Aoyama wins Mishima

[Joseph Murphy]

On 18 May 2001, Aaron wrote:

>The publishing house Shincho announced that Aoyama Shinji has been
>awarded the 14th Mishima Yukio Award for Literature for the novelization
>of his film Eureka.  The prize was also awarded to Nakahara Masaya for
>his "Arayuru basho ni hanataba ga..."  The jury included Tsutsui
>Yasutaka, Fukuda Kazuya and Shimada Masahiko.
>
>The URL for the prize home page (Japanese) is:
>http://webshincho.com/mishimasho/
>
>Though they haven't posted the results yet.
>
>I can't think of another case of a novelization of a film winning a
>literary prize in Japan.  Can anyone?

I was waiting to see if anyone would answer Aaron.  I think it's a question
not just if there is a precedent for this in Japan, but anywhere.  Let's
pose it as a question.  Though adapting novels has long been a source for
stories and a way movies borrow some cultural legitimacy (a point
prominently featured in credits), the novelization of a movie has always
been one of the most despised genres, at least in English language, rushed
out by no-name writers on contract as soon as a movie looks like a hit,
with pulp-production values, on sale at the supermarket with the Harlequin
romances, disappearing utterly as soon as the movie drops out of sight, a
brand expansion tactic, as Aoyama implies, on the order of Aladdin
lunchboxes.

There are ways to theorize this directionality in terms of cultural
legitimacy, the cultural field, in terms of a "concretization" inherent in
cinema, etc.  But just as an initial pass, to get a grip on the phenomenon,
whereas I would bet anyone can name ten top-grossing or prize-winning film
adaptations of novels off the top of their head (start with Gone with the
Wind, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Double Indemnity, Scarlett Letter,
Tarzan, Cape Fear (1961 and 1991 versions, from John McDonald's The
Executioners, 1957), The Yearling... Taki no shiraito, Narayama Bushiko,
Sorekara, Shi no toge, the 12 films in Keiko McDonald's new book, Kitchen,
Bedtime Eyes, Tsugumi, Ring, Rasen, and on and on), I wonder if you went
over best-seller lists for the last 50 years if you could find one
novelization of a film on the fiction top-ten list, let alone winning a
prize.  I don't know, I'm actually wondering, as I haven't done it, but I
doubt there would be many.

Aoyama may just be a very talented writer, i.e., this can be explained as
an exception.  Or it's possible that the prize committee is just trying to
needle the pretensions of the literary world (which has refused to award
the Akutagawa prize a couple of times due to "lack of quality"), i.e., they
are being irreverent.  But Aoyama seems to be part of a group of young
artists and intellectuals theorizing a thing called "Over-visualization,"
including Azuma Hiroki, who did the book on Derrida's "Postal" period, Abe
Kazushige, a novelist (_La Nuit Americaine_ (1994); _Individual Projection_
(1997)) and the "Superflat" people.   (see _Fukashina mono no sekai_ (On
Over-Visualized World) by Azuma Hiroki, et al., Asahi, 2000; and maybe the
journal _Interconnections_ to get an idea), and this fits.  i.e., this
strikes me as a potentially new development, and may signal as much as
anything the death of literature (and I mean that in the positive sense).

It would be nice to pool some more data, though, to see what kinds of
precedents there are for this.  Does anyone recall other instances of
directors writing novels based on a prior film?  Not "behind the scenes" or
director's accounts, but a novel with a "based on the film by..."
acknowledgement.  In any tradition you're familiar with?
yours,
J. Murphy


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Joseph A. Murphy				        o
Dept. of African & Asian Languages and Lit	        o
University of Florida			        o
Gainesville, FL  32611-5565			        o
website:  <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jmurphy>        o
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