Drive My Car: A Symposium on Hamaguchi’s Cross-Media Vehicle
18/06/2022 @Symposium Space, Raiosha, Hiyoshi Campus, Keio University (and via Zoom)
Keynote Speakers

D. A. Miller (The University of California, Berkeley)

Drive My Car Drives Me Crazy
D.A. Miller was for many years the John F. Hotchkis Professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he taught literature and film. His numerous publications on film include the

BFI Classics volume on 8½ (new edition, 2022), Second Time Around: From Art House to

DVD (2021), and Hidden Hitchcock (2016). A collection of his essays on gay-themed

movies is forthcoming in Italian under the title Bellissimo: Il film a tema gay. He is a memberof the American Academy.

Ayako Saito (Meiji Gakuin University, Japan)
Who Drives His Narrative: Women, Psychoanalysis, and Cartography in Drive My Car
Ayako Saito is a professor in the Department of Art Studies, Faculty of Letters, at Meiji
Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in film studies. Her publications

include: “Hitchcock’s Trilogy: A Logic of Mise-en-Scène” (Endless Night: Parallel Histories,

Cinema and Psychoanalysis, University of California Press, 1999), “Politics of Crying and

Reclaiming Women’s Public Sphere” (Senses of Cinema, 2003), “Reading as Woman: The
Collaboration of Ayako Wakao and Masumura Yasuzo” (Reclaiming the Archive: Feminismand Film Theory, Wayne State University Press, 2010), "Occupation and Memory: The
Representation of Woman's Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema" (The Oxford Handbook ofJapanese Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2014), "The Power of Narrating and the Politics
of Listening in Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke's Tohoku Documentary Trilogy" (Social

Factory, the Shanghai Biennale Catalogue, 2014), and "Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women

Write and Direct" (Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity, Edinburgh

University Press, 2018). She has also edited Film and Body/Sexuality(Shinwasha, 2006), co-edited Invisibility: Representation of Invisible Race—Dismantling the Race Myth

Vol.1 (University

of

Tokyo

Press,

2016),

andco-authoredbooks,

including Wakao Ayako Film Actress (Misuzu Shobo, 2003), Male Bonding: East Asian

Cinema and Homosociality (Heibonsha, 2004), and Fighting Women: Female Action in
Japanese Cinema (Sakuhinsha, 2009).
Speakers

Ru Shou Robert Chen (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
A Return to Bazin: Uncle Vanya in Drive My Car
In “Theater and Cinema”, Andre Bazin began this seminal article by proclaiming that
“Cinema is a valid medium for a wide variety of dramatic works.” He aims to settle the dispute
between what he calls “filmed theater”, a pure recording of stage play, and “cinematographic
theater”, theater work wisely employed by film director as a part of mise-en-scene in a film.
Bazin’s discussion of theater and cinema can be applied as case studies to the films of Ryusuke
Hamaguchi, who loves to incorporate theater work as a part of narrative structure. In Asako I& II (2018), for example, a performance of The Wild Duck by Ibsen was stopped because of

the earthquake. And in Drive My Car (2021), more than one third of the story centers aroundtable read and rehearsing of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

As Hamaguchi expressed in an interview, he found a strong connection between the world of

Kafuku, the main character in Drive My Car, and that of Uncle Vanya, while adopting theshort story of the same title by Haruki Murakami into his script. In this paper, I would like toelaborate on the significance of the play-within-film, Uncle Vanya, and how the text reflects
every wounded soul directly or indirectly related with the production of the theater
performance in the film. And most importantly, by returning to Bazin, this paper hopes toshed light on the reason how the themes of regret and redemption in Drive My Car find echoes
in Uncle Vanya and win its appealing power over Asian as well as global audiences.

Ru-shou Robert Chen is a Professor at the Department of Radio-TV, National Chengchi

University, Taiwan. His publications include Looking at Screen Darkly: One Hundred Years

Reflections on Taiwan Cinema (in Chinese, 2013), and the Chinese translation of LumiereGalaxy (2021) by Francesco Casetti. His research interests are Taiwan cinema, film theory,
and Walter Benjamin.

