's his well-controlled pacing. Maybe it's his bold black-and-white photography. But to watch an Ozu film is, experientally, very much like being in an Ozu film.

Just as Ozu's works stay aesthetically within the ordinary — the mundane, practically — and imbue the material with stark, fascinating beauty, they also remain well within the domain of typical human affairs. And yet. This links up conveniently with a line of thinking I've been pursuing in recent weeks. Almost any clod can make something compelling out of outlandish people, places, things or events; we'll be interested in that sort of thing, at least momentarily, simply because it's alien to our experience. But it takes an especially skillful creator to make a beautiful work out of what isn't alien to our experience, and it takes an even more skillful one to sustain that at length. At 136 minutes, Tokyo Story isn't particularly long, but damn, does Ozu ever sustain it — whatever it is — throughout.

Shamefully, I've only seen about a third of Ozu's filmography. Time to rectify that. Then — and this may sound like a tall order, but I'm up to it — it'll be time to watch the oeuvres of all the directors that profess to be strongly influenced by Ozu. Hsiao-Hsien Hou's up first, then I'll move on to the (very recently departed) Jun Ichikawa. Then I'll take on the next thousand or so.

Blue Seed (Jun Kamiya and Yuzo Takada, 1994-1995)

The aragami, a race of gigantic plantlike monsters straight from Japanese myth, suddenly appear out of nowhere to terrorize Tokyo and cause some serious property damage. Thus the Terrestrial Administration Center, a below-board, somewhat ragtag government agency charged with the defense against and prevention of aragami attacks, finally gets to see some action. They race to the scene when Momiji Fujimiya, a fifteen-year-old girl living in rural nowheresville, one day finds herself pursued by a particularly nasty, particularly tentacled aragami. When the TAC intervenes, Momiji learns of her place in the whole epic human-aragami conflict: as the modern-day descendant of the Princess Kushinada (another actual entity from J-myth), she can, if she dies, destroy all aragami and thus relieve her country of its monster problem. If the aragami kill her, however, they'll live to convert Japan into a verdant all-aragami homeland at the behest of the god Susano-o (J-myth).

So Momiji joins the TAC, eager to help the team fight the aragami. An angsty half-aragami loner named Kusanagi shows up and allies himself with their cause as well, hating as he does the hideous creatures that made him the superpowered outcast he is. But will he reciprocate Momiji's crush on him?

* * *

I loved Blue Seed as a 12-year-old. After picking up the current issue of V. Max — yes, V. Max — at the comic book shop, I pored over the feature on Blue Seed, memorizing every episode synopsis, character description and screenshot through sheer frequency of exposure. "The stage is set for mythology and science to clash in Tokyo," I believe the cover read. How cool was that?

But these were the days when anime meant $24.95 subtitled VHS ($19.99 dubbed, but that was for losers), which, on my $5-a-week allowance, proved untenable, even with stocked-up Suncoast Movie Company coupons clipped out of Animerica. So I was stuck making trips to Hollywood video every time I wanted and could pay for the rental of a two- or three-episode tape, which would almost invariably be dubbed. Eventually, I'd seen all the tapes that had been released to that point — covering eight or so episodes of the total 26 — and, while waiting for the next one, forgot I was waiting for the next one.

Now, a dozen years older and with comparatively infinite resources at my disposal, I've finally done a complete watch-through of Blue Seed, partially because I was curious to see how it would hold up, partially because I genuinely wanted to learn how things turned out for the characters, and partially because I hate not tying up loose ends. The first few episodes brought back childhood memories, but soon I was in new cultural territory, so I began watching it with the same cruel, objective eye with which I'd view anything else.

After trying Blue Seed as a kid, I went on halfheartedly to a few more anime series. The last ones I saw before giving the stuff up were Trigun (enh) and Cowboy Bebop (enh, especially that soundtrack that everyone loves). I then ran scared from anime, fearing that I would turn into the larger-than-I-expected crowd of the form's geeks that I'd only recently realized existed. (Before, save for friends to whom I introduced it, I was the only anime-viewer I knew.)

Today, I'm comfortable enough with who I've become that I can watch as much anime as I want without gazing into an abyss of social maladjustment — kinda like the guys who are so "comfortable with their heterosexuality" that they can flip on the gay porn from time to time, no biggie — but I can no longer claim to be well-versed in its world. That said, Blue Seed strikes me as the first or second cousin of a great series; were I some kind of anime professor, I'd assign it a low B or high B-minus and cite its frustrating failure to live up to displayed potential. Then I'd slowly shake my head in an avuncularly disappointed way.

