2 Best Releases From The Asahi Shimbun Studio

The Spool Staff

ドライブ・マイ・カー

GenreDrama
Watch afterLicorice Pizza (2021),
MPAA RatingNR

Ryusuke Hamaguchi adapts a Haruki Murakami short story & gives it additional depth & soul. Interpretation is a complex beast. In terms of language, not even the most literal one is left entirely untouched by the person making it. In the case of longer work, a translator can take on a far more hands-on role, making a novel or film in translation a product of its interpreter as well as its original artist. In some cases, this influence can be significant. Translators and editors have played such a massive role in the way that English audiences understand and appreciate Haruki Murakami that writer, translator, editor, and creative writing professor David Karashima wrote an entire book on the topic in 2020.  Interpreting prose for the screen comes with its own nuances, and its own symbiotic relationship between the writer’s vision and the filmmaker’s. Translating Murakami’s writing for the screen is perhaps even more complicated, given the nature of his stories and how he tells them (or at least how I understand them based on the English translations I’ve read). Continue Reading →

旅のおわり、世界のはじまり

GenreDrama
StudioKing Records,

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth follows Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), a young Japanese woman reporter who is in Uzbekistan filming an expose of the country’s culture for a travel show. She starts off with a smile, but soon after the discrepancies of Uzbek and Japanese culture becoming a hindrance that soon seeps deeper into mental fatigue.  Continue Reading →