How to Adapt: Drive My Car
How do you adapt a 40-page short story into a three-hour film? That was the challenge facing screenwriters Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe (the former also serving as the director) for the 2021 Japanese-language film, Drive My Car. The film is based on the 2014 story of the same name from Haruki Murakami, found in the short story collection Men Without Women. I asked myself this question when I finished watching the film last week and knew I had to investigate. I went out, bought Men Without Women, and identified the two major tools deployed to successfully adapt Drive My Car: organic world-building and necessary differences.
Let’s look at the plot itself for both. Kafuku is a widowed theater actor who enjoys long drives to his work, often using the time in his car to memorize lines for his stage productions. Due to various circumstances, Kafuku is forced to relinquish the freedom of driving his Saab and be driven from place to place by Watari, a young, brusque woman with an exceptional talent for smooth driving. Together, the two learn more about each other’s lives and pasts, forming a strange but undeniable bond centered on loss and forgiveness.
The summary above offers compelling drama, conflict, and character insight, but the question remains; how do you translate it to screen in a meaningful way? How can others learn how to adapt well? For starters, the story needs to be expanded. This is where organic world-building occurs. The short story itself offers glimpses into a larger world but given its length, does not dive into them. The clearest example of this is through Kafuku’s play, Uncle Vanya. Murakami’s short story offers this:
“Kafuku practiced his lines on the way, reciting with the cassette recording. The play was a Meiji-era adaption of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. He played the role of Uncle Vanya. He knew the lines by heart, but ran through them anyway to calm his nerves before a performance. This was a long-standing habit of his.”
The only other reference to the play occurs later in the story when Kafuku and Watari have a brief exchange about the characters they identify with. Through the use of organic world-building, screenwriters Hamaguchi and Oe expand their screenplay to include an entire subplot of Kafuku’s initial involvement in the production, scenes of the casting process, rehearsals, and a culmination of the performance itself. The plot beat exists in the short story and is ripe for expansion.
Another instance of organic world-building is the role of Kafuku’s deceased wife, Oto (unnamed in the short story). In each, Oto is involved in acting as well and has had a handful of affairs with other men. Her last affair, which Kafuku is aware of but does not question during her life, is with a man named Takatsuki.
Hamaguchi and Oe stated two other short stories from Men Without Women were used in developing and expanding their screenplay — Scheherazade and Kino. Focusing on Scheherazade, we see a female character tell increasingly unusual yet engaging stories to her partner, only doing so after intercourse. This character’s stories include feeling in a past life she was lamprey and another when, as a young girl, she had broken into a crush’s home on several occasions, taking little objects of his with each break-in and leaving behind an item of her own in the stolen object’s place. Both are lifted from Scheherazade and put into the film to expand on Oto’s backstory and make her a more three-dimensional character. In the film, Oto is now the woman who tells the story of the lamprey and tells Kafuku and her sexual partner, Takatsuki, of a girl who breaks into her teenage crush’s home. With the breathing room of the film’s length, we can sympathize with Kafuku over her death more and glean insight about her own relationship with her husband and Takatsuki through her storytelling.
Speaking of the supporting characters, we see some of our major but necessary differences between the short story and the film. This includes: the color of the Saab (yellow in the short story, red in the film), the central location, the reasoning for Kafuku needing a driver (a drunken accident in the short story, liability requirements of the theater production company in the film), and Kafuku’s involvement in the production of Uncle Vanya (that of purely a performer in the short story, changed to the director and subsequently a reluctant actor in the film). But some of the most necessary changes I want to focus on relate to the characters.
Each supporting character in the short story (Watari, Oto, Takatsuki) is offered more backstory and interconnectedness to our protagonist, Kafuku, but more importantly in adaptation, each are changed. Let’s look at Watari first. In Murakami’s prose, her mother died from a driving accident when she was young. In the film, her mother is killed in a landslide, destroying the family home and leaving Watari destitute and an orphan. The importance here is both cinematic (it is more visually interesting for Kafuku and Watari to visit the remnants of a ruined home than perhaps a marker on the side of a road) and emotional. Watari carries the guilt of escaping the home after the landslide while she was unable to save her mother. “I killed my mother,” she says in the film.
In each, Oto’s death is different. In the short story, her death is prolonged, as she succumbs to uterine cancer and guests, including Takatsuki, are barred from seeing her. Oto’s death is also a decade prior from the main storyline. Compare this to the film, where her death from a brain aneurism feels sudden. It also occurred just two years previously. Kafuku too intentionally delayed his return home that day, knowing Oto was with another man (later revealed as Takatsuki) so he could avoid a confrontation. Kafuku lingers on his choice to avoid his wife and perhaps doom her to dying alone while he was away. Mirroring Watari, he states, “And I killed my wife.”
While Kafuku and Takatsuki both become something of odd friends in each story, their relationship is necessarily changed. Look first to who Takatsuki is. Here is the short story’s description of him; “In his early forties and not an especially skilled actor…been married for ten years and (had) a seven-year-old son.” In the film, Takatsuki is thirty, brash and cocky, has never married, and was forced to step away from his successful TV role due to a scandal. In the film, Takatsuki is desperate for work and auditions for Kafuku’s production of Uncle Vanya, landing the titular role and further entangling the pair’s professional and emotional relationship — both to the craft of acting and to the woman each man loved.
In the end, they become closer after Takatsuki reveals the ending of Oto’s story with the girl who broke into her childhood crush’s home. This story was told to each of the men by Oto, but the ending was never told to Kafuku. Only once the pair had reached the point of mutual understanding of their shared affections towards Oto, whom neither could have anymore does their odd friendship end. Takatsuki is arrested following a fight with another man, that man dying from his injuries. With Takatsuki unable to play Uncle Vanya, Kafuku is forced to take on the role he had abandoned years earlier. Takatsuki propels Kafuku forward, to not only learn forgiveness of his wife’s infidelity and find closure with her death, but also in driving Kafuku to embrace the stage once more in a triumphant and devastating performance.
Drive My Car offers a unique case study in adaption with both serving their similar plots well and achieving the emotional thrust necessary in their respective mediums. The question of adapting the short story to film is answered through organic worldbuilding (utilizing single-line references in the story and expanding on them, including elements from other Murakami short stories) and necessary differences (altering supporting characters roles, backstories, and personalities). In the end, the film succeeds in its adaptation because it respects the spirit of the text while not being solely beholden to it in order to create something new.
