The Two ‘Female Problems’ of Japan Addressed Between Audition’s Book-To-Film Adaptation
Or how two visions of one story revealed the sociocultural duality surrounding the changing ‘role’ of Japanese women.
It was the first time I both read the book and watched the film. What I discovered in adaptation was rewarding.
Audition is a 1997 Japanese novel written by Ryu Murakami — an author known for fiction addressing the hard topics in Japanese society, think school girls involved in drugs and compensated dating for example. In 1999 it was adapted into a film by director Takashi Miike — a director known for, well, shocking films.
The plot is as follows: the main character Aoyama is a middle-aged widower looking to remarry. Aoyama’s friend, Yoshikawa, a film producer, comes up with the idea to hold an ‘audition’ for a fake film, where the requirements for the casting actress would describe Aoyama’s preferred would-be wife. This is how Aoyama meets and becomes fatally entranced by the mysterious Asami.
Spoiler alert, by the end of it she tortures him and saws his legs off.
Same plot, not the same story
Audition has been critiqued as both misogynistic due to Aoyma’s motivations, as well as feminist due to Asami’s inevitable revenge on the man who wronged her. In actuality, it’s neither: there’s a much deeper underlying commentary addressing Japanese women’s evolution from their ‘traditional’ selves.
The book, in fact, punishes men for the unreal standards set to Japanese women, romanticizing an oppressive, patriarchal past. Meanwhile, the film is about the source of that ‘longing’ for the ‘traditional’ woman, which is the underlying belief that Japanese culture dies with the empowerment of women, thus the trend of demonizing women in J-horror.
Funny thing is, the only way to see these commentaries clearly in this unclear story is by directly contrasting the original author’s voice and the film director’s vision! Let me show how I saw these differences between two men’s interpretations of the ‘female problem’.
THE BOOK
The 1997 novel tells the story in a linear narrative from Aoyama’s point of view. It focused heavily on the intimate conversations between Aoyama and Asami and expresses his deep romantic infatuation for her. He can even be called a gentle soul. The milestones in their relationship include:
- Asami confessing her childhood abuse and trauma in an extremely bonding moment.
- We have an emotional scene where Aoyama tells Asami of his intention to eventually marry her. We see how she freaks out, how he chases after and they share their first kiss under the rain…
- …with a literal confession of love.
- Aoyama is extremely considerate and anxious about when and whether or not to have sex with Asami.
We even get character development:
- We see Aoyama’s love for his son and late wife.
- Asami is depicted as having a life, personality, intellect and presents herself consciously. She chooses to be polite and modest while knowing she is stunning.
- Her fears revolve around committing to someone who did not truly love her.
- Throughout the entire book, Yoshikawa and Aoyama discuss the ethics of this audition, Aoyama understanding how discriminating the process is. He continuously weighs how to make sure the truth doesn’t damage their relationship when Asami will learn the truth.
- Even the dog gets moments of bonding and character!
I can’t stress enough that none of this is present in the film. But about that, later.
According to these bullet points alone, it would seem at first glance that an innocent man got into a misunderstanding with a psycho and is not deserving of any of what happened to him. Come on, he literally uses the word ‘soulmate’.
But Aoyama is not completely innocent — one might say he was very much guilty of his ‘standards’. Let’s take a look at his late wife:
‘Ryoko was cultured, intelligent and strikingly attractive. She was also a woman of great inner strength, and as a wife she’d been quietly supportive of Aoyama in every aspect of his life and career.’
She was also ‘ever-modest’ and ‘self-effacing’ about her many supportive roles. Even when he was unfaithful to her with a night-club hostess, she maintained her ‘cool and quiet dignity’. In one word, Ryoko was the ideal, ‘traditional’ housewife. Aoyama was looking for no less
But the thing about ‘traditions’ is that they come from a time when women were, you know, objectified. When she knew her place and her role was to be modest, obedient, scripted, beautiful, serving.
Furthermore, in the book Aoyama compares women to bugs —
‘The beautiful ones are the rarest.’
— and his son remarks how Japanese women are not attractive. There are many comments throughout the book like these. Another notable one being Yoshikawa’s, regarding how unpolished women are ‘these days’, drifting without class or purpose.
When talking to Yoshikawa about remarrying, book-Aoyama laments about dating services because one should ‘only date one person at a time’ and he is anxious of being ‘disappointed’ over and over again.
Asami, whom he falls in love with immediately, is no less than perfect.
- Stunningly beautiful, mysterious, with a mesmerizing voice.
- She’s humble, honest, but not shy. Not only that, but she has the perfect body, and turns out to be extremely skilled and passionate in bed — no joke, an entire chapter was dedicated that one night, and it’s not that big of a book.
- She is elegant, a great conversationalist. Her love for Aoyama is, at least visually, calm. No eagerness whatsoever, extremely dignified, cautious of his intentions. In some ways, I got geisha vibes from her.
And so this angelic goddess flips when she learns — in the middle of their first sexual bond no less — that Aoyama has a son he didn’t mention about before.
He lied to her. He doesn’t love only her. He loves his son, too.
The line between what constitutes familial and romantic love are a bit blurred for her due to trauma, but the point stands: Asami gave her perfect self to someone, to only be his, but he was not only hers.
Let’s be real for a minute, for a woman to devote her existence entirely to her partner with nothing else in her life, do nothing but think about him, breathe for him, everything she does being about him and downright ready to do anything for him, and all of this willingly — on the lighter side this is dependability and obsession, and on the other end plain crazy. And yet, this is a rather common fantasy that lingers at the back of many Japanese young men’s heads, often depicted in the media they consume.