To be sure, the series' main conceit is cool: I like the idea of grounding mythological figures in modern-day science, especially since mythology by itself doesn't exactly do it for me. And this isn't the first story in which Susano-o returns to abolish humanity and reclaim Japan for the plants, so injecting a bit of empiricism seems like just the ticket. But the show can't commit to it! There are nods toward the plant-based aragami's photosynthesis and whatnot — I'd have liked more mentions of vacuoles — but much of what the TAC's science lady says sounds suspiciously biobabble-y.

The same goes for many of the themes: they seem to have some substance upon introduction, but every time they're about to be explored, the narrative pulls away. As the Kushinada, Momiji lives under the threat that an aragami could pop up any time and snatch her away with its hideous tentacles, talons, pincers or whatever. That would be an incredibly scary position to be in, especially when you realize that your entire country will want you dead as well when they find out that killing you will end their monster trouble. The bulwark between you and death is thin indeed. Is this explored? Not really. Momiji's a lot more concerned with whether Kusanagi's willing to go on a date with her.

Midway through, the show becomes, to an extent, about Japanese national identity. Kunikida, the taciturn, middle-aged, Amish-bearded (and corny-pun-making) director of the TAC, harbors doubts about whether the Japan of the present is really a Japan worth saving from vegetal takeover. Is this explored? Not really. This theme and others invariably get thrown to the curb when, surprise surprise, another arigami smashes out from under the pavement and the TAC has to burn rubber to go gun it down. The finale is a bit of a Grinch Who Stole Christmas riff on Japanese heritage and custom, but there were bolder choices to be made.

Blue Seed has a lot to work with, materially speaking, but it's ultimately badly hampered by being a television series, which makes the show a monster-of-the-week feature before it can be anything else. I do respect the that the series' creators could come up with an entirely new aragami for each week — they're definitely not clones — but I don't respect how almost all the battles come down to someone "unexpectedly" jumping in at the very last second to save whoever's in critical danger. Two whole characters seem to exist solely for that purpose. I'm thinking the concept would have worked a whole lot better as a movie, which would also have conveniently neutralized the producers' tendency to use flashbacks to the previous episode.

So it's a good series, but not a great series. Bubblegum Crisis, which I will re-watch next, is a great series. Or at least that's what I thought as a teenager.

Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)

When World War II ends, dissolute jazz trumpeter and prisoner of war Shozaburo Takitani gains his freedom and fathers a kid. Foreseeing America's influence on his country, he names his sire Tony. The opposite of his gregarious father, the reserved Tony Takitani grows up keeping his distance from the social unrest instigated by his generation, preferring to quietly hone his ability to draw machines. Finding success as a technical illustrator, Tony meets a woman in the course of his work with whom he's captivated, chiefly by her ultra-refined sense of dress. Despite a fifteen-year age difference, he decides he must marry Eiko as soon as possible; doing so ameliorates the loneliness that's plagued him throughout life.

However, Eiko's addiction to clothes strains the house's available space to the breaking point, so Tony lays down the law: no more articles of clothing until you get rid of some of the old ones. Trying to comply, she returns a recent purchase, but at a stoplight on the way back finds she can't resist the pull of the item's color, texture and craftsmanship. Pulling an impulsive U-turn to retrieve the garment, she dies in an auto wreck. Lonely again, Tony puts out a want ad for an assistant with his wife's measurements, hoping that whoever he hires will be able to wear the late Eiko's many, many clothes and ease Tony into the fact that she's gone, she's gone, oh he — he's gotta learn how to face it, she's gone.

* * *

Tony Takitani is both one of the best and one of the most faithful adaptations of a short story I've seen. It's based on the eponymous 1990 tale from Haruki Murakami's collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and keeping with my theory that the best Murakami is the least surreal Murakami, it was also my favorite of the bunch. Actually, the stories in that book, rearranged in order of my personal preference, support the theory pretty solidly. And so my data collection continues.

Both "Tony Takitani" and Tony Takitani are stripped-down showcases of what Murakami does best. First, they're both feet-on-the-ground realistic. Second, they're small-scale: so small scale, in fact, that the film gets by with two — count 'em, two — actors and a handful of extras. Third, they revolve around two ur-Murakami characters: the solitary guy with his solitary pursuits who was born shortly after the war, and the strikingly well-clothed woman who's suddenly snatched away from that solitary guy. They're archetypes on which he's leaned very heavily for the last few decades — and, having read over one Murakami book per week for the last few weeks, their presence in each story couldn't jump out at me more clearly — but they seem to work for him, so why not lean and lean and lean?

