“Landscapes of the heart”: Adapting Angela Carter’s Japanese writings for the screen

Crofts, Charlotte

Abstract

British novelist Angela Carter’s experiences living in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a significant impact on her development as a writer. Carter’s time in Japan ruptured her understanding of her own culture and informed her subversive, intertextual reworkings of traditional Western texts; a “decolonialising” project which acknowledges fluid, multivocal, shifting meanings and intersectionality. She had a background in translation and her own work has been translated and adapted into various media.

This paper explores a feature film adaptation of Carter’s semi-autobiographical short story, ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, which is currently in development. When her Japanese lover Taro stands her up, a young British writer is plunged into a strange nocturnal odyssey as she searches for him through the back streets of Tokyo’s pleasure quarter. Unable to find him, she finds herself instead experiencing a sexual, cultural and creative awakening in the arms of a stranger. An exhilarating journey unfolds; that of a woman struggling to find her own identity, and of an artist, discovering her own unique voice.

Using the central story as a portmanteau, the screenplay interweaves other stories and journalistic writings, combining live action, animation and puppetry and drawing on Japanese aesthetics, including manga, irezumi and bunraku, to create a formal hybrid. The paper will critically reflect on this delicate act of translating Angela Carter’s literary gymnastics and her use of narrative metalepsis – involving vertiginous shifts in narrative point of view – to the screen, using Brechtian formal strategies to both trouble the representation of Japan and experiment with the aesthetics of narrative film itself.

The paper situates this collaborative, practice-based research project both within Adaptation Studies, but also within Translation and Travel Writing Studies, harnessing the thinking around transculturation, the “mobilities” and “spatial” turn, approaches through which, as Silvester and Topping suggest "new cultural phenomena may be achieved, in the richest of ways, through the mixing of genres and the crossing of media".

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Media journeys: Journal of adaptation in film and performance looking back, stepping forward, 2019
• Start Date: Jul 15, 2019
• End Date: Jul 15, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 5, 2023
• Keywords: Angela Carter, Japan, Adaptation, Transculturation
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10289863