Kosuke Fujiki(Okayama University of Science, Japan)
Hear the Other Sing: The Construction and Acceptance of Otherness in Drive My Car
Although the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19 has largely shut down access across national
borders since around the spring of 2020, Japanese cinema witnessed in 2021 a handful of

productions filmed in South Korea. Both The Cursed Sanctuary X (Seichi X, Irie Yū, 2021)
and The Asian Angel (Ajia no tenshi, Ishii Yūya, 2021) were shot and are set entirely in South

Korea, with Japanese visitors and expatriates as their protagonists. Whereas the former wasfilmed in September 2019, prior to the pandemic, the filming of the latter from February to
March 2020 coincided with the spread of COVID-19 in the country, which posed a challenge
to the filmmakers as some locations became unavailable during the shoot. Japan’s contender

for the Oscars 2022, Drive My Car (Doraibu mai kā, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2021), was affected
more heavily by the pandemic. Busan was initially chosen as the main filming location;
however, the filming in March 2020 was suspended until November, with the location having
been changed to Hiroshima. The remnant of Hamaguchi’s original plan can be traced in thefilm’s South Korean cast members and the brief epilogue shot in South Korea.
Approaching the question of understanding the Other in different ways, these three films canbe situated within the context of Japan’s strained relationship with its East Asian neighbours
throughout the 2010s. Even though the Korean elements may be minimal among these films,

Drive My Car responds to its socio-political background through its construction of Otherness
with the use of voice and the multiplicity of languages, as well as through its dramatised
confrontation with and eventual acceptance of the Self and the Other. The characters’ intense
remorse for their past, a theme which is nearly absent in Murakami’s stories from which thefilm derives, not only underscores the characters’ introspection but also opens up possibilities
for an allegorical reading of Hamaguchi’s film. By examining the film’s narrative,
cinematography and audio-visual motifs, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the theme of
the Other is developed in Drive My Car, and then elucidate its significance within the current
situation in East Asia.

Kosuke Fujiki is Lecturer in English Linguistics at Okayama University of Science. He earned
his PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London, where he completed his thesis on the postreversion Okinawan cinema. His research interests include contemporary East Asian cinemas,
film adaptation, and the representation of memory and history in cinema.

Hironori Itoh (Kansai University, Japan)
All the World’s a Stage, Rotating with Sound: Motives of Rotation and Sound in Drive

My CarJapanese director Sho Miyake presents several interesting thoughts on Drive My Car(Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021): in a trilogy discussion with Hamaguchi, Miyake claims, "I reallyfelt at home on the rotating earth, that is, the feeling that the world is in motion every
moment". The phrase of "the rotating earth" may seem relatively abrupt; however, it issuggestive and constitutes the essence of the film because rotation is an important motif in

Drive My Car.

In the original novel entitled "Drive My Car" by Haruki Murakami, the expression related torotation appears toward the end of the novel: "He could only make out a slight gradation in

the engine’s hum." If the original text is translated into English, "the engine's hum" denotes"the sound of an engine revving". In Japanese, however, the word kaiten(回転) is used to both
describe rotation and revving. In the novel, the name of the wife of protagonist Kafuku
remains unknown. However, in the eponymous film, she is given the name Oto, which means"sound" in Japanese. The words rotation or revving and sound precisely play the same
important role in the film.
Moreover, car tires, cassette tapes, and vinyl records appear as props related to rotation andsound. In this presentation, I shall demonstrate the manner in which these visual and acoustic
elements cinematically depict Kafuku's circumstances and the changes in his state of mind.
Kafuku drives a Saab 900, a vintage car that is no longer manufactured. Cassette tapes andvinyl records are media from an older era. They can be considered analogies to films of thefilm era. Through Drive My Car, a film of the digital age, Hamaguchi declares not only therebirth of Kafuku but also the renewal of the film medium itself.

Hironori Itoh is a film researcher and critic. He earned his MA in the Graduate School of
Human and Environmental Studies of Kyoto University. He specializes in the film andcinematic style of Yasujiro Ozu and is also interested in contemporary Japanese film andanimation. He is the author of the book Film as Liberal Arts for Work and Life (PHP
Institute,2021).

Hwang Kyunmin (Meiji Gakuin Institute of Language and Culture, Japan)
Beyond Borderlines: On Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car
The red Saab 900, the car Kafuku, the main character, drives, is another protagonist of Drive

My Car (2021). Hamaguchi's intention to switch the yellow convertible in Murakami's

original story to a vivid red one was successful, showing the scenery of Japan through arunning car and making a sharp contrast with the green landscape. His prominent use of the
car as an essential visual element is reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s films in that its
presence is more keenly felt than that of any other character during the three-hour runningtime.
In the interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Hamaguchi explained that he referred to
Kiarostami’s works when he shot a lot of car scenes. “There’s this Iranian artist called
Kiarostami, and his films have very striking scenes where there’s a driver and the surroundings
are changing a lot. And at the same time, the relationships between the characters arechanging as well. I began to think that this image was somehow a condensation of life”.