The original story, then, is just Murakami doing his thing in the purest form imaginable, and for me it doesn't get much better than that. In the film, Ichikawa wisely sticks closely to the source material; I don't have the text around, but I'm almost positive that most of the lines come verbatim from the story. There's third-person narration, as in the story, and most of the fairly impressively composed visuals (especially considering the production's tiny scale) serve essentially as moving illustrations. I don't know what to make of the touch that certain lines of narration are delivered by the characters themselves — not just their dialogue, but the narration that comments upon their own affairs — but it's used just sparingly enough to stay on the "charming" side of the line.

I'm put in an awkward position, ultimately: this is a film that I very much enjoy and would recommend on the basis of its beauty and simplicity, but I'm not sure it justifies its existence. In the final analysis, the movie more or less duplicates what Murakami did in prose, adds visuals and music — and to be sure, Ryuichi Sakamoto's moodily appropriate score that plays like one continuous piece is a welcome feature no book could provide — but cuts a bit of character development and a lot of language. So it's a wash, but by all means a wash one should watch, superior to the average film and far superior to the average adaptation.

(Neato fact: Murakami was inspired to write "Tony Takitani" after buying a shirt bearing that name at a Honolulu garage sale. Turns out the real Takitani was a member of the Hawaii state legislature, and he had a bunch of campaign wear printed up in the mid-80s. Personally, I think the shirt looks cool. If you happen to have one in your possession, I'll lay down a few PayPal bucks to take it off your hands. I wear a small, but could maybe be talked into a medium if the price is right.)

The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

Decorated Korean War veteran Captain Bennett Marco returns to the United States only to begin having bizarre nightmares of a Communist brainwashing session of his entire infantry patrol where one soldier, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, is hypnotized and ordered to plug two of the boys everyone thinks died in combat. When Marco learns that the other surviving members of the patrol have the same brand of night terrors, he digs some dirt and discovers that Shaw has been made into a commie sleeper agent meant to assassinate the presidential candidate who isn't a secret communist. The candidate who is a secret communist also happens to be Shaw's McCarthy clone stepfather, who's married to Shaw's wildly domineering mother, who herself is part of the conspiracy but is also conspiring against the conspirators. (And that's my third rewrite of the premise.)

* * *

First off, why don't movies have posters like The Manchurian Candidate's any more?

I don't know when the movie poster industry abandoned every art form but photography (and photoshopography), but boy, was that ever a turn for the worse. It's not that I long for Frank Frazetta, Drew Struzan or Boris Vallejo to pick up their brushes and start doing that eerie pseudo-photorealistic thing again, and it's certainly not that I long for a return to that exaggeratedly goofy style that Grandma's Boy parodied and/or tried to kick-start. Why, I ask — and this is a question I ask about many pieces of art — do they have to be so figurative? Whatever happened to abstraction? Abstraction's pretty cool. Stylization's no slouch, either. It's all a damn sight better than photos of main characters.

The poster is one of the few elements of this film that hasn't already been talked to death — 's why I bring it up. The Manchurian Candiate has become such an well-known pillar of The American Canon that I'm hesitant to write much about it, other than to point out that it still feels fresh enough not to seem like a pillar of The American Canon. If the AFI has done nothing else for us — and it hasn't — it's been to pour down a thick layer of forced hushed reverence on an entire class of films. Take their "100 Years... 100 Movies" list: who among us can approach for the first time the likes of Casablanca, The Godfather or On the Waterfront sans that soggy, crippling mixture of inflated expectation and pre-emptive incomprehension?

Fortunately, The Manchurian Candidate plays less like a museum piece than a really cool period piece, except that it's actually from the time period it's portraying. It's both a release from 1962 and a loving tribute to 1962, if that makes any sense. Plus, it feels more than a bit like a warmup for the Alan Pakula American conspiracy pictures that would show up in the following decade. Since the movie so transcends its time period, it's ironic that a remake came along in 2004 (but set "in the dystopic near-future of 2008"). I mean... why? The original is practically its own remake, and besides, the very title doesn't even make sense in a modern-day setting. I haven't seen the Jonathan Demme version, but I fear the chance to update the film was seized as a chance to make some kind of statement about the living hell that supposedly is America today. That's been happening quite a bit with Cold War films lately, I've noticed. "So yeah, that was a good flick in its day," I picture the execs saying, "but shouldn't we re-animate its corpse so's we can rag on Dick Cheney?"

