I am not an Algorithm: Adapting Kafka’s Novel, Der Prozess into a Japanese-Language Feature Film

I originally presented on my feature film adaptation of Kafka’s novel at the AAS (Association of Adaptation Studies) Conference in Brno, Czech Republic in September 2019. The paper I presented there focused more on the process of adaptation and less on the meaning of the adaptation within a Japanese context. I substantially rewrote the paper for publication in Japanese in the second volume of Literature and Adaptation. In the chapter I describe the ways I transformed Kafka’s novel Der Prozess, into a Japanese language film, Shinpan, 2018.

My script largely preserved all the characters and the plot of the novel; the story of a thirty-year old banker, Joseph K, who wakes one day to find himself “under arrest,” though his crime is never specified. Although Kafka intended Der Prozess to be read as a philosophical and spiritual parable many interpreters have stressed the political meanings of the work and its relevance to contemporary society, while filmmakers and other artists have often adapted the book and other works by Kafka to make political statements about their own times.

Through a comparison of the original novel, an earlier film adaptation by Orson Welles (Shinpan 1960) and my own version I trace the political resonance of Kafka’s work and its transformations in film. Welles’s conceived his version as a noir nightmare, a shadowy dream world that echoed the ambiguities of the cold war. But in his film the “powers” that threaten K, though ambiguous and ubiquitous are very “visible.” The men who arrest K resemble seedy FBI agents, the court is like a Stalinist Show Trial or a McCarthy Hearing and the final execution evokes the atomic bomb.

In contrast, the same plot in my film becomes a satirical commentary on modern Japanese bureaucracy and public naivety and a critique of the more invisible systems of oppression in post 3.11 Japanese politics and society. The arresting officers are like bored bureaucrats playing a role, the court is a small and dingy affair with a few bored men examining meaningless files in a leaky school gymnasium. In contrast K’s final execution is brutal and unexpected, as it is in the novel.

I explain in the chapter how I attempted to create a sense of liminal reality that would trouble the audience’s reception of the film. Very little that is unrecognizable as “Japanese reality” occurs in the film, but the plot is absurd and impossible and K’s arrest (as in the novel), is never truly explained. I chose this less dream-like approach so that the film would speak more broadly to the age of social media and “fake news.” I also briefly discuss another film inspired by Kafka’s work in general, Shinpan, by Shuji Teryama (Shinpan 1975) to illustrate the difficulty of identifying and critiquing power in the kind of media-saturated age in which we now live.

The chapter raises questions about the difficulty of representing the ambiguous and invisible systems of power that Kafka evokes in his novels. Both Orson Welles and Shuji Terayama were still very sure that “power” and oppression could be visualized, but I tried to suggest in my adaptation that the oppression was internalized, shared by everyone and thus harder to challenge and identify. The film ends with one of the arresting officers looking directly into the camera and suggesting that we might be next.

文学とアダプテーション2：ヨーロッパの古典を読む 　小川、吉村　編。春風社