Haruki Murakami, part 5: Drive My Car

Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki Watari (Toko Miura) in Drive My Car. Image source: The Film Stage

Writer-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car (2021) seamlessly combines elements from two Haruki Murakami short stories, "Drive My Car" and "Scheherezade," from the collection Men Without Women (2014).

Theater actor and director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) lives in Tokyo with his younger wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television screenwriter. In the opening scenes we see their post-coital ritual, where Oto narrates a story to Yusuke.

Oto's story is about a high-school girl with a crush on a classmate. She starts breaking into his house when she knows no one will be there and entering his room. Each time she takes some small object whose absence won't be noticed, and somewhere in the room hides a token of herself.

As Yusuke is driving Oto to work the next day in his vintage red Saab 900 Turbo, they go over the story together, shaping it and teasing out its meanings. Oto is writing a screenplay for a late-night TV program, but Yusuke asks her to wait until they make love again to complete the story, whose ending she hasn't yet imagined.

Oto (Reika Kirishima) and Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) in Drive My Car. Image source: The Film Stage

That evening Yusuke is appearing as Vladimir in a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. We see the last moments of the play. Hamaguchi cuts away just before the final lines:

vladimir:  Well? Shall we go?
estragon: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.
Curtain.

The omission of these lines is significant: it will turn out that one of the themes of the movie is movement versus stasis.

Later, Oto continues her story. The girl feels herself drawn to the boy's room, where "time stands still. Past and present fade away." She removes her clothes and begins to masturbate on the boy's bed when she hears someone entering the house and coming up the stairs. "Now she can stop at last. . .she'll become a new person. The door opens." Is Oto trying to tell Yusuke something? [1]

The next day as Yusuke is leaving, Oto asks him if they can talk when he returns that evening. "Of course," he responds. But Yusuke has lied. Instead of going to teach a workshop, as he'd told Oto, he drives around Tokyo rehearsing his lines for an upcoming production of Uncle Vanya to a cassette tape of the lines for the other characters recorded by his wife. The play seems to comment on their situation; is Yusuke rehearsing for the conversation with Oto, which he clearly dreads?. . .

Two years later, Yusuke has come to Hiroshima to stage a multilingual production of Chekov's Uncle Vanya. Thanks to a past accident, the festival requires their artists to have drivers rather than drive themselves. Yusuke is a bit obsessive about driving—he hates to be a passenger—and about his car. Like most drivers he thinks that other drivers are either too aggressive, too timid, or too distracted. Driving is also how he runs his lines, by playing the cassettes recorded by his wife of the other characters' parts. Those cassettes are also a connection to her, and Chekhov's lines often seem to be commenting on Yusuke's past and current emotional state.

So Yusuke is not happy when he is assigned a young woman, Misaki (Toko Miura), as his chauffeuse. But the taciturn Misaki is a skilled driver and, if Yusuke is never quite fully comfortable as a passenger, he slowly comes to accept her. As he begins to unbend, they both begin to reveal more about themselves; ultimately, each helps the other come to terms with a trauma from the past.

Drive My Car. Image source: Japan Society Film Club

As Yusuke and Misaki slowly reach an understanding, we also watch the casting, rehearsals and performance of Uncle Vanya. Yusuke is renowned for his unconventional casting choices. One of the actors who has auditioned is Koji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a TV heartthrob who had starred in a show that Oto was writing. Yusuke unexpectedly casts him as the middle-aged Vanya, a role that Yusuke himself is famous for. The two men go drinking after rehearsals, but we learn that Yusuke has a ulterior motive for getting to know Takatsuki. And unfortunately Takatsuki is involved in a sensationalistic subplot added by Hamaguchi that seems both implausible and jarringly out of place in this quiet, reflective film.

Apart from the violent Takatsuki subplot, Hamaguchi's elaborations of his source material develop layers of meaning only hinted at in Murakami's stories—the scenes from Yusuke's stage productions, for example, which seem to enact and, in the end, provide a partial resolution for, Yusuke's emotional dilemmas. The acting is excellent, with special kudos for Nishijima, Kirishima, Miura, and Park Yu-Rim, as a mute actress who movingly delivers the final lines of Uncle Vanya in Korean Sign Language. The images are also beautifully composed by Hamaguchi and photographed and lit by cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya. Drive My Car is a rich, subtle, and visually striking film.

Haruki Murakami. Photo credit: Kevin Trageser / Redux. Image source: The New Yorker

Other posts in this series:

• The English Library novels: Hear the Wind Sing (1979/1987), Pinball, 1973 (1980/1985), and Norwegian Wood (1987/1989)
• The first U.S. publications: A Wild Sheep Chase (1982/1989) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985/1991)
• The transition: The Elephant Vanishes (1980-91/1993) and Dance Dance Dance (1988/1994)
• International breakthrough: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995/1997)
• Comics adaptation: Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL's Manga Stories (2023)
• More film adaptations: Burning (2018) and Norwegian Wood (2010)

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1. This scene, by the way, is not from Murakami's short story, but is one of the many details in the film that have been added by Hamaguchi.