South of the Border, West of the Sun (Haruki Murakami, 1992)

Hajime, a 12-year-old boy from the suburbs, befriends Shimamoto, a lonely girl with a lame leg who transfers into his class. The two kids are each other's only companions until Hajime's family relocates to a new neighborhood: he feels funny about going out of his way to visit her, so he stops. The years pass. Hajime dates a girl in high school but messes her up permanently by doing her cousin pretty much nonstop, then whiles away most of his twenties copyediting at a textbook firm, then marries a woman he meets at an inn while ducking out of the rain, then, with capital more or less handed to him by his wife's dad, opens a series of swank jazz bars in Tokyo. He's his own boss, he's got a couple of daughters, he swims every day — life's decent.

But suddenly, of all the jazz joints in the world, Shimamoto has to walk into Hajime's. She's done the whole duckling-to-swan thing, including having undergone a surgical procedure to correct the dragging leg. He's captivated once again, ready to throw it all away to run off with his childhood companion. One problem is that she's beautiful, sure, but also kind of weird: she speaks cryptically even by Murakami standards, appears and disappears erratically, and will reveal nothing — but nothing — about her own life. Still, Hajime's ready to take the plunge, though it grows clearer and clearer that he's entering way uncharted territory as Shimamoto starts displaying eerie, self-destructive thoughts and behavior.

* * *

At 213 undersized pages, this is a short book, but not a small one. It's also one of Murakami's lesser-known efforts, which surprises me because, having read five of the man's novels — the others being Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — this is easily the best yet. I've noted before what a shame it is that Murakami generally works in the genre of magic realism, since I like him for his realism and only barely tolerate his magic. Prior to reading South of the Border, Norwegian Wood had been my favorite book of his, since it's 100% realism, 0% magic. This one operates on a very similar ratio, but it's a more mature, streamlined work; where the earlier book worked well as a portrait of the artist as a young man, the later benefits from additional wisdom of years on the part of both the author (despite only five years coming between the releases) and characters alike.

I've also noted before that Murakami works with a propriatery set of types, and this is no departure. Hajime is another male feckless loner protagonist in the vein of Wind-Up Bird's Toru Okada, Norwegian Wood's Toru Watanabe and Kafka's Kafka Tamura, trying to maintain his isolated routines while letting life carry him where it may. Shimamoto handles the dual roles of the out-of-nowhere well-dressed female, like Wind-Up Bird's Nutmeg Akasaka and Kafka's Miss Saeki, and the unreachable woman closed off within herself, like Norwegian Wood's Naoko and Wind-Up Bird's Kumiko. As usual, the guy feels directionless until challenged by a girl with whom he can't truly connect, but in this book he's got it even worse: he already did connect deeply with her in childhood, and he could've maintained that if not for his own laziness. That's gotta hurt.

It's hard to say whether Murakami men are hapless victims of fate or whether they make their own beds with carelessness and thus have to lay in them. None, thus far, have been immoral guys, or even amoral guys; I genuinely like Toru, Kafka, the other Toru, Hajime, etc. But even I can see that, with a bit more conscientiousness, they wouldn't get into half the trouble they do. And it's not as if they're roaming across the country fathering illegitimate kids and knocking over convenience stores; the worst things Hajime does all come from acting on uncontrollable mutual attractions, first to his girlfriend's cousin and then to the thirtysomething Shimamoto. Oh, and he mentions offhand that, sure, he's had a couple girls on the side while his wife's been pregnant, but who doesn't, right?

From this description, I suppose Hajime's starting to look like a bit of a sex maniac. Or — and this is a definite possibility — maybe he's normal and I'm the reverse of a sex maniac, whatever that is. One way to approach the character would be to condemn his inability to keep his pants on, but I don't think that plays. He talks of experiencing uncontrollable attractions. Key word: uncontrollable. I don't think it's intended as meaningless filler, especially since uncontrollable attraction is a theme Murakami whips out with some frequency. But come to think of it, most of the developments in Hajime's life don't seem to be products of his own agency: his one real decision is the one between his wife, kids and jazz bars or his long-lost Shimamoto, and even when he makes it, forces outside his control still dick around with him, seemingly trying to push him back to square one.

And while we're on the subject, I'm often surprised by how much sex Murakami manages to work into his stories. It's not as if he desperately piles it on like some kind of frustrated fanfiction writer, but his flat tone and focus on inanimate details lead me away from expecting it. But why? If anything, he's just reflecting standard human experience; if human experience has a universal, sex is surely it. What Murakami's use of sex reveals to me is more that sex in other stories is conspicuous by its absence. If you really want to convey human lives with anything approaching verisimilitude, you'll need to incorporate sex in fairly healthy doses. So why do so many stories think they can get away with just glossing over it? Why do they even try?

