Murakami’s influence on Wong Kar-wai

“Wong’s chief inspiration for Chungking Express was a short story entitled ‘On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning’ by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The story is about the mutability of perceptions, and begins with the sentence, ‘One fine April morning, I passed my 100% woman on a Harajuku back street.’ Chungking Express similarly begins with a chance encounter, which becomes a motif in the first episode….Wong develops the themes of chimerical relationships with the same evanescence displayed in Murakami’s short story. People’s lives just touch but never interpenetrate (maybe they do not even touch but just brush past, mere possibilities, foregone opportunities to connect, impermanence). Like Murakami, Wong injects a sense of magical element into everyday life but with a sense of fatal consequences. Like Murakami, he invokes icons from popular culture to suggest the part that memory plays.” (from Wong Kar-wai by Stephen Teo, 50-51)

I had been reading Murakami for several years when I began watching Wong Kar-wai’s movies, and while I drew connections between the themes that they both explored, I did not know that Murakami’s work directly influenced WKW’s work. I was very excited to find out that it did—the idea that two of my favorite artists were connected was made manifest. Also, WKW’s methodology is very, very similar to Murakami’s; when they begin on a new work, neither knows the direction that they are heading. The process of creating for both of them is integral to the creation itself. It cannot be separated. This is the opposite of how, say, Alfred Hitchcock or Vladimir Nabokov worked. WKW had, I think, about 3000 minutes of footage (not just takes, but footage proper) of In the Mood for Love. In the editing room, he parsed it down to the story that we know. If you watch the documentary @ In the Mood for Love, you will see scenes in which Tony Leung’s and Maggie Cheung’s characters and relationship are basically unrecognizable from the finished film. I guess WKW had to film those scenes to realize that they didn’t fit. (Happy Together was originally a three-hour film and included a couple of significant female roles, one of which was a nurse who nurtured Tony Leung’s character back to health after he attempted suicide; it ended up being about 100 minutes long.) Likewise, when Murakami began writing Norwegian Wood, he said that he didn’t know what the novel was going to be about or where it was going or how it was going to end; all he knew was that there would be five characters, three of whom would die.