Kafuku is the protagonist in the film, too. We spend our lives trying to know one another, to speak across the barrier of the self, but everything gets in the way, starting with words themselves. Drive My Car locks into this theme and amplifies it across its three-hour runtime, tugging at threads in the story and spinning them into variations. In Hamaguchi’s spin on the story, the intricacies of language serve as a kind of metaphor for communication itself - a metaphor that’s also of a piece with Murakami’s use of the Japanese language. We spend our lives trying to know one another, to speak across the barrier of the self, but everything gets in the way, starting with words themselves To write the Oscar-nominated screenplay, Hamaguchi used the framework of “Drive My Car” but mixed in two other stories, “Scheherazade” and “Kino,” both of which appear with “Drive My Car” in Murakami’s 2014 collection Men Without Women, and drew out a brief mention of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the original story into a full narrative thread. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car differs substantially in its details from the story from which it draws its name, but this theme - of the strange human struggle to actually know anyone, to speak and be heard and understood - ties the two together strongly. “They could see a certain sparkle of recognition in each other’s eyes,” Murakami writes. Kafuku is startled by the normally reserved Takatsuki’s conviction and clarity, and their gazes meet. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves. So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we can love them. The proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. The other man seems on the verge of revealing what Kafuku already knows, but instead his heart opens and he says a wise thing: Now, having edged near the subject, Kafuku has opened up a bit, telling Takatsuki that he grieves not having known his wife as well as he wished he did. He initiated the friendship with motives that weren’t entirely clear even to himself he wants to hear more about his late wife, but he also wants to better understand her reasons for sleeping with Takatsuki, and maybe punish Takatsuki, too.īut to Kafuku’s surprise, over a few months of drinking together, the pair have struck up a companionable and affable relationship without ever revealing to one another what actually happened. Kafuku knows, or is fairly sure he knows, about Takatsuki’s relationship with his wife, and he’s also pretty certain that the other man truly loved his wife and hasn’t recovered from the loss. The other is Takatsuki, the last man with whom Kafuku’s wife had an affair before her diagnosis. One is Kafuku, whose wife died years ago after a short bout with cancer. Near the end of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” - on which the multi-Oscar-nominated film is sort of based - two middle-aged men, both actors, are at a bar.
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