SENDAI, Japan — One of Japan’s most popular crime thriller writers, Kotaro Isaka is a self-described homebody. He rarely leaves Sendai, the city in northeastern Japan where he lives, and many of his books are located there.
But when his 2010 novel “Maria Beetle” was adapted into “Bullet Train,” a Hollywood action movie starring Brad Pitt, Brian Tyree Henry and Joey King that premieres August 5 in the United States, he embraced the largely Western cast. and highly stylized, hyper-neon setting that is perhaps best described as Japan-adjacent.
While writing “Maria Beetle,” a thriller about multiple killers trapped on the same high-speed train, Isaka created a motley crew of characters who “are not real people, and maybe they aren’t even Japanese,” Isaka, 51, said during a recent interview. interview in the lounge of a hotel restaurant not far from his home and a stone’s throw from the local shinkansen — or bullet train — station. The novel, which originally appeared in Japan, debuted in English last year.
With its fast-paced plot, colorful killers, high death toll, sadistic teenage villain and cheeky humor, Isaka always dreamed that the novel could become an ideal Hollywood movie. The original Japanese context, he said, didn’t matter much.
“I don’t feel like people want to understand Japanese literature or culture,” Isaka said. “I don’t understand much about Japan either.”
Making Isaka’s novel into an American-style action film with a mixed cast from the United States, Britain and Japan was part creative, part business decision. Despite the popularity of manga graphic novels and anime cartoons outside of Japan, in recent years few live-action movies or television shows with all-Japanese casts have become international hits. Unlike South Korea’s global phenomena such as ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Parasite’, Japan has garnered much praise for films such as the recent Oscar winner ‘Drive My Car’ and the Palme d’Or-anointed ‘Shoplifters’ , but seldom international box office success.
There are already complaints in the Asian-American media about money laundering, although the cast of “Bullet Train” includes black, Latino and Japanese actors. David Inoue, the executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, told AsAmNews that “this film seeks to reaffirm the belief that Asian actors in lead roles cannot wear a blockbuster movie, despite all the recent evidence to the contrary, starting with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.‘ and extend to ‘Shang-Chi.’”
That Isaka himself considered his characters to be ethnically malleable “gave us comfort in honoring the Japanese soul, but at the same time gave the film a chance to get big giant movie stars and make it work on a global scale,” said Sanford Panitch, a president. from Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, the studio behind ‘Bullet Train’.
For anyone who has experienced Japan’s strict pandemic border closures, the presence of so many non-Japanese on a train supposedly traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto is shocking, and it makes it clear that the film bears little resemblance to real life.
David Leitch, the director of Bullet Train, and the screenwriter, Zak Olkewicz, said they wanted to keep some of the main characters from the novel: three generations of one Japanese family. “People who haven’t necessarily seen the film will be surprised to find that the plot is more or less about the Japanese characters and their storylines getting that resolution,” Olkewicz said, although the characters aren’t in the middle of the film. stand. the film.
But even in Isaka’s novel, there are western references: one of the killers is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, a detail that has been preserved in the film.
“We were all aware of it and wanted to make it super inclusive and international,” said Leitch, who directed “Deadpool 2” and “Atomic Blonde” and served as executive producer for two “John Wick” movies. The diversity of the cast, he said, “just shows you the power 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 another part of Asia,'” Leitch said. “Where could we see all those international types collide?”
In the end, he concluded, “Tokyo is as international as a city as anywhere else.” (With key plot points hinged 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 fantastic vision created on an American soundstage. Seeing it, Isaka said he was grateful that the extreme violence of the story had been removed from any realistic setting. “I’m relieved that it’s set in the future of Japan or as 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 Anglophone readers who already have an affinity for Japanese entertainment through manga, anime, or Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer who is a literary star in the West.
The son of art gallery owners in Chiba, south of Tokyo, Isaka grew up reading mysteries and thrillers, including translations of novels by Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. He moved to Sendai to study law at Tohoku University, where he began writing short stories.
