Drive My Car de Ryūsuke Hamaguchi: una adaptación al cine de Haruki Murakami

Abstract

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021) is a film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s work of the same title from the short story collection Men Without Women . Despite numerous differences with regard to the original text, Hamaguchi’s rendition has been favorably received by viewers and critics as faithful. This paper aims to clarify how he produced such an impression. His success on this score is due to a strategic leveraging of the nature of adaptation itself, particularly as a process and product of intertextuality. Hamaguchi’s film conveys his interpretation as a reader and takes advantage of intertextuality not only with the original written story but also with Chekov’s Uncle Vanya (which figures in the original “Drive My Car”), with other stories in Men Without Women