Drive My Car has resonances to the characteristics of Kiarostami's films in that they capture
the outside scenery through the movement of cars. These images are embraced by thedevelopment of narrative and the theme of the film. At the same time, however, Hamaguchi
differs from Kiarostami by elaborating the movement and closed space of a car that crosses(symbolically) physical and psychological boundaries. In this paper I aim to examine the ways
in which Hamaguchi visualizes and resolves the trauma of characters by focusing on the
representation of the Red Saab and the act of moving beyond borderlines. Furthermore, Iwould like to see how the film gains sympathy from contemporary Asian audiences suffering
trauma in the Covid-19 era.

Hwang Kyunmin earned a Ph.D in the Department of Art Studies at Meiji Gakuin University
and her dissertation examined the representations of Women in the Films of Imamura Shohei.
Her main areas of interest are history, gender and genre in Japanese and Korean cinema. She
participated in “Transition and Actual Condition of the Studio System in Postwar JapaneseFilms: An Empirical study of Nikkatsu Romanporno”(2019) as Project Researcher, and her
publications include “The Spatial

Embodiment of Gaze and Aspects of Women’s

Oppression in The Pornographers” (2017, Cineforum), “The Cinematic Landscape of Korea

Changed by Iwai Shunji's Love Letter” (2020, Kawadeshobo) and “Evolving Heroines:
Transition of Women’s Representation in Korean Drama” (2021, etc.books).

Motonori Sato (Keio University, Japan)
To the Ends of Adaptation: The Beginnings of Translation in Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II
and Drive My Car
It may sound counterintuitive to regard Hamaguchi’s two recent films, Asako I & II (2018)and Drive My Car (2021), as “translations”. Indeed, given that the former is based on Tomoka

Shibasaki’s novel Netemo Sametemo (2010) and that the latter is based on Haruki Murakami’s
short story “Drive My Car” (2014), it would make more sense to call them “adaptations”

rather than “translations”. However, despite the rise of adaptations studies, the conceptionsof adaptation as discussed in the academy—in which most of the arguments centre on
faithfulness and freedom—do not seem to provide an insight into the unique experiments that
Hamaguchi began to undertake with Happy Hour (2015). What Hamaguchi calls the “Italianreading method” is an eminent example. His inspiration is a French documentary film La

Direction d'acteur par Jean Renoir (1968), in which Renoir asks an actor to read her lines

without putting any emotion into them. In Drive My Car Hamaguchi demonstrates this Italian
method in multiple ways, asking his characters/actors to read their lines literally, regardlessof whether they are Murakami’s, Chekhov’s, or Hamaguchi’s words. I will argue that his Italianreading method, that is, his stubborn commitment to the original words, offers a new way ofthinking about “translation”, one akin to what Walter Benjamin theorised in his essay “TheTask of the Translator”: “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does
not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, toshine upon the original all the more fully”. The key to real translation is, according to
Benjamin, “a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be
the primary element of the translator.”

Motonori Sato is Professor of English at Keio University, Japan. His publications on literatureand cinema include The British New Wave (in Japanese, Minerva, 2012) and Graham Greene,a Cinematic Life (in Japanese, Keio University Press, 2018, Winner of the Association for theStudies of Culture and Representation Award).

Ryohei Tomizuka (Kanagawa University, Japan)
Looking and Touching: Bodies in Drive My Car
A naked woman, shot backlit in bed before dawn, is talking to a man. She seems to be tellingthe story of a girl who comes to mind while they are having sexual intercourse. In Drive My

Car (2021), which opens with this truly striking scene, Ryusuke Hamaguchi introduces two
new elements into his film that relate to the body.
First, the love scenes, which he has rarely featured in his other works, stand out in the earlypart of the film, which depicts the lives of Kafuku and Oto in Tokyo. In these scenes, a man
and a woman are naked, embracing each other face-to-face and engaging in physical contact.
However, each of their gazes shifts to the space behind the other, and they do not actually
look at each other directly. This is quite bizarre, considering the fact that the Japanese word
“maguwai” (目合ひ, which literally means “eye contact”) metaphorically refers to sexualintercourse. Such scenes appear repeatedly in the part of the film set in Tokyo. In these scenes,
we are made aware of the disconnection between the two, rather than the intimacy of theirrelationship.
For instance, take the scene of Oto’s affair, which Kafuku witnesses by chance. In thissequence, her face, which is embraced by the man, is staring straight ahead instead of back at

