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Cinematization of works at the Japan Literature Prize
Author | Kelp Island
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For those who do publishing, selling a film adaptation is indeed a big deal. Sometimes we would make a special cover for the release of the movie, or put a suitable display board in the bookstore.
On the eve of the release of "There is always the densest blue in the night sky" in May 2017, a special exhibition area for the original poetry collection was set up in the Kiyokuniya Shinjuku store.
In an era when visual language is becoming more and more important, cinema does allow the story itself to be spread more widely than words. Isn't it always about IP, the reason why Keigo Higashino has the courage to resist the self-report of juvenile delinquents (the "Song of the Drunken Rose Murder Incident") to call out his own publishing house, in addition to the unshakable annual book sales, but also because of the considerable benefits brought by the film and television matrix. In this economic stance, literature and cinema do not seem to be able to obtain a reciprocal relationship. But that never got in the way of the old saying "not as good as the original," the so-called "best literature is something that movies can't replicate."
But this binary contrast, I myself resented very much, each medium has no inherent advantages and disadvantages. In turn, I can also say that the best film language is also impossible to simulate in words, and this expression is unsolicited. Literary production and film production, the different kinds of work in these two cultural chains, are not one-way benefits from one party to the other, but must be conspiratorial. They carry very different essences and cannot be judged rudely.
Next to the main store of The Three Provinces Hall, you can see the cover of the 2012 novel "Who" because of the cinematization
If we pick up the top ten of the year in Japan's "Movie Shunbun" in recent years, we will find that many works have a mother book of novels.
Like what
2013 "Chronicles of Boats", "Goodbye Valley", "Cannibalism"
2014 "Only Here to Shine", "Paper Moon"
My Man
2015 "Journey to the Shore", "Solomon's Perjury"
2016 "Fury", "Crossing the Fence", "Creepy"
Wait, wait, too much.
Toyoichi, an older generation of Japanese directors who have lived through the studio and screenwriting era, see this and a large number of manga adaptations as a fall after the loss of originality of kuniwa paintings, but some people want to clarify how novel production interacts positively with films. At this time, literary awards, a topic of great commercial value in the field of literature, are particularly important.
1. Cluttered award titles
Japan is a country of books. They quickly completed the modernization of printing and publishing, founded a number of literary magazines/societies that we are familiar with, and have developed to this day, such as "New Wave" (1904), "Spring and Autumn of Literature and Art" (1923), "Literary Circle" (1933). Publishing houses carry literary magazines, set up literary awards, and launch libraries, stimulating the media and cultivating readers.
The inaugural issue of Literary Circles in 1933 and the latest issue in September 2017
Combing through the list of Japanese literary prizes is an almost impossible task, and there are hundreds of articles on Wikipedia. I am afraid that no country has been so "quick to make a quick profit" as Japan's management of literary awards: hundreds of awards have almost made the literary world work all year round, and publishers, bookstores, authors, and readers have been attached to this system for a long time and skillfully, forming a solid chain.
For most writers, although the award is outside the rules of literature, the noise outside the life of writing, it cannot be escaped, and many of them have a ambivalent mood of desire and disdain. Cultural critic Hiroki Higashi and writer Yasutaka Tsutsui were extremely sarcastic, and also made the movie "Literary Murder Incident" (大いなる助走), which he considered to be a low means of selling books.
For readers, the literary prize is a convenient shortcut for us to directly and efficiently select words, even if it is clear that such a way is often unfair, but we must hand over the choice of words in a busy life. Literary awards are not so much about literature as they are about business, they are also the smell of filmmakers in the literary field.
There are many classification coordinates for Japanese literature awards, and most of what we are talking about is a business award, while official encouraging awards are excluded. For example, the "Art Selection Award" set up by the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the "Japan Academy of Art Award" of the Japan Academy of Arts generally do not involve the commercial chain but are purely aimed at rewarding high-quality works in the industry, which is equivalent to giving some honorary and economic returns to those engaged in literary and artistic creation.
The genealogy of commercial awards is much more complex, with pure literature and popular literature each having their own boundaries, and within the two territories there are newcomer awards and non-newcomer awards, and there are open and non-public recruitment in the newcomer awards - the context is complex and the effects are different. In 2014, the Asahi Shimbun made an evaluation of the Business Literature Prize, listing the following pyramids.
