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Abstract
As one of contemporary Japan’s most famous authors, Murakami Haruki’s stories have inspired many producers of various media and genres. In this transmedial process where creative content is transposed between textual and other media forms, the content of a literary work inevitably has to change to suit the new aesthetic form due to the specific conventions of the target media and genre. This article uses Murakami’s works to address such concept of transmediality, which reflects our contemporary cultural and literary environment where boundaries between media types and genres have become more blurred. Specifically, we examine Murakami’s short stories, ‘Panya shūgeki’, ‘Panya saishūgeki’, and the movement of these stories from literary text to other mediums, in order to explore what sort of politics is involved in the transmediation. Focusing on three themes – ideology, race and gender – and their representations across different genres and media, we see transmediality as a process whereby a nexus of possible interpretations can be opened up through rearranging different elements of a story and negotiating with different aesthetic features of the new platforms.
Notes
Acknowledgments
Versions of this article were presented at the Global Japan Studies Seminar at the University of Tokyo, the Asian Studies Conference Japan, and the Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association Australia. We thank the organisers and participants for their comments. We also thank Yamakawa Naoto, Carlos Cuarón, Lucas Akoskin, Pierre-Marie Grille-Liou and JC Deveney for their generous support in reproducing the screenshots and scans in this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from the Japanese are the authors’.
3 Yamasaki (Citation2008), for example, has meticulously traced such edits in Murakami’s earliest novels, Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase.
4 Focusing on these textual evidence, Katō reads the first attack as a tale describing how the rebellious youth of the 1970s were tamed and eventually ‘retrieved’ or ‘re-absorbed’ (kaishū) by a society moving quickly towards hypercapitalist consumerism (Citation2011, 237). For this reason, he even disregards the Lennon reference and chooses to set the stories in the early 1970s and mid-1980s (243).
5 Usually translated as Battles without honour and humanity, but rendered as Gang war without etiquette in the subtitle in Yamakawa’s film.
6 Gebaji, literally ‘violent words’, is a portmanteau between the German word gewalt for ‘violence’ and the Japanese word ji for ‘character’.
7 Personal email exchange with the artists, 23 October 2018. The artists based their understanding of the first attack on the French translation of Kat Menchik’s illustrated novel. This translation uses the old original, not Murakami’s new Panya o osou version (published only several months earlier than the French version; in fact, we doubt if Murakami’s newly edited version is ever translated, i.e. re-exported, into a foreign language). Thus, we can only conclude that it is a coincidence that, like Yamakawa, the bande dessinée artists also decided to add the posters.
8 The French artists believe that the bōsōzoku ‘could be considered a far right influenced group of youngsters’ (Personal email exchange, 23 October 2018). This may not be an entirely accurate claim, but what is important here is that such association with the far right lies behind the artists’ use of bōsōzoku motifs.
9 Personal email exchange, 23 October 2018.
10 Our reading here sees the Asian students as Asian Americans. Since they do not speak in the film, the audience may, of course, choose to interpret them as simply young Asian tourists or students from Asia.
11 Mixed-race Asians are not included in this figure of 4.8%.
12 Hispanic/Latino and black comprise a total of 57% of food service employees in New York City in 2007 (Labor Market Information Service Citation2009, 12).
13 For an overview of narration types in Murakami see Hansen (Citation2010).
14 The decision to not cast the indecisive female customer as middle aged seems intentional as the production booklet of Yamakawa’s Panya shūgeki says onna (‘woman’), not obasan as in Murakami’s source text.
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Notes on contributors
Gitte Marianne Hansen
Gitte Marianne Hansen is a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at Newcastle University and AHRC Leadership Fellow and PI for the project “Gendering Murakami Haruki: Characters, Transmedial Productions and Contemporary Japan.” She holds a PhD in Japanese studies from University of Cambridge. She may be contacted at [email protected].
Michael Tsang
Michael Tsang is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at Newcastle University. Previously he worked on the AHRC-funded “Gendering Murakami Haruki” project as Research Associate. He holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick. His research interest lies in world literature with an East Asian focus.