The Japanese Author Behind ‘Bullet Train’ Is OK That the Film Isn’t So Japanese

Sendai, Japan — Kotaro Isaka, one of Japan’s most popular crime thriller writers, is a self-proclaimed family. He rarely leaves Sendai, the northeastern city of Japan where he lives, and many of his books are located there.

But his 2010 novel “Bullet Train” “bullet train,” A Hollywood action movie starring Brad Pitt, Brian Tyree Henry, and Joey King, which will be released in the United States on August 5. He mainly adopted Western casts and highly stylized hyper-neon settings.

While writing the thriller “Maria Beetle” about multiple assassins trapped in the same high-speed train, Isaka created a miscellaneous crew of characters “not real people, and probably not Japanese.” , Said Isaka, 51.During a recent interview in the hotel restaurant lounge, not far from his house and just a short walk from the locals bullet train — Or Shinkansen — station. Originally published in Japan, the novel made its debut in English last year.

With its fast-paced plot, colorful assassins, high body numbers, sadistic teenage villains, and cheeky humor, Isaka always dreamed that the novel could be the ideal Hollywood movie. He said its original Japanese context was less important.

“I have no desire to make people understand Japanese literature and culture,” said Mr. Isaka. “I don’t seem to understand much about Japan either.”

Converting Ithaca’s novels into American-style action films with mixed casts from the US, UK, and Japan was part of a creative license and part of a business decision. Although manga graphic novels and anime manga are popular outside Japan, live-action movies and TV programs cast by all Japan are rarely hit internationally in recent years. Unlike South Korea’s global phenomena such as “Squid Game” and “Parasite,” Japan is an artist in recent Oscar winners such as “Drive My Car” and Cannes Palme d’Or’s anointed “Shoplifters.” Highly rated by, but rarely. Successful international entertainment.

The “bullet train” cast includes black, Latin, and Japanese actors, but Asian-American media are already complaining about whitewashing. David Inouye, Managing Director of the Japanese American Citizens Alliance, said: AsAmNews “This movie seeks to confirm the belief that the leading Asian actor can’t carry a blockbuster, despite all the recent evidence that begins with Crazy Rich Asians.‘ And it extends to “Xiangqi”. “

Isaka’s own view of his character as ethnically adaptable “provided us comfort by respecting the soul of Japan, but at the same time earned a huge giant movie star in the film. And gave it the opportunity to make it work globally, “said President Sanford Panich. Sony pictures The studio and entertainment film group behind “Bullet Train”.

For those who have experienced a severe pandemic border closure in Japan, the large number of foreigners on the train from Tokyo to Kyoto is annoying, and the movie looks little like real life. It is clear that.

“Bullet Train” director David Leitch and his screenwriter Zack Orkevic said they wanted to preserve some of the novel’s most important characters: three generations of one Japanese family. “People who haven’t necessarily seen the film will be surprised to find that the plot is about Japanese characters and their storylines getting the solution,” Orkewitz said, but the characters are central. Not in film.

However, Isaka’s novel also has a Western reference. One of the assassins is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, the details stored in the movie.

“We all wanted to make it very comprehensive and international,” he directed “Deadpool 2” and “Atomic Blonde” in two “John Wick” films. Reach, who was an executive producer, said. The diversity of the cast “just shows the strength of the original author’s work, and that this could be a story that can transcend race anyway,” he said.

At some point, the filmmaker considered changing the settings. “Maybe it’s Europe, maybe it’s another part of Asia,” said Reach. “Where can I see all these international types clashing?”

In the end, he decided, “Tokyo is the most international city of all.” (Isaka said, “I can only think of Japanese bullet trains,” because important plot points hang on trains arriving on time at various stops along the route.)

Reach wanted to shoot part of the film in Japan, but the pandemic made it impossible, and he was even more devoted to the fantastic vision created on the American sound stage. Seeing that, Isaka said he was grateful that the extreme violence of the story had been removed from all sorts of realistic settings. “I’m relieved that it’s set in the future of Japan, or like Gotham City,” he said. “It’s a world people don’t know.”