In addition to this, there are many authorities in various fields:
[Popular Literature]
Speculative Fiction: Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, Benge Reasoning Award, Edogawa Rambling Award
Science Fiction: Japan SF Award, Nebula Award, Star New One Award
Historical Fiction: Yoshihide Nakayama Literature Award, Historical Group Portrait Award, Asahi Period Novel Award
Comprehensive: Naoki Prize, Eiji Yoshikawa Prize, Yamamoto Goro Award
[Pure Literature]
Non-Newcomer Award (awarded to a stalwart writer): Noma Literature Award, Junichiro Tanizaki Award, Yasunari Kawabata Award*
Newcomer Award
- Non-public Newcomer Award (closed call for papers, selected from published newcomer works): Wasagawa Prize, Yukio Mishima Award, Noma Literary Newcomer Award**
-Public Newcomer Award (Public Call for Papers to Select Winners): Group Portrait Newcomer Literature Award, Waseda Literature Award, New Wave Newcomer Award***
*Because of the strict restrictions on who to be awarded, when asked what the most authoritative literary award is, literary enthusiasts often do not answer the newcomer awards such as Wasagawa, but instead mention the stalwart writer awards such as the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize.
** Public newcomer award is undoubtedly the best weapon for literary lovers to knock on the door of the literary world, Haruki Murakami is to use "And Listen to the Wind" to win the group portrait newcomer award into the literary world, it is worth mentioning that the group portrait newcomer award is not only authoritative in the field of literature but also very influential in literary criticism.
It is sponsored by rivals "Literature and Art Spring and Autumn" magazine and "New Wave Society". Because of mishima's extraordinary association with the Shinchosha before his death, most of the works were published by Shincho, and his posthumous work "The Sea of Plenty" was also serialized in "Shincho". In order to launch a literary award that competed with Wasagawa and Naoki, Shincho set up its own Newcomer Award in the name of Yukio Mishima and Nagorō Yama, but as a result, its influence could not compete with Wasagawa and Naoki.
The prosperity of literary awards shows the openness of the literary world, the possibility of entering this industry, and it is equivalent to the huge volume of adapting the mother book.
2. Text and image invade each other - Naoki and Wasagawa
The innate "genre literature" physique of reasoning, science fiction and historical fiction will naturally become the focus of film adaptation, they have some common characteristics to be selected, and have formed a very smooth adaptation habit. The annual Benge Reasoning Award and the Edogawa Chaos Award are among the biggest filmmakers in film adaptation. Compared with this, the comprehensive literature award and the pure literature award with more uncontrollable aspects will pose more challenges to film adaptation.
Even if old-school literature lovers always have to show their wisdom by suppressing Wasagawa and Naoki, they can't deny their outstanding top influence, which determines that they will become an important reference for film adaptations. The most well-known Japanese literature prizes in Japan are, of course, the "Wasagawa Prize" and the "Naoki Prize".
Small signs for bookstores after the two awards were announced in 2017
Both are newcomer awards and are awarded twice a year (March, September). "Wasagawa" is taken from the surname of Ryunosuke Wasagawa, and "Naoki" is taken from Naoki Thirty-Five, but these two awards were not established by themselves, but by Kikuchi Hiroshi, who was the president of the magazine "Spring and Autumn of Literature" in 1935, to commemorate these two friends. From the very beginning, Kikuchi said, "Whether it is the Wasagawa Prize or the Naoki Prize, it is all for the promotion of the magazine, and I am blunt about this." It is time for us, who always introduce international prizes such as The Nobel Prize, to establish an authoritative literary prize belonging to Japan."
At the beginning of its establishment, the Wasagawa Prize was the highlight of the field of pure literature, and the Naoki Prize was a bellwether in the field of popular literature. But in fact, this distinction has become more and more blurred since then, such as the pure literary writer Inofushi Trout who won the Naoki Prize, the Matsumoto Kiyoharu of the Social Reasoning School who won the Wasagawa Prize, and nagai Ryuo who was originally shortlisted for the Naoki Prize and later won the Wasagawa Prize. After the rapid popularization of film and television in Japan, the entertainment choices of the civic class increased, and literature in this competition more naturally tended to be serious and profound subjects, making the boundary between popular literature and pure literature even more unstable. Entertainment and literature have always been propositions throughout the history of both. If you comb through the data, you will find that in the last carnival of the bubble economy in the 1980s, the Wasagawa Prize was vacant for several consecutive years.
