Tony Takitani (Trailer) - Jun Ishikawa

Tony Takitani had a solitary childhood. Being alone was normal since his mother died young and his father was always away with his jazz band. At school he studied art, but while his sketches are accurate and detailed they lack feeling. Used to being self-sufficient, Tony seems to find emotions illogical and immature. After finding his true vocation as a technical illustrator, he becomes fascinated by Eiko, a client who in turn is fascinated by high end fashion. Eventually he marries her, and his life changes. He feels vibrantly alive and for the first time he understands and fears loneliness. But her obsession with designer clothes begins to worry him. When he asks her to economize, the consequences are tragic.

Upon adapting the piece of Japanese writer Harukim Murakami into a film, Jun Ishikawa realized that because of the particularities of the source material, reading the expressions of Murakami's characters was no easy task. The reasons why he was attracted to shots comprised of blank spaces like Edward Hopper's paintings, why he built a simple stage like a small theater to shoot the film, why he shot most of the scenes by slightly altering the angle of the stage and simply changing the interior, why he had very few people appear in the film by asking the leading actor and actress to play two roles each and why he decolorized the print to tone down the color are all based on his attempt to answer demands brought about by Murakamí's literary world, which may be solid but is nonetheless floating, a few centimeters off reality's ground all the same. He used a narrator as a distancing tool and thought that the low tone of his voice would suit the atmosphere. He also felt able to instinctively, express the parts of the original story while guarding it's original "serenity" and to not be bound by narrative.