My take on the novel:
Audition the book is about the unreal, crazy male expectations towards women. Long story short, for the ‘perfect woman’ to behave the way Asami does, she gotta be a psycho. Think how ‘flawless’ and charming Hannibal Lecter is in Hannibal (2013). And so the only logical flaw that could balance out her perfection is, well, her torturous-murderous ways of dealing with disappointment.
Paired with a long patriarchal history has raised a nation that knows nothing about ‘dating’ or courting women, this national inexperience is what fuels the dating, romance, and sex dilemmas you might have heard regarding Japan.
Mid-article factoid! Throughout the story, we address Asami by her first name, but ‘Aoyama’ and ‘Yoshikawa’ by the men’s surnames
THE MOVIE
Go back, check all the bullet points in the last section. None of them are in the film.
Movie-Aoyama is more of a creepy middle-aged man dating a young woman. The way Aoyama stares at Asami during the interview, the way he goes to touch her chair after she leaves. His overall demeanor lacks that gentle nature.
He’s not in love.
Not only is Aoyama portrayed as a man of little depth or empathy, but Asami’s character, too, is different. Still beautiful, but her character is stoic, agreeable, bland, lacking. We’ll see her truly smile only when she’s downright sticking needles into Aoyama’s eyes.
Instead of defending her when Yoshikawa points out how fishy she is, movie-Aoyama just says that he won’t be easily ‘played’. There is no chemistry or much conversation between them in the film, and it really seems as though an older man is trying to take advantage of Asami’s obedience. Though the movie starts with the idea of re-marrying, no serious intentions with Asami are ever re-confirmed.
Even when the moment of their first night comes, Aoyama’s reaction to Asami’s decision to give her body — yeah, not even ‘make love’ — is stoic, silent, emotionless. She doesn’t seduce him and takes over him like she does in the book. Instead, she just lays down and waits to be taken in an almost transactional manner.
The reasoning behind Asami’s ‘flip’ in the film is that she learns about the audition being fake, saying that Aoyama only wanted to sleep with her. It’s like the director wasn’t even trying to make a ‘love’ story. It would seem that the purpose was to make Aoyama seem to ‘deserve’ his torture.
Both the book and film subvert the genre expectations, starting out as a romance drama but ending a horror film. While the shift is sudden in the book, the movie ‘shows’ us that there is something sinister in Asami early.
We see her from an omniscient point of view when Aoyama is not around. How she sits on the floor of her apartment in an unnatural pose, unmoving, for what seems like days, waiting for Aoyama’s phone call. The ghost of Aoyama’s dead wife watches outside his home. We know something is off.
These direct hints were perhaps necessary due to the explicit torture scene. The audience had to be prepared. But if there’s no element of surprise, then what is the climax of the film?
The answer is that perhaps, what we’re seeing isn’t what really went down. Reality itself distorts in the second half of the movie as we shift between feverish visions, Aoyama’s hallucinations, and jumps in time, thus making him an unreliable narrator whose point of view we can no longer trust. It’s hard to focus on Asami’s serial murders and torture when we don’t know why we’re seeing what we’re seeing.
On one hand, this could be his sense of guilt eating him up. He might still be in that hotel bed with Asami after the first night caught in a nightmare.
On the other, we could build a narrative about how Aoyama can’t believe finding such a ‘perfect’ woman, how he’s anxious to commit after seven loveless years, scared of losing love again, paranoid of what might go wrong. But this explanation could only work if paired with his deep infatuation with Asami in the book.
My take on the film:
Audition the film, in my eyes, is actually related to the numerous J-horror movies featuring a vengeful female ghost with long-black hair. The trend of demonizing women stems from their empowerment, or rather fear of losing national identity in a culture shaped by the patriarch.
The director might be trying to punish all of the patriarchy through Aoyama. Asami in the film is nothing like the ‘modern’ Japanese woman, more of an empty husk of oppressed femalehood.
This paranoia of ‘losing’ Japan was also strongly kindled by the economic crisis, ‘westernization’, and technological advancements of the last century. Body-horror, ‘losing control’ or literally turning into a ‘monster’ is a common trope in Japanese entertainment media, especially in uncertain post-war times. Films or anime depicting physical, mental, and sexual confusions feel like a visual metaphor for the economical and social transformation.
Even today the country continues to be a contrast of trying to preserve tradition and simultaneously trying to pursue technological and global advancements. The idea that your body is malleable and unsafe is like an analogy to the national body feeling ‘ripped apart’. In Audition, it’s being torn by the changing female ‘role’.
Reading between adaptations
There’s so much more I could say about Miike and Murakami, dive deeper into Japan’s matters, discuss the film’s cult following. But people more knowledgeable than me already have. Many academics and experts in the fields of cinematography and anthropology already know how movies are more than entertainment, but a reflection of current values, fears and humanity — a sort of time-capsule.
Granted, as the trend goes, I was extremely frustrated by the film at first. Mid-film I reminded myself that this is two different people retelling the same story, their personal views and impressions inevitably getting interwoven into the narrative.
And when I asked myself what mindsets stand behind these two versions, it opened a whole new paradigm to movie-watching. That’s what I’m here to say.
Read the book and watch the movie.
The next time you’re exasperated over a ‘bad’ book adaptation, ask yourself why changes were made. Don’t blame budget, trends, or a lack of heart, think deeper. What truth lies between the differences?
I’d like to credit What Happened to Japanese Horror? — on YouTube by one of my favorite channels, Screened, which shaped how I phrased my take on the film in this article.