Coital escapades and lack of ambition aside, I'm sympathetic to most of the sensibilities of the Murakami man. Sometimes when he's describing an element of one their mindsets or worldviews, I think, damn, I've felt that. While I realize that that's one of the primary draws of the novel form, you must understand that I don't often experience it; I've almost never been able to identify with characters I've been told I should identify with, and if I need to drag out the Holden Caulfield example again, I will. South of the Border gave me a handful of I've-felt-that moments, and they were all striking. Consider, first, Hajime's ruminations on his own taste in women, something I think about quite often:

The first girl I ever slept with was an only child. Like [girlfriend] Izumi, she wasn't exactly the type to turn any heads; most people would hardly notice her. Still, the first time I laid eyes on her, it was as if I were walking down the road one afternoon and a silent bolt of lightning struck me smack in the head. No ifs, ands or buts — I was hooked.

With a very few exceptions, your typical beautiful women don't turn me on. Sometimes I'll be walking down the street and a friend will nudge me and say, "Wow! Did you get a load of that girl?" But strangely enough, I can't recall a thing about this supposed knockout. And gorgeous actresses or models don't do a thing for me. I don't know why, but there it is. For me the boundary dividing the real world and the world of dreams has always been vague, and whenever infatuation raised its almighty head, even during my early teens, a beautiful face wasn't enough to get my engines started.

Of course, the joy of finding that someone else knows is counterbalanced by the fact that that someone articulated the idea better than I ever will, but hey, small price to pay. Similarly, here's Murakami-via-Hajime on the intrinsic rewards of one's own enterprise:

What I liked best was seeing ideas that had sprung up inside my head materialize into something real. I even threw in my two cents' worth regarding the menu. Surprisingly, I wasn't half bad at this kind of work. I loved the process of starting from scratch, creating something, seeing it through till it was absolutely perfect. It was my bar, my own little world. Think you could find this kind of happiness proofreading school textbooks? No way.

When he can write real life that well, I wonder why Murakami thinks he ever has to work in extra-dimensional wells, psychic sisters, talking cats and mystical Colonel Sanderses. Perhaps we'll never know.

With at least 2000 pages of Murakami novels and short stories under my belt thus far, I can begin to develop a grand theory of Murakami goodness. My current hypothesis is this: the smaller the cast of characters and the fewer the number of magic and/or surreal elements, the better the book. My data set roughly supports this, since I rank the novels as follows:

1. South of the Border, West of the Sun (~4 important characters, barely anything fantastical)
2. Norwegian Wood (~4 important characters, nothing fantastical)
3. After Dark (~3 important characters, half fantastical)
4. Kafka on the Shore (~7 important characters, at least half fantastical)
5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (>8 important characters, majority fantastical)

But I won't be too hasty, since I still have seven data points to go. If there's one thing I want to avoid becoming, it's a slave to theory.

The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)

Documentarian Errol Morris interviewed former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara for an episode of his television series First Person. Seeing that the man could give him much more than an hour of compelling conversation, Morris decided instead to make a feature-length documentary of McNamara talking: talking about his childhood of academic excellence, talking about his time at the helm of the then-great Ford, talking about his involvement in Word War II's Tokyo firebombing and, of course, taking about 'Nam.

* * *

I like many things, but I like these two things especially:

1. Participating in or being party to conversation
2. Listening to smart, experienced people talk

While this documentary tends toward the "facilitated speech" end of the conversational spectrum, Morris unquestionably delivers intelligence and experience, both on his own part — he's the one asking the questions and cutting the answers together, after all — but most visibly on McNamara's. Like him or hate him, you can't argue with the former Sec of D's verbal sharpness and acuity of reflection, even in his mid-80s. (Score another one for "use it or lose it", mental-faculty-wise.)

And many do hate him. Morris has visited the redemption-of-the-reviled well more than once — Mr. Death, for instance, which is about a man who fell in with Holocaust deniers primarily because he didn't have any other friends — and this is almost an exercise in that department, but to call it that would be way too reductive. I doubt anybody expected McNamara to be all, "Japs? Screw 'em! Gooks? Screw 'em!" but it's clear that he's perceived in some quarters as a cold, calculating monster who would march thousands upon thousands of cornfed American boys to their jungle deaths in order to advance his own agenda of rational civilian military control. But, extreme exceptions aside, people aren't monsters. We can bring up the usual Nazi and serial killer counterexamples, and if we're talking in relative terms, sure, they're monsters. But then monster means possession of something like the following: advanced persuasive abilities, a monomaniacal thirst for power and a complete lack of interest in external consequences. As T.S. Eliot said, "Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them."