After graduation, he took a job as a systems engineer, but woke up most mornings before 5 a.m. to write fiction. Because the apartment he shared with his wife was too small for a separate writing space, he would sometimes retreat with his laptop to a stone bench by the river near his apartment, tapping stories in the evenings after work.
In 2000, his first novel, “Audubon’s Prayer,” featuring a talking scarecrow, a cat who can predict the weather, and a bully turned police officer, won the Shincho Mystery Club prize for newcomers.
Two years later, with his wife’s encouragement, he cut the cord to a monthly salary. “I thought if I don’t quit my job and focus,” he said, “I can’t write something great.”
Several of his novels have been made into Japanese films, although none of them have been released in the United States. His works in translation are popular in China and South Korea.
Even before his novels were translated into English, Japanese critics discovered an American — or at least Hollywood — sensibility in his work.
The way characters speak in some of his novels is “almost as if he’s copying the American movie-style dialogues into Japanese,” says book reviewer Atsushi Sasaki. “When you look at the dubbed version of Hollywood movies, the Japanese can sound very unnatural, and that’s how I’ve always imagined his books and what his characters said.”
Yuma Terada and Ryosuke Saegusa, the founders of CTB, a film, production and literary agency representing Isaka, have made Isaka’s work virtually unknown to English-language readers, consolidating the copyrights to his novels and commissioning translations of a handful of them. , hoping to pitch him as Murakami’s literary cousin.
Sam Malissa, who translated “Maria Beetle” along with another novel, “Three Assassins,” which is part of a loose trilogy and has also been published in English in Britain and the United States, said the frenzied energy of Isaka’s work could help push the boundaries of Western stereotypes about Japanese literature. Too often, he said, Anglophone readers perceive Japanese fiction as akin to Ukiyo-e woodblock paintings with a “koan-like impenetrability,” Malissa said.
Terada, a former financier, and Saegusa, a longtime editor at Kodansha, one of Japan’s largest publishing houses that has published several Isaka novels, began purchasing Malissa’s manuscript of “Bullet Train” from various studios, but initially found no buyers. After Terada and Saegusa narrowed the plot down to a five-page summary, three studios bid and Sony ultimately won. (Terada and Saegusa are executive producers on the film.)
Shortly after “Maria Beetle” was chosen for the film, the translated novel was sold to Harvill Secker, a London-based unit of Penguin Books.
Liz Foley, the publishing director, read the manuscript on a beach vacation. “Suddenly I was transported to this world that felt a little strange,” she said. Although Sony had made the choice for the book at the time, neither Leitch nor Pitt were still attached to the project.
So far, Foley said, the English edition of “Bullet Train” — which was renamed after the original — hasn’t been a bestseller, but has had “really good sales.”
Overlook Press, a division of Abrams Books, released it in the United States last August, where it was met with positive reviews. On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” the critic John Powers described “Bullet Train” as “the irresponsible pleasure of pure entertainment.” Both publishers are releasing movie tie-in editions in hopes of capturing some movie afterglow.
Foreign literature is a notoriously difficult market in English. But Philip Gabriel, Murakami’s longtime translator who has translated three of Isaka’s novels, hopes the film adaptation of “Bullet Train” will spark the interest of other English-language publishers. “At least the brand awareness makes publishers say, ‘Hey, let’s take another look at these other Isaka novels,'” Gabriel said.
Outside of the English-language markets, Isaka’s work is getting more on-screen attention: his novel “The Fool of the End” will be turned into a Korean drama series for Netflix.
Isaka said that just as his work jumps onto the global stage, he can no longer reliably meet the six-page daily writing goal he set for himself when he started out as a novelist.
“I’ve already written a lot of what I need to write,” he lamented.
He said his wife, who gave him permission to quit his job 20 years ago to write full-time, had recently told him to focus on producing one good novel when he was in his 50s.
“I feel lighter now,” he said.
Hikari Hidareporting contributed.