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Tony Takitani
Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's 1995 short story of the same name, which was published in The New Yorker in April 2002. Ichikawa uses much of the original Japanese text, written entirely in the third person and past tense, as a voiceover narration. The unseen male narrator tells the story of the oddly named Tony Takitani, who lived a lonely life until, in middle age, he fell in love with and married a lovely young woman named Eiko. At first, it was a perfect union, but gradually, the very thing that initially attracted him-her passion for clothes and the striking way she wore them-came to dominate her existence and their life together. She became addicted to designer wear on a scale that would put Carrie Bradshaw to shame. Eiko's accidental death-not a result of her shopping addiction itself but, rather, of her conflicted attempt to curb it-returned Tony Takitani to the isolation in which he had spent his first 40-odd years.
Only a few pages long, the story spans Japan's history from the end of WWII to the millennium and is constructed so that, in screenplay...