That still wouldn't make McNamara a monster, since the harm does seem to interest him. Building his military career on the principle that an outsider with strong utilitarian calculation abilities — the same ones that convinced Ford to start using seatbelts — he thought he was strongly interested in the harm. Little did he know, I guess, that popular thinking about his line would reduce to the following: War? Bad. People who make decisions that aren't "stop doing war immediately"? Bad. Which reminds me of another well-known quote, one from Orwell: “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”

And yes, war, to the extent that it involves the deaths of innocent people, is bad, but that position is much more clearly articulated as "the deaths of innocent people are bad." McNamara comes across as realizing this, and also as realizing that war near-inevitably involves the deaths of innocent people, but he doesn't condemn war itself, because what's the point? One of his central theses is that we're not going to end war anytime soon, so we'd do well to attenuate it any way we can. One of the ways to do that is to use a finisher, the equivalent to groin-kneeing the other guy in a bar fight or stabbing him with a smashed bottle. Finishers carry two inherent dangers, though: (a) you might regret having done needless damage, damage hugely disproportionate to what had been used against you and (b) you give the other side tacit permission to use a finisher against you, assuming they can. McNamara gets across how hard this sort of choice was in WWII, and if it was hard then, it was positively brain-siezing during the Cold War's worst moments, given how that situation resembled two guys with knees directly aimed at groins and bottle shards inches from faces.

Since Morris tends to cut out his questions and stitch together interviews consisting almost entirely of answers, it's tough to say if he's trying to stick it to McNamara, to pin him down and get him to admit wrongdoing regarding Vietnam. He does ask him if he feels guilty about the whole ordeal, but McNamara parries; again, what's the point? McNamara's guilt isn't going to change anything now, and it especially won't change the events of the late 1960s. There's a bit of "Johnson was hell-bent on keeping troops there" talk, but the main point is right there in the title: in normal human affairs, it's extremely difficult to predict the long-range effects of one's actions, but in war, christ, fuggedaboudit. McNamara seems to think that he and other officials did the best they could with the information they had, and I believe it. The real wrenches in the gears were their assumptions that the information was more solid than it was and that their predictive abilities were more accurate than they were.

This is all reflective of a theme that's been on my mind lately: we don't know. That's not to say that no human could ever predict anything about anything and that we're thus better off just stumbling randomly through life; that's to say that we should recognize what we can know, what we can't know, and where and how things get fuzzy. The first is routinely overestimated, the second is routinely underestimated, and the third is often ignored. Forget war; the fog of everyday life is thick enough, thank you very much.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami, 1995)

Toru Okada, an unambitious thirty-year-old in mid-1980s Tokyo, quits his dead-end law-office job. At home and on the dole, he settles into a routine of cooking, picking up the dry cleaning and searching for his lost cat. On the feline's trail, he meets a school-skipping, death-obsessed sixteen-year-old girl who works for a toupee manufacturer. A series of eccentric characters contact him thereafter: a red-hatted clairvoyant working pro bono, said clairvoyant's pastel-suit-wearing ex-prostitute sister, a former military man who fought in Manchuria with the late other psychic Toru and wife Kumiko used to visit and a fashion designer with a mute son and unclear magical abilities.

When all of a sudden Kumiko up and disappears, Toru quits the cat hunt and assumes the wife hunt. To help himself think, he climbs to the bottom of the dry well behind a local abandoned house — and, some say, a cursed one — and, stuck there, discovers a portal to what may or may not be another reality. He emerges with a bruise-like mark on his face which might possess exploitable powers itself. An old comrade-in-arms of a psychic he used to visit sends lengthy missives describing the horrors of Manchuria; the fashion designer recalls her childhood experiencing same. Kumiko's vile older brother rises to celebrity and political power. Also, a little kid somewhere wakes up to find that he has a doppelgänger, and it's overtaken his bed. This is all well and good, Toru thinks, but where's my lady?

* * *

As the premise, such as I could describe it, might indicate, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is jam-packed with stuff. I've even left a lot out in the interest of avoiding the dreaded tl;dr. (Me, I'm more inclined to drop a ts;dr, but each to their own.) You've got your lost cats (a theme to return in Kafka on the Shore) your weird sex, your baseball bat fights, your waking dreams, your dreaming wakes, your military history, your wordy correspondence — anything you need.

