LOS ANGELES — Japanese auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi adapted a roughly 40-page Haruki Murakami short story into a fully realized, seamless three-hour film, "Drive My Car." But it was much more involved than that: He actually took material from three Murakami stories, and within that adaptation, he included significant passages of Anton Chekhov's stage classic "Uncle Vanya" — in multiple languages. And he accomplished all of that while retaining Murakami's themes and expanding far beyond where the author left his characters.
"The short story didn't really have a conclusive ending; it was sort of midway through," said Hamaguchi, through an interpreter. "From the audience perspective, that's something they might be dissatisfied with. I had to think of 'What were the characters' issues, and how were they going to be solved?' I thought the most legitimate way to do it would be to use other stories from this collection ... there were common themes running through them."
"Drive My Car," nominated for four Oscars, including best picture, director and adapted screenplay, could as easily have been called "Men Without Women," after the book from which Hamaguchi mined the three tales. The central relationship, between actor-director Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima in the film) and laconic driver Misaki (a perfectly cast Tôko Miura), and Kafuku's wife's infidelities — including with a man Kafuku came to know, Takatsuki — come from the collection's first story, "Drive My Car." But the most unforgettable aspects of Kafuku's wife, Oto, come from another, unrelated story: "Scheherazade," in which a woman having an almost regimented affair tells her lover fascinating stories of her past following their sexual encounters. In the film, that basic scenario exists with the stories being inventions, not memories. A third entry in the collection, "Kino," contributes more subtly, with its decisive violence and main character's catharsis.
