Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the Murakami movie for hardcore fans

polygon.com:

You don’t have to know an ounce about bestselling author Haruki Murakami to enjoy the new animated film Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which adapts his work.

Murakami is known for being prolific, both in publishing output and raw page count for each book. His writing is dense with references to mid-20th-century pop culture, Japanese history, jazz, The Beatles minutiae, and the male sexual id, which is to say he’s both immediately entertaining and just as immediately off-putting. FIlmed adaptations of his writing, on the other hand, are often more contained and accessible — they’re ultimately stand-alone works from individual creators.

Those who stream Blind Willow on a whim will get another solid example of Western adult animation, the kind that until recently couldn’t consistently find investment, even from indie studios. Blind Willow sits alongside films like Flee, Tower, and Anomalisa, though it has most in common with the last film, with its heady conversations about the banality of adult life, some nudity, and a splash or two of freakish gore.

But if you do know Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is much more, akin to a once-in-a-generation mashup event. This isn’t a Murakami movie; it’s the Murakami movie.

When Murakami published the anthology Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman in 2006, he wrote in the introduction that it was his “first real short-story collection.” That was a funny thing to say. Murakami had been publishing for two decades, including 2002’s critically adored short-story set After the Quake. But to him Quake was “more like a concept album.” Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by comparison, captured the breadth and depth of his craft, stretching across 24 stories written over as many years. They had