Good old Michiko Kakutani described the book thusly: "the impression it gives [is] of being jerry-built out of an arbitrary accretion of episodes and digressions." I agree. The cause, I think, is fourfold:

1. The novel is built out of an earlier short story
2. The novel was originally published in a serial form and collected into three separate ~200-page books
3. Murakami admits that he makes up his stories as he goes along (which isn't... necessarily bad)
4. Things get lost in translation

But none of this is to say that the book sucks! Sure, it's not exactly a well-oiled machine, but it's well-executed enough to remain a page turner even when I didn't have clue one as to how everything fits together. (In retrospect, clue one should've been that not everything does fit together.) That's kind of Murakami's way, to throw stuff in front of the reader and maybe explain it later, or maybe not. And since this is my third Murakami book in as many weeks, I've begun to notice other pet themes of his as well: the not-particularly-driven male loner almost unwillingly forced into the protagonist's role, for instance, or the out-of-nowhere appearance of an exquisitely well-dressed woman. Murakami loves him some well-dressed women. (He also loves him some women who are so far withdrawn into themselves that they're well nigh unreachable to their protagonists, who happen to be desperate to get through to them. Sometimes they're also well-dressed women, is the case with Kumiko.)

And I suppose this would be the place to reiterate my now-usual "realism good, magic bad... magic realism kind of good?" point about Murakami stories. The guy's incredible at depicting the stuff of quotidian life — I got excited when I found that the novel opens with Toru boiling pasta and listening to Rossini — and he can crank out a fine character sketch, especially if that character is something of an isolated autodidact. For instance, here's how he writes the life of Cinnamon, son of the fashion designer Nutmeg (they don't want to give Toru their real names, to answer your question):

During lulls between jobs, Nutmeg would teach Cinnamon how to read and write and do arithmetic. But in fact, there was not that much that she had to teach him. He liked books, and he would use them to teach himself what he needed to know. She was less a teacher for him than the one who chose the books he needed. He liked music and wanted to play the piano, but after learning the basic finger movements in a few months with a professional piano teacher, he used only manuals and recorded tapes to bring himself to a high level of technical accomplishment for one so young. He loved to play Bach and Mozart, and aside from Poulenc and Bartók, he showed little inclination to play anything beyond the Romantics. During his first six years of study, his interests were concentrated on music and reading, but from the time he reached middle school age, he turned to the acquisition of languages, beginning with English and then French. In both cases, he taught himself enough to read simple books after six months of study. He had no intention of learning to converse in either language, of course; he wanted only to be able to read books. Another activity he loved was tinkering with complicated machinery. He bought a complete collection of professional tools, with which he was able to build radios and tube amplifiers, and he enjoyed taking clocks apart and fixing them.

[ ... ]

At eighteen, Cinnamon got his driver's license. Nutmeg found a kindly driving instructor to give him private lessons, but Cinnamon himself had already been through every available instruction book and absorbed the details. All he needed was the practical know-how that couldn't be obtained from books, and this he mastered in a few days at the wheel. Once he had his license, he pored over the used-car books and bought himself a Porsche Carrera, using as a down payment all the money he had saved working with his mother (none of which he ever had to use for living expenses). He made the engine shine, bought all new parts through mail order, put new tires on, and generally brought the car's condition to racing level. All he ever did with it, though, was drive it over the same short, jam-packed route every day from his home in Hiroo to the office in Akasaka, rarely exceeding forty miles an hour. This made it one of the rarer Porsche 911s in the world.

In his newest compilation, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Murakami takes this skill of putting a life succinctly on paper for its best spin yet — or at least it's the best in his work that I've read so far — in the short story "Tony Takitani", which is pretty much 100% in the same tone as the above passage. Also like the above passage, it's 100% realism; everything Murakami says happened conceivably could have. That's not so much the case in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. After Toru makes his trip down the well, the question of what's real and what isn't hangs in the air, as does the question of what's perceived by the mind, what's happened only in the mind, and just whose mind is what happening in.

Unfortunately, I find those questions to be a pain in the ass, just as I found my eyes shifting automatically into skimming mode upon encountering any passage that didn't have a high probability of being "real". And if a passage is introduced as a dream, forget it; I don't have any patience for hearing a real human's dreams, let alone a fictitious one's. And boy, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle dwells on these questions, unanswerable as they are. Characters do attempt to explain a few of the story's more outlandish phenomena now and again, but the explanations are incomplete and don't make much sense. I'll leave it to readers more patient than I to figure out how, say, "prostitution of the mind" works.

