Literary Inspiration in Film Criticism: A Comparison of Suzuki Seijun’s Films and Murakami Haruki’s Killing Commendatore

Abstract

The influence of Japanese cinema on Murakami Haruki’s literary work is not a topic that has been widely explored. Indeed, the relationship between the two is far from manifest: References to Japanese cinema in Murakami’s novels are almost non-existent, with a mention of Kurosawa Akira’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Hidden Fortress (1958) in 1Q84 (2009-10) being a rare exception. Although Murakami occasionally refers to Japanese films in his essays, his only book of film reviews, The Adventure of Cinema [Eiga wo meguru bōken] (1985, co-authored with Kawamoto Saburō), has no entry of Japanese cinema.

This article considers intertextuality between Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (2017) and Suzuki Seijun’s post-Nikkatsu films, using Murakami’s 1980 review of Suzuki’s work as a key text. As will be demonstrated, Murakami’s adaptation of “The Bond of Two Lifetimes” [Nise no enishi] (1808) in Killing Commendatore shows a considerable influence from Suzuki’s television work, A Mummy’s Love [Miira no koi] (1973). Through comparison of Murakami’s novel with A Mummy’s Love and Suzuki’s Taisho trilogy (particularly the 1991 film Yumeji), I will identify a creative trajectory from Murakami’s critical engagement with Suzuki’s oeuvre early in his career to Suzuki’s unexpected re-emergence in Murakami’s later text.