How Haruki Murakami adaptation Drive My Car, Japan’s 2022 Oscar hope directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is steered by what characters can’t say

Winner of best screenplay at Cannes, Drive My Car tells how a theatre director’s life changes when his wife, whose sexual fantasies inspired her writing, dies

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi explains how he reinterpreted the Haruki Murakami short story it is based on and his interest in new ways of expressing emotion

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Hidetoshi Nishijima (top) and Jin Daeyeon in a still from Drive My Car, Japan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film award at the 2022 Oscars.

Published: 7:45pm, 7 Dec 2021Updated: 11:18pm, 7 Dec 2021

Japanese writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has had a remarkable year, releasing two film festival favourites, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car.

The first, a collection of three short episodes, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. Hamaguchi and his co-writer Takamasa Oe then won the best screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Drive My Car, which has since been selected as Japan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at next year’s Academy Awards.

Adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car focuses on theatre director Yusuke Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima), whose life changes dramatically when his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) dies.

At nearly three hours, the film is a deep dive into complex relationships surrounding Kafuku and his wife, whose sexual fantasies inspired her writing for television.

Hamaguchi’s films have an organic, free-flowing feel, as if they were improvised on the spot. But apart from some workshop scenes in his 2015 drama Happy Hour, he says performers in his films essentially repeat exactly what’s written in his scripts.