If I can measure the goodness of a writer by how much crap like this I let them get away with, then Murakami must be writerly goodness incarnate. Much has been written about how this book shines a light on Japan's struggle for an identity — for What it Means to Be Japanese^TM — but if that's what it's doing, it's doing it pretty obliquely. The sections about Japanese misadventure in Manchuria are fairly condemning, but I doubt that stuff was in the front of the Japanese everyman's mind in 1995, when the novel came out, or even in 1984, when it takes place. Mostly it's just a bunch of individual threads, each of which connect with the others, or don't. But most of these threads are, taken by themselves, page-turners, full of precise, spot-on descriptions: I wanted to know where Kumiko went, or why the boy found his doppelgänger, or what exactly Toru's celebrity brother-in-law's secret was. It's no big deal that these questions aren't quite directly tied to one another; as for the fact that the answers never really come, your mileage may vary. (I've been reading a lot of Murakami lately — I stopped demanding answers a while ago.)

Three-quarters into the novel, Toru finds a way to communicate with Kumiko, whatever dimension she's in, via Cinnamon's computer terminal. It's equipped with a mouse, which anachronistically bothers my inner vintage computer weenie, but it otherwise correctly operates with a bare-bones ASCII interface. Kumiko types the following to her increasingly desperate husband:

> The reason I am here, like it or not, is because this is the proper place for me. This is where I have to be. I have no right to choose otherwise. Even if I wanted to see you, I couldn't do it. Do you think I DON'T want to see you? So please, don't torture me about this any longer. If there is any one thing that you can do for me, it would be to forget about my existence as quickly as possible. Take those years that we lived together and push them outside your memory as if they never existed. That, finally, is the best thing you can do for both of us. This is what I truly believe.

Some critics bitch and moan about Murakami's thin characterizations, but I'll say this for him: he has absolutely mastered "flaky 15-year-old girlfriend on AOL Instant Messenger".

Save the Green Planet (Jun-Hwan Jang, 2003)

Byeong-gu, an eccentric young beekeper convinced of a vast space alien conspiracy against Earth, kidnaps a CEO — not for the first time — and, in his makeshift gadgetry-filled lair underneath a mountain farmhouse, attempts to torture him until he confesses to being an alien leader in disguise. As the cops' search for the CEO closes in, captive and captor play cat-and-mouse, and as details of Byeong-gu's violence-ridden past gradually emerge, it becomes clear that his obsession with the paranormal masks several entirely Earth-based quests for vengeance.

* * *

I've watched me some Korean movies and I've watched me some Bollywood, but Save the Green Planet is the first I've seen combine characteristics of both. It doesn't have any songs, but it does have the same little-of-everything multigenre ethos of India's finest. Even the most cursory examination reveals traces of psychological thriller, comedy, detective thriller, horror, social commentary (Society Done Me Wrong" is certainly an element at work) and sci-fi.

This brings to mind the makings of a new evaluative pattern: don't be a genre. This isn't meant as a blanket slam against genre films, but I happen to prefer the ones that no two video stores would file in the same section. Why? Because genre films are, by their very nature, more amenable to cliché — indeed, one could argue that certain suites of employed clichés are what place any given story into a genre — and thus I'm statistically less likely to encounter a cliché, that foul thing against which all creative effort is a total war, in non-genre films.

There are two ways to avoid the pitfall of genre: eschew the conventions of all established genres, or intermingle the conventions of many established genres in such a way that the resulting interactions between them are sufficiently un-clichéd. (Bollywood mixes genre conventions, but its titles do it so formulaically that the industry has long since become a bona fide genre unto itself.) Save the Green Planet's choice of door number two makes it entertaining indeed, though I've noticed that some viewers aren't all that comfortable when a movie jumps from genre to genre without warning — comedy to seriousness and back seems an especially rough road for them — or with ones that lean tentativelt toward several genres but definitively toward none. Wes Anderson's Rushmore, one of my very favorites, was the first example I ever noticed of the latter in action. Perhaps it's some type of cognitive dissonance at work. (I admit to having acquired a taste for cognitive dissonance, m'self.)

* * *

14. Don't be a genre. As we saw in Pattern 12, defeat of cliché is the sine qua non of goodness. And what is a genre but a prepackaged set of clichés for a story to adhere to? Liberated from genre, a story is automatically liberated from well-worn conventions.