Looking at the film adaptations in the history of the Naoki Prize and the Wasagawa Prize, two of the most important works are the most important. The former is Shoru Nosaka's 1967 award for Grave of the Fireflies, and the latter is Shintaro Ishihara's 1955 award for Season of the Sun. The films adapted from both works have caused a phenomenal wave of movie viewing to some extent. But since I am very ambivalent about the idea of "Grave of the Fireflies", let me talk about the mythical "Season of the Sun" here.
In 1955, Ishihara Shintaro's short story "Seasons of the Sun" won the Wasagawa Prize in the literary magazine "Literary Circles", and in January 1956, it was quickly filmed in May of that year, and achieved unprecedented success. The story tells the story of bad high school students on the Shonan Coast who squander their youth in alcohol, PhDs, women, and fights. Intense hormonal pungency runs through the novel, accompanied by explicit sexual depictions and violent scenes. In addition to the bravado of writing, the most important point is to provide post-war young people with a sad and restrained lifestyle different from their parents. In the process of winning the "Literary Newcomer Award" and the "Wasagawa Award", the novel has been mired in a whirlpool of praise and criticism, with Furuo Sato being a staunch opponent and Yukio Mishima being a willing supporter.
However, among the many storms surrounding this novel, the most relevant to the film directly gave birth to the "YingHua Ethics Committee" (Ying Lun). After the unprecedented success of "Season of the Sun", a reporter for "Weekly Tokyo" Came up with the term "Sun Clan". Used to describe the summer seashore, a young man caught in disorderly pleasures. After the release of the "Season of the Sun" movie, Shintaro Ishihara's "Execution Room" and "Crazy Fruit" were successively filmed, and this series of film works was naturally called "Sun Family Movie". Because of the cross-era sex-related scenes in the film (such as breaking the paper door with a male root), theaters around the world independently implemented the "minors are prohibited from entering" rule, which became a social phenomenon for a time. In order to deal with the various problems arising from the "Sun Family Film", a third party outside the film industry joined in, which is now the prototype of Yinglun.
Thanks to the film's enduring influence, today's Tease Coast also stands a monument to the "Season of the Sun" .
The 1950s were also an era when fiction could unleash a national wave of popular culture. If we pull the camera back to the present, it is difficult to imagine such a fanatical cultural phenomenon that originated in fiction until Naoki Yoshiyoshi's "Spark" appeared. In the first half of 2015, the winner of the Wasagawa Prize, Yuji, led a wave of reading in Japan as an artist, and many Japanese bunko books now have the words recommended by Youji printed on their waist covers. The novel's influence on popular culture is simply changed by the different identities of Shintaro Ishihara and Naoki Akayoshi.
In the past 10 years, the works that have been filmed continuously by the Wasagawa and Naogi Awards have more or less carried the temperament of "artistic drama films", and it seems unlikely that they will impact the shocking results in the theater, and these adaptations have entered a more peaceful dialogue between words and movies. Directors can't let go of the temperament of the literary work itself, and Kazuki Sakuraba's film of the same name, which has won awards in Japan with its impactful opening, has won various awards in Japan; And Tanaka's "Eat Together" has also been faithfully reproduced. But sometimes it is also necessary to castrate the original work helplessly, and Kenta Nishimura's "Hard Train" encounters such "softening", which stains its own nihilistic temperament with a little soft light, although this soft light is very short-lived. Wasagawa and Naoki themselves blurred the boundaries between so-called popular literature and pure literature, and simultaneously tended to produce within the literary field, and the films based on these works also returned to the film more introvertedly.
The relationship between Wasagawa and Naoki and the film is more based on the director's personal preferences and choices.
After the 2000s Wasagawa and Naogi Awards, the filmization is not fully recommended
3. Out of the bookstore out of the best-selling film - The Honya Awards
In addition to the two annual literary events of Wasagawa and Naoki, the "Honya Awards" also have a deep relationship with movies. However, the Honya Awards have become the topic of discussion with the 90% filmization rate after the establishment, that is, participating in this kind of interaction from a more industry perspective.