him, and she comes into Kafuku’s view through the mirror. Just as Kafuku’s gaze isunreciprocated here, in the story that Oto sometimes tells Kafuku after sex, the female student
can only secretly break into the house of the boy she has feelings for. In another love scene,in which Kafuku and Oto have returned home after their daughter’s memorial service, theirexpressionless faces, like the Noh mask, are captured from opposite angles as they sit on thesofa and embrace each other, as if to show their distance. The next morning, Oto collapses,
leaving behind a riddle of pensive words.
The second half of the film focuses on the rehearsals of the multilingual play by the cast fromseven different countries and the scenes in which Kafuku and his personal driver Misaki drive
back and forth between the theater and the place where he is staying. In the beginning, they
can only glance furtively at each other through the rearview mirror, a pattern of action that
resembles Kafuku’s relationship with Oto. What triggers a change in their relationship is an
outdoor rehearsal scene that Misaki observes for the first time. In this sequence, Sonya, played
by Lee Yoo-na (Park Yu-rimu), who communicates in Korean sign language, and Yelena,
played by Janice Chang (Sonia Yuan), who uses Chinese, touch each other. The emotional
interaction between the two is brought out by the power of sign language, which Hamaguchi,
who has always focused on the voices of actors, adopts for the first time in this film.
This presentation will trace how the two motifs of sign language, which again plays animportant role in the climax of the story, and the love scene in the early part of the film reenact
and alter the themes of looking and touching that Hamaguchi has been pursuing, while also
referring to his previous works in the process. In so doing, I will reconsider the uniquesignificance of Drive My Car, which can also be interpreted as a re-staging, the “second timearound” of his earlier film Intimacies (2013) with a variety of innovations.

Ryohei Tomizuka is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kanagawa
University, Japan. His publications on literature and cinema include “From Grief to ‘Practical

Power’: Moods and Affects in ‘Experience’” (The Journal of the American Literature Societyof Japan, vol. 20, 2022), “Parlor and Study: Emerson’s Domestic Economy in Representationsof Space” (in Japanese, The American Review, vol. 54, 2020, Winner of the Makoto Saito

Award), and “The Method of Asako I & II” (in Japanese, Eureka, no. 50, vol. 12, 2018). His

research interests include American literature, film studies, and literary theory.

Mary Shuk-han Wong (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
Sadness in Drive My Car
It had already passed midnight when the film ended. Audience in this preview show remained
silent while leaving the cinema. Under the dark sky of Hong Kong, I had to catch my last bus
home but I chose not to run. There were some heavy things inside my mind. Yusuke Kafuku,
Misaki Watari and Oto Kafuku all strick me by their glooming faces. Even the playful Koji
Takatsuki, his glooming face in the car, shot by long take, creates a strong emotion on me.
What do these faces tell? Sadness, without doubt.

Drive My Car is a film about sadness. It started with Yusuke Kafuku’s sudden discovery of
Oto’s affair and together with her sudden death, give Yusuke a mix feeling of hate and selfblame. Yet this is just the beginning. From his personal sadness, we gradually deeply visit
other people’s sadness including Misaki’s, Koji’s and Lee Yoon-a’s. Drive My Car is not a film

only about individual sadness but aims to connect sadness in the contemporary world. It starts
with a domestic sadness in a middle-class Japanese family. Yet with Yusuku’s road trip, hissadness is connected with other classes, gender and people of other nationalities. The filmwith its non-dramatic narrative brings out a strong humanistic message that in today’s world,
ironically, people are united with sadness. Textually, sadness or strike to start a new life arealso common grounds to connect Haruki Murakami’s short story and Anton Chekhov’s play.
What sadness is the saddest? Is Kafuku’s sadness looks junior than Misaki’s sadness? There

are different layers of sadness in the film, yet it does not aim to rank sadness. For Drive My

Car, sadness is not cured by happiness. One’s sadness is being “cured” by others’ sadness
through self-reflection. With the tragic childhood of Misaki, her solemn expression andmonotone action throughout the film could be seen as a criticism towards the middle-classmale artist who looks egoistic. Not to say the dumb Lee Yoon-a who could be regarded as thespiritual lead of the film. Yet it is only through this process that Kafuku could be “cured”.
Sadness in Drive My Car is represented in a very control narrative style. I hardly remembereda single scene of crying when I left the cinema. Drive My Car has constructed a world of
sadness that allow global audience to identify with. The film seems want to remind us thatmake sure we understand what sadness is before shedding tears.

Dr. Mary Shuk-Han Wong is a writer and comparative literature scholar. She was born andraised in Hong Kong. She is now Associate Professor in Chinese department of Lingnan
University in Hong Kong. Published widely on Hong Kong literature, film and culture. Her
major scholarly works are Feminine Writing: Cinema, Literature and Everyday Live (2014)

and Hong Kong Cinema: Writer, literature and cinema (2013). Major edited works are ‘Hong

Kong Literature and Culture of 1950s series’ (2013) and Hong Kong: 1960s (2020). Major

creative works include literary essays How to Live the Sad Days (2022), Against the Grain(2017), From Kafka (2015) and short story collection Surviving Central (2013). She is the co-producer and literary advisor of the documentaries 1918: Liu Yichang (2015) and Boundary:

Leung Ping Kwan (2015).