Big-screen treatment dream
Author Kotaro Isaka hoped thriller would make an ideal Hollywood film, and he’s OK that adaptation ‘Bullet Train’ isn’t so Japanese
Kotaro Isaka, one of Japan’s most popular crime thriller writers, is a self-described homebody. He rarely leaves Sendai, the city in northeast Japan where he lives, and many of his books are set there.
Yet when his 2010 novel
“Maria Beetle” was adapted into “Bullet Train” — a Hollywood action film starring Brad Pitt, Brian Tyree Henry and Joey King now playing in U.S. theaters — he embraced the largely Western cast and highly stylized, hyperneon setting that can perhaps best be described as Japanadjacent.
In writing “Maria Beetle,” a thriller about multiple assassins trapped on the same high-speed train, Isaka created a motley crew of characters who are “not real people, and maybe they’re not even Japanese,” Isaka, 51, said during a recent interview. The novel, which was originally published in Japan, debuted in English last year.
Isaka always dreamed the novel, with its fast-paced plot, colorful assassins, high body count, sadistic teenage villain and cheeky humor, might make an ideal Hollywood movie. Its original Japanese context, he said, did not matter much.
“I don’t have any feeling of wanting people to understand Japanese literature or culture,”
Isaka said. “It’s not like I understand that much about Japan, either.”
Turning Isaka’s novel into an American-style action movie with a mixed cast from the
United States, Britain and Japan was part creative license, part business decision. Despite the popularity of manga graphic novels and anime cartoons outside Japan, few live-action movies or television shows with all-japanese casts have become international hits in recent years. Unlike global phenomena from South Korea such as “Squid Game” and “Parasite,” Japan has enjoyed art house acclaim for films like recent Oscar winner “Drive My Car” and Cannes Palme d’oranointed “Shoplifters,” but rarely international box office success.
There have already been complaints in the Asian American media about whitewashing, although the cast of “Bullet Train” includes Black, Latino and Japanese actors.
David Inoue, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, told Asamnews that “this movie seeks to affirm the belief that Asian actors in the leading roles cannot carry a blockbuster, despite all the recent evidence indicating otherwise, beginning with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and extending to ‘ShangChi.’ ”
That Isaka regarded his characters as ethnically malleable “gave us comfort in honoring its Japanese soul but at the same time giving the movie a chance to get big, giant movie stars and have it work on a global scale,” said Sanford Panitch, a president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, the studio behind “Bullet Train.”
David Leitch, the director of “Bullet Train,” and its screenwriter, Zak Olkewicz, said they wanted to preserve some of the novel’s most important characters — three generations of one Japanese family. “People who haven’t necessarily seen the movie will be surprised to find out that the plot pretty much kind of is about the Japanese characters and their storylines getting that resolution,” Olkewicz said, although the characters aren’t at the center of the film.
Yet even in Isaka’s novel there are Western references: One of the assassins is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, a detail that is preserved in the movie.
“We were all really aware and wanted to make it super inclusive and international,” said Leitch. The diversity of the cast, he said, “just shows you the strength of the original author’s work and how this could be a story that could transcend race anyway.”
At one point the filmmakers considered changing the setting. “We had conversations like ‘maybe it could be Europe, maybe it could be a different part of
Asia,’ ” Leitch said. “Where could we see all these international types colliding?”
In the end, he decided, “Tokyo is as international of a city as anywhere.” (With key plot points hinging on the train arriving on time at various stops along the route, Isaka said, “we can only think of a Japanese bullet train.”)
Leitch had hoped to shoot parts of the film in Japan, but the pandemic made that impossible, so he leaned further into a fantastical vision created on an American soundstage. Seeing it, Isaka said he was grateful to have the story’s extreme violence removed from any kind of realistic setting. “I am relieved that it’s set in Japan’s future or like a Gotham City,” he said. “It’s a world that people don’t know.”
In Japan, Isaka has published more than 40 novels — many of them bestsellers — and his agents hope the high profile of “Bullet Train” will help elevate his work among English-language readers who already have an affinity for Japanese entertainment through manga, anime or Haruki Murakami, a Japanese novelist who is a literary star in the West.
Shortly after “Maria Beetle” was optioned for the film, the translated novel sold to Harvill Secker, a London-based unit of Penguin Books.
Liz Foley, the publishing director, read the manuscript on a beach holiday. “Suddenly I was transported into this world that felt slightly off-kilter,” she said. Although the book had been optioned by Sony at that point, neither Leitch nor Pitt had yet been attached to the project.
So far, Foley said, the English edition of “Bullet Train” — which was retitled from the original — has not been a bestseller but has had “really good sales.”
Foreign literature is a notoriously difficult market in English. But Philip Gabriel, Murakami’s longtime translator who has translated three novels by Isaka, hopes the film adaptation of “Bullet Train” will pique the interest of other English-language publishers. “The name recognition will at the very least get publishers to say, ‘Hey, let’s look again at these other Isaka novels,’ ” Gabriel said.
Outside English-language markets, Isaka’s work is getting more screen treatment: His novel “The Fool of the End” is scheduled to be made into a Korean drama series for Netflix.