The Honya Awards were founded in 2004 and are announced every April to "Create Bestsellers from the Store". Unlike the general literary awards, which invite judges to participate, they are decided by the vote of ordinary clerks working in bookstores across the country. "Honya" means "bookstore" in Japanese. As of 2014, the first ten first-place works were all visualized or mangaized (8 movies, 1 TV series, 1 manga), and the filmization rate of even non-first-place works was as high as 50%. Therefore, it is called the "Steady Literary Award". Film critic Michihiro Akii explains, "Because the Honya Awards reward books that bookstore clerks really want to sell, the results tend to be close to real readers, making people feel intimate and entertaining, so they are more likely to be movieized." ”
If we make a list of the winners of the Honya Awards for the years, it will surely make fans feel very close, and more importantly, almost all of these films have won the ideal word of mouth.
From this list, it is clear that the winning works of the Honya Awards are more "readable" (it is worth noting that Onda Hashi has won the top prize for the second time, and has become the only writer to win both the Naoki Prize and the Honya Prize for the same work). The film adaptations of these novels give full play to the advantages of commercial films, almost all of which have fascinating stories and are the embodiment of the high standard of contemporary bang painting drama films. The "best-selling film attribute" carried by the Honya Awards itself has been continuously reinforced in a spiral after 10 years of operation. People will walk into the theater because of the phrase "The works that are accepted by the Honya Awards are screened", and the filmmakers will also choose the script because of this label.
The interaction between the Honya Awards and the movie is perhaps the most comfortable mode of interaction between the two. With the burden of "good film insurance" tied, it is undoubtedly a good thing that the "Honya Film" will invisibly prompt the "Honya Film" to place itself in a higher evaluation standard. But some people will also worry about whether this will affect the bookstore clerks to unconsciously internalize "suitable for movies" into a voting criterion to ensure the absolute advantage of the Honya Awards in this data. For the award-winning writers, they have also begun to reject their novels from being automatically recognized as "cinematic stories", and This year's award-winning Onda Lu has clearly said that he will consider the film very carefully. (Although I think it will be cinematic in the end, because this story about music is really suitable for the multi-media form of film))
Whether the super high rate of cinematization can be continued after the Honya Awards is probably not certain.
4. Literary Award for Film - Japan Entertainment Novel Award
Having said all this, in fact, aside from the literary awards, the relationship between Japanese writers and movies has always been very close.
In the 1920s, the Japanese already owned movies like "Crazy Page.". This experimental film adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata's novel has been called "a landmark masterpiece of new sensational cinema", and was ranked 4th in the 1926 Shunbun and was one of the 200 Japanese business cards. Kawabata and Iisogasanosuke used expensive investment at the time, and the box office was dismal, making it the only film attempt of the New Sensations.
In that era of silent films, rough film carried raw montages, the defamiliarized sensory attributes of Japanese noh dramas and psychoanalytic psychological drama editing, the dismantling of literary narratives and the fullness of visual language, so that this film represented a certain peak in my heart in a sense. This peak is not the degree of completion of the film itself, but how Kawabata and a group of writers who promote neo-sensory literature try to make a connection between words and images when the film is not so mature, which I think is the meaning of "adaptation". Instead of "reproducing", not "copying", but visually reorganizing the core of the text. Literature and film should interact with each other while maintaining strong independence from each other. But one thing in recent years has made me feel that the literary awards and film exchanges as an industry have fallen into a skew.
In 2012, a literary prize called the Japan Entertainment Fiction Awards was launched. The award is characterized by the selection of "original novels of the film". The chairman of the censorship committee appointed producers and directors who have produced high-quality films in recent years, such as Yuji Ishida, who participated in "Confessions" and "Cicada on the Eighth Day" as a producer in the first term, and Yuji Ishida, who won the Academy Award for Best Film for two consecutive years, and Shu Kubota, who produced "Whale and Tiger and Fish" and "Ranger Sword Heart" in the second year. The manuscript is a new work for public offering, and the winner is selected by the committee. It has been held for 4 sessions.
In my opinion, this kind of literary award, which directly uses "original film novels" as a selling point, seems to make both movies and novels lose their charm at the same time. The film to adapt the text must be refracted, injecting the language of the film into the scene of the text, so that the two mediums can obtain integrity at the same time. At a time when Banghua is constantly adapting manga and novels and producing TV dramas, launching such a literary award is probably the most inappropriate thing to do when originality is declining.
Even though Japan's huge literary market continues to supply the film market with the mother book of narrative every year, movies still have the obligation to cultivate their own originality.
(End of full text)
<b>The author of this article, "Deep Focus DeepFocus", now lives in Paris, has published 197 original texts so far, and is still active in the Douban community. Download Douban App search users "Deep Focus DeepFocus" to follow Ta. </b>