Why the Novel Cannot Be Replaced by the Film

 After watching the film adaptation of Norwegian Wood, I personally have an opinion: film is NOT a good medium to present this story. I'm not trying to criticize the filming techniques or anything like that. If we only view it as a separated movie, it's not that bad. In another word, at least it succeeds as a movie. However, if we discuss it together with the original novel, it fairly lacks the ability to convey the whole context within the novel.

To understand Norwegian Wood, the tiny details between the protagonists’ interection should be importantly considered. At the beginning of the movie, it only tells us that Kizuki, Toru, and Naoko are friends during high school. After Kizuki's death, Toru and Naoko move to Tokyo and coincidentally meet again. Then they become close through the time they spend together over the year, and finally they do. That is it.

But what is really important in the novel is how Kizuki plays a really important role in both Toru and Naoko's hearts, (the lost of Kizuki in movie seems not to be too strike on both of them) , and how the loss of their closest friend, in a city where they are both strangers, is what connects the two of them together. And from that, how a certain emotion, and a certain redemption, grows between them. But all of this, none of it comes through in the movie.

The movie only tells us the story, tells us what happens. But everything that is truly important for both Toru and Naoko themselves can only be explored through their tiny conversations, their small actions, and what they are thinking inside. These are things the movie simply cannot show.

To put it all together: although the movie tells the story of Norwegian Wood fairly clearly, it completely fails to bring out what the novel is really about:  the bonds that grief creates between people, the desperate need to save each other, and the quiet, painful hope of redemption. And so a book that is so full of human nature, ethics, and all kinds of deeper meaning ends up looking in the movie like just an ordinary, plain tragedy.

Boran