The consiencousness of contemporary japanese culture

In his collection of short stories, Murakami’s characters work in law offices, in quality control for department stores, in PR for appliance manufacturers. All are dissatisfied. Some rebel and quit their jobs; more often they escape into dream, fantasy, and even death. Paradoxically, however, as if unwilling to confront the emptiness within, they take refuge in ritual behavior and methodical attention to detail. In “The Wind-Up Birdand Tuesday’s Women” the narrator says, “Wheneverthings get in a muddle, I always iron shirts.” He does so in twelve precise steps, never deviating from the sequence.

In order to illustrate this hyper-conscientiousness to detail, I am expanding drawing upon the aesthetics of city magazines like Monocle and New York. By making use of this aesthetic, I am also taking leverage of the way city magazines glamorize and romanticize everyday life. City magazines also pay very close attention to small details of life, which is what i am trying to convey with these three book trailers. Since Murakami’s writings have been categorized time and time again as “city-novels”, I felt that this was a highly appropriate approach to take on.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to incorporate it, but I have it down now.

I will shoot bland video sequences of the things that the characters do: cooking pasta while listening to FM radio, ironing shirts, walking past a flower shop, buying groceries, taking in the laundry, etc. I will then super-impose a “city-magazine” (which i will design and print and bind) showing these same actors and same locations in a much more stylized manner, laid out in a swiss-grid. It is as if these actors are “living in a magazine”. The pages of this magazine will flip while the video clip of the actor performing mundane task runs in the background, in a frame-within-frame composition.

The red X marks the motion-video.

I have subsequently shot all the “high-gloss” video for the first Narrator’s obsession with his 12-step method of ironing shirts. These images will be made into a booklet to be used in the video.