Thoughts on Burning

 In my opinion, Burning was a very well done adaptation of Murakami's short story, Barn Burning. Since Barn Burning was such a short piece, I feel like the movie was able to really expand on this intriguing story while still remaining mostly faithful to the original content. However, since various elements needed to be added to the story to make it long enough to fill a whole two and a half hour movie, there were some noticeable differences in the characters and the plot of Burning.

One way in which Burning differs from Barn Burning is most evident in the very beginning of the movie. Instead of being a married older man who met the main girl at a wedding three years ago, the protagonist--Jong-soo--was around the same age as Hae-mi and grew up in the same little farm town by the North Korean border. However, Jong-soo does not even remember Hae-mi at first when they meet again when she is working at a raffle stand. While I was unsure why this beginning was changed so much at first, by the end of the story I realized it was written like this so that we could see Jong-soo give the watch he won from the raffle to Hae-mi--which would later end up helping him realize that Ben killed her when he saw the watch in Ben's drawer of his victim's bracelets. I thought that this subtle initial placement of the watch in the beginning was a very smart idea and I felt that it tied the story together very smoothly at the end.

Another addition to Burning was Hae-mi's cat. Similar to the watch, the way the story was set up made it seem like Hae-mi asking Jong-soo to feed her cat while she was in Africa would not have much more relevance to the story other than that it was something that brought him closer to her. I remember thinking it was quite odd that the movie did not show the cat when Jong-soo started feeding it and even had him make a comment about not being able to find it since it did not seem significant to the plot. I thought that bringing the cat in at the end after Hae-mi was killed and having Jong-soo only able to speculate whether or not it was hers since he had never seen it was a very effective way to build suspense for the following scene, where he calls Boil's name and it comes to him--the last nail in the coffin that proves Ben is the murderer.

Also, since this is was movie, all of the characters needed to have their own names, including the cat. I feel like this was very un-Murakami-esque since his characters in Barn Burning and many of his other stories do not usually have names, giving them more of a sense of anonymity. The cat having a name especially stuck out to me since there was that one conversation in A Wild Sheep Chase about how Boku did not name his cat.

-Melody