The Truth Behind Chungking Express & Norwegian Wood: Was One Influenced by the Other?

Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood and Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express have a lot in common, and it's a question we get curious about as fans: was one influenced by the other? The short answer is that we have found no evidence that either creator drew on the other. But if you love both, the echoes are impossible to ignore, and they say something about a certain kind of longing that crosses borders.

Two young people, two anxious eras

For some of us, there are periods in life when we are too immature, too full of reckless dreams, and unable to put into words what is stirring inside. In those years, when you feel the gap between what you want and what you can have, a few artists seem to speak directly to you. For us, those two were Murakami, discovered in a second-hand bookstore, and Wong Kar-wai, whose films we watched on VHS more times than we can count.

Norwegian Wood (1987) is one of the defining works of Japanese urban sensibility, and Chungking Express (1994) is among the defining films of 1990s Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai, who studied design, quietly captures the pain and uncertainty of young people in Hong Kong in the years before the 1997 handover to China. Murakami's novel, too, was written about a precarious era for young people, with love and loss left hanging in an empty space.

Music as the connecting thread

Both works use a pop song to carry memory. In Murakami's novel, it is the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," which takes the narrator back to a lost age of innocence. In the film, it is "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas, which seems to pull the characters toward a sunnier place they can't reach, dreamy, sad, and exciting all at once.

If you want to dive further into this, our Music Room posts explore the songs that run through Murakami's books.

Short lines that stick

Both creators also build their characters through spare, memorable lines. In Norwegian Wood, there is the famous exchange where a character says she likes someone "a lot," and when asked how much, answers: "Like a spring bear." In Chungking Express, a character wishes that if love has an expiry date, he'd like his to be ten thousand years. Neither line explains itself, and that is exactly why they linger.

The titles share a quality too: each pairs something evocative with a sense of place, whether Norway or the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong.

What about a Wong Kar-wai adaptation?

The novel came first, by several years. After Norwegian Wood was published in 1987, directors from around the world reportedly wanted to adapt it, and Murakami declined for a long time. We have also read that Wong Kar-wai was among those turned down, though we can't confirm the details. The film finally arrived in 2010, after years of persistent courting by the Vietnamese-French director Tran Anh Hung, who made The Scent of Green Papaya.

It is tempting to wonder what Norwegian Wood would have looked like through Wong Kar-wai's eyes: all neon, slow motion, and unspoken feeling. Wong's style has changed since his early days, and these days we watch his newer work less often, but In the Mood for Love, Happy Together, and Chungking Express remain among the best love films outside the usual formulas. We think they will be found and loved for a very long time to come.

A shared sense of hope

In the end, what ties these two together isn't influence so much as shared emotional territory: youth, loneliness, and the hope that someone, somewhere, will understand. Like the characters in Chungking Express, Hong Kong itself still feels uneasy, yet full of people hoping for support and peace. We hope for the same.

Have you read Norwegian Wood and watched Chungking Express? Which one hit you harder? Tell us in the comments.