“Silence is golden.” A student once repeated this old proverb in a class I was teaching, and at the time, it went against what I was hoping to accomplish, since this was a conversation class and I wanted to get the students talking more. In that context, “Silence is golden,” landed like an excuse not to talk.
Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Oscar-winning adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story, works the same phrase into its dialogue and lends new meaning to it in the process. Sometimes, you can talk and talk for 20 years without ever really communicating the thing that matters most. That’s a lesson that stage director and actor Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) learns one day as his flight gets canceled at the last minute, and he drives back home from Narita International Airport to catch his wife in a compromising position.
A Long Cold Open and Deep Iceberg of Emotion
The opening credits of Drive My Car, which rolled into Japanese theaters a year ago today, don’t arrive until 41 minutes into the movie, whereupon the viewer realizes that this whole thing they’ve been watching was just an extended prologue. You’ve got to admire a flex like that. The prologue is nearly twice the length of the cold open to the 2020 cult horror fave The Empty Man, which likewise shone a light on a big skeleton in the closet (or, rather, cave), telling its own self-contained story, like a short film within a film.
Yusuke has a unique method for staging Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov adaptations in Drive My Car. He has actors of different nationalities speak the dialogue in their own language so they can’t understand each other and have to rely on other cues, like a knock on the table. The multilingual stage production — a tower of true babble, founded on Yusuke’s unresolved grief — sees actors exchanging dialogue in Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, and Tagalog. One of them even gives a powerful audition in sign language.
At first, Yusuke just has them doing a robotic live read, learning the flow of the entire play, the same way he does when he’s driving around in his red Saab 900 Turbo, listening to his wife’s recordings. Eventually, though, circumstances conspire to make someone else take the wheel for Yusuke, hence the title. It turns out he and his driver, Misaki (Toko Miura), are alike and she has her own troubled past, a Hemingway-esque iceberg of emotion that floated down from Hokkaido and lives below the surface of her everyday interactions.
A One-Track Mind on a Two-Lane Highway
I’ve read five or six Murakami novels and his nonfiction book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, but after listening to all 46 hours and 45 minutes of the 1Q84 audiobook, I hit a point with Murakami where I felt like my relationship with him as a reader had gone about as far as it was going to go.
Right from the outset, Drive My Car shows some of the usual Murakami fixations, as Yusuke’s wife sits in bed naked, brainstorming a story about a girl who sneaks into a guy’s apartment, leaves a tampon in his drawer, and resists the urge to masturbate on his bed. However, while sexuality does play a part in Drive My Car, it’s not nearly as preoccupied with that as 1Q84.
In 2010, the year I arrived in Japan, 1Q84 was the latest Murakami work to be published, and it was subsequently nominated for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. You can read the florid excerpt that earned it that nomination over on The Guardian, while the Tokyo-based site/magazine Metropolis explores the overall pattern in Murakami’s work of bad sex through prose. Just imagine subjecting yourself to almost 47 hours of descriptions like, "A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, Tengo thought."
If 1Q84 betrayed a one-track mind, then Drive My Car is at least a two-lane highway, and it helps that it has Ryusuke Hamaguchi steering it.
A Top-Tier Haruki Murakami Adaptation
Like Murakami’s most famous novel, Norwegian Wood, which Tran Anh Hung also adapted to film in 2010, Drive My Car takes its title from a Beatles song. It’s right up there with Burning as a top-tier Murakami adaptation. It also has a few twists and turns, worthy of the proverbial long and winding road. Yet as the characters react to certain plot developments, the movie leaves some things unsaid, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps on their inner lives and project themselves into what they must be thinking or feeling.
In a way, we’re all acting, each and every one of us, in our daily lives. The problem arises when we abandon truthful emotion in our ongoing act and just start lying to ourselves (to say nothing of other people), numbing ourselves to what’s real in order to survive.
Even as it cruises along the Akinada Bridge and Hiroshima coastline, there’s a confident stillness to Drive My Car that’s frankly quite refreshing in the age of noisy, smash-‘em-up superhero flicks. Though it’s a Japanese film based on the work of an author I’ve read multiple times, Drive My Car admittedly wasn’t high up the list of Best Picture nominees for me to see, even after it won Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards earlier this year. I can see how the prospect of streaming a 3-hour drama with subtitles might not appeal to every HBO Max viewer, either, but this is a remarkable film that took me by surprise and is well worth a watch.