The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai’s elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo – or anywhere else in Japan – that he would hate to lose. In those days, Shanghai was just a day’s boat ride from Nagasaki. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. But Tony Takitani’s mother and father were both one-hundred-per-cent genuine Japanese. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I. Tony Takitani’s real name was really that: Tony Takitani.īecause of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. Qui potete trovare l’intero racconto in inglese, così come è stato pubblicato nel New Yorker Magazine (aprile 2002), tratto da qui: La pellicola, uscita nel 2004, racconta la vita amara e schiva di Tony riuscirà l’amore di Eiko, ossessionata dall’abbigliamento, a scalfire la solitudine del marito? La profonda malinconia dei personaggi si riflette con un’eco sapiente nelle scelte del regista, come si evince dal trailer:

Probabilmente questo nome non vi dirà nulla eppure, si tratta di un film pluripremiato del regista Ichikawa Jun, tratto da un racconto di Murakami Haruki, con musiche di Sakamoto Ryūichi (autore delle colonne sonore de L’ ultimo imperatore e Il piccolo Buddha, tanto per menzionare due celebri titoli).

Abbandonare un gatto by Haruki Murakami