In Japan, Isaka has published more than 40 novels, many of which are bestsellers. His agent hopes that the name recognition of the “bullet train” will help enhance his work among English readers who are already familiar with Japanese entertainment through manga. Anime, Haruki Murakami, and a Japanese novelist who is a Western literary star.

Isaka, the son of the owner of an art gallery in Chiba, south of Tokyo, grew up reading mysteries and thrillers, including translations of novels by Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. He moved to Sendai to study law at Tohoku University and began writing short stories.

After graduating, he got a job as a system engineer, but woke up most of the morning before 5am to write fiction. The apartment he shared with his wife was too small to have another writing space, so he took his laptop and retracted it to a stone bench by the river near the apartment and tapped the story the night after work. There was a thing.

In 2000, his first novel, Audubon’s Prayer, won the Shincho Mystery Club Award for his scarecrow, a cat that could predict the weather, and a policeman who became a childhood bully.

Two years later, with the encouragement of his wife, he cut the code to a monthly salary. “I thought he couldn’t write great things without quitting his job and focusing on it,” he said.

Some of his novels have been featured in Japanese films, but have not been published in the United States. His translations are popular in China and South Korea.

Even before his novel was translated into English, Japanese critics discovered American, or at least Hollywood sensibility, in his work.

Book reviewer Jun Sasaki said that in some novels, the characters speak “as if they were imitating American cinematic conversations in Japanese.” “When you watch a dubbed Hollywood movie, the Japanese may sound very unnatural. That’s the way I always imagined what his book and his characters were saying.”

Yuma Terada and Ryosuke Saegusa, the founders of CTB, a leading film, production, and copyright agency for Isaka, are novel because Isaka’s work is hardly known to English readers. We integrated the copyright and asked for the translation of a few novels. Sell ​​him to Murakami as a literary cousin.

Sam Marissa, who translated “Maria Beetle,” along with another novel, “Three Assassins,” is part of a loose trilogy, and is also published in English in the United Kingdom and the United States, according to Isaka’s work. He said that crazy energy might help push the boundaries of Western stereotypes of Japanese literature. According to Marissa, English-speaking audiences often think of Japanese fiction as a woodblock print of an ukiyo-e print with “mystery like a koan.”

Former financier Terada and Kodansha’s longtime editor Saegusa, who publishes several Isaka novels, began buying Marissa’s “bullet train” manuscripts in several studios, but initially. The taker was not found. After Terada and Saegusa boiled down the plot into a five-page summary, three studios bid and Sony finally won. (Terada and Saegusa are executive producers of the film.)

Immediately after “Maria Beetle” was selected for the film, the translated novel was sold to Harville Secker, a London-based Penguin Books unit.

Publishing director Liz Foley read the manuscript during her beach vacation. “Suddenly, I was taken to this world where I felt a little calm,” she said. This book was selected by Sony at the time, but neither Leitch nor Pitt had been attached to the project yet.

So far, the English version of the “Shinkansen,” whose title has changed from the original, wasn’t a bestseller, according to Foley, but “it really sold well.”

Overlook Press, an American publisher that is part of Abrams Books, released it in the United States last August and was well received. In NPR’s “Fresh Air,” critic John Powers described “Bullet Train” as “the irresponsible joy of pure entertainment.” Both publishers publish tie-ups of the movie in the hope of capturing the afterglow of the movie.

Foreign literature is a difficult market notorious for English. However, Philip Gabriel, a longtime translator of Mr. Murakami, who translated Isaka’s three novels, hopes that the film adaptation of “Bullet Train” will appeal to other English publishers. “Name recognition would at least make publishers say,’Hey, let’s take a look at these other Isaka novels again,'” Gabriel said.

Outside the English market, Isaka’s work has undergone more screen processing.His novel “The Fool of the End” Netflix Korean Drama Series..

Mr. Isaka said that he could no longer reliably set the goal of writing six pages a day, which he set at the start as a novelist, as if his work had jumped to the world stage.

“I have already written a lot of what I intend to write,” he lamented.

He said his wife, who gave him permission to quit his job to write full-time 20 years ago, recently told him to focus on making one good novel in his fifties. Told.

“I feel light now,” he said.

Hikari HidaContribution report.