Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Writer: Pierre Földes, Haruki Murakami

Director: Pierre Földes

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a beautiful piece of animation, a European co-production, written and directed by Pierre Földes. It refers only loosely to Haruki Murakami’s short story collection of the same name and in fact takes stories from other Murakami collections. Superficially the different narratives capture some of the dream-like, imaginative quality of Murakami’s writing. Characters wander in nightmares through empty corridors but also make extraordinary discoveries in lush hidden landscapes.

But where Murakami wants to conjure endless surreal situations without suggesting realistic explanations, Földes offers a more reassuring, if less imaginative framework, setting the stories in Japan in 2011. This allows him to use the context of the aftermath of the devastating Tokyo earthquake and tsunami. Thus the stories, most of which pre-date this, become linked thematically, suggesting different effects on the imaginations of individuals of these terrifying disasters.

The main stories follow the lives of two lonely men. The younger, Komura, only realises something is wrong with his marriage when his wife Kyoko suddenly disappears. She leaves an elliptical note saying that living with him is like ‘living with a chunk of air’. Komura knows that she had become increasingly withdrawn, obsessively watching interviews with earthquake survivors, but he’d been unable to ascribe a meaning to her behaviour. Expecting normality at work, Komura is shocked to be singled out and criticised for his lack of drive. He’s encouraged to take voluntary redundancy and given a week to consider his options. Pushed into taking action, he wanders off in search of whatever it is he lacks.

There is a parallel between Komura and timid middle-aged bachelor Katagiri, the film’s other central character. Katagiri is employed by the loans department of a monolithic bank. Terrified of making mistakes, he works longer hours than anyone else, but this has earned him no favours. A fierce boss descends, blaming him for a default on a huge loan. In a very typical Murakami move, the despairing Katagiri returns home to find a huge green frog has installed himself. Frog alternately displays polite charm and ferocious rage. He insists he needs Katagiri’s help to defeat a deadly worm of gigantic dimensions, hidden directly beneath the skyscraper in which Katagiri works. This monster is about to destroy Tokyo. Why me? Katagiri asks, aware he lacks any heroic qualities. But Frog insists it is Katagiri’s help alone that he needs. Thus the small world of the salary man is blown apart by the threat of a battle of epic proportions between the forces of good and evil. But ultimately it’s a plot-line that fizzles out.

The story-telling, in other words, is a rather watered-down version of Murakami’s fiction. But what is most compelling about Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the highly imaginative quality of the film’s animation. The characters’ gestures and facial expressions are perfectly observed, while people passing in the street or sitting at bars are rendered as transparent, ghostly figures. The city- and landscapes are beautifully drawn. A particularly notable scene visually is one in which Kyoko describes an extraordinary event that happened on her twentieth birthday. The situation emerged because of the exceptionally heavy rainfall, and it is the rain itself which almost steals the scene, so magnificently is it rendered.

Földes seems to accept uncritically Murakami’s depictions of gender- and sexual relationships which now seem hopelessly out of date. Too much of the plot rests on encounters between Komura and series of almost identically gorgeous young women all eager to seduce him. So although Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is certainly watchable, it never really captures the exceptional strangeness of Murakami’s multiple worlds.

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman is released in the UK & Ireland on 21 March 2023.