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Where there are no ears to listen, there is no story to tell….
My story is my only remaining possibility for an
ongoing life, which is how it must be for everyone,
living or dead.
The story and film Drive My Car both present powerful insights and images of the nature and forms of traumatic loss and betrayal, as well as paths toward healing. In dramatizing trauma, which is often inexpressible and beyond ordinary words, literature and film offer fresh insights and resonances to human psychology and pathways from which to confront and understand traumatic experience. Cognitively, we discover the multiple meanings and expressions of pain and loss. Emotionally, art provides the needed form and substance that elicits cathartic working through of these events through moments of recognition.
Haruki Murakami has a special gift for elaborating traumatic experience with rich, often surreal images and narratives (Rosbrow, 2012). His short stories and novels often point the way to how trauma heals, leading to heartfelt epiphanies and resolutions. “Drive My Car” (Murakami, 2017) is a recent story of his, made into a brilliant, celebrated film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, winner of awards at the Academy Awards and Cannes Film Festival.
Both short story and film tell a gripping yet elusive tale of Kafuku, a 47-year-old actor (and theater director in the film) who is haunted by a series of losses and betrayals (intersecting multiple storylines layered upon each other): the death of his young daughter; his discovery of his wife Oto's
subsequent infidelities; his wife's death (written differently in story and movie); his later catalyzing contact with her last lover, Takatsuki; and, above all, the relationship he develops with Misaki, a young woman who is assigned as his driver while he works on a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Because of a blind spot from glaucoma, and after an accident, Kafuku is forced to stop the