Suvudu Universe

For the casual comic-book-movie watcher, the spectacle of Hugh Jackman’s vicious loner Wolverine landing in modern Japan might come off as a random Hollywood gimmick meant to throw some exoticism into the X-mix. But the thematic and storytelling roots of “The Wolverine,” the new X-Men movie that hits theaters Friday, July 26, reach deep down into Marvel comics lore. Born in the 1880s and immortal, Wolverine has turned up all over the globe in the middle of any number of real historical events (World War I, D-Day), and his backstory includes travel to Japan, where he learns the language and a whole menu of martial arts. The current standalone movie, directed by James Mangold from a screenplay stitched together by Scott Frank, Mark Bomback and Christopher McQuarrie, takes its inspiration from a classic 1982 limited series created by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller that amounted to the character’s first solo story outside of the X-Men. In it, Wolverine tangles with the yakuza, a swarm of ninjas, some deadly ladies and the Silver Samurai.

The set up got us thinking about other books and movies that feature Westerners in Japan (Wolverine/Logan is Canadian originally), a perennial fish-out-of-water scenario that has traditionally held an attractive strangeness for American readers and audiences. The rituals, culture and hierarchies of Japan have intrigued and baffled the typical Westerner for centuries, and artworks that attempt to illuminate the inner workings of Japanese society — and just why it throws us so off balance — have often held strong appeal.

Much like Claremont and Miller, Ian Fleming decided to send his well-known hero James Bond off to the Far East in You Only Live Twice, the last Bond novel published during the author’s lifetime, in 1964. By this time, the British spy is in bad psychological shape after the murder of his wife, but he gets an unexpected opportunity to avenge her when he is sent on a mission to Japan and discovers his nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, is also in town. Fun sidenote: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film version of the book, which featured Sean Connery as Bond in a kimono.

Cary Grant starred in Paramount’s 1932 production of the classic play/opera “Madame Butterfly,” which tells the tragic story of an American soldier on shore leave in Japan who falls in love with a geisha, marries her, abandons her, and then returns years later with his American wife. The story explores the cultures’ different concepts of honor and the symbolic relationship between the two countries. For a lighter, modern take on that relationship, Isaac Adamson’s 2000 novel Tokyo Suckerpunch: A Billy Chaka Adventure follows a Cleveland journalist who heads to Japan to cover a martial arts competition and winds up embroiled in a crazy, action-packed adventure that involves the yakuza and an unauthorized film being made from his work. Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon were once set to reunite with their “Pleasantville” director Gary Ross to make a film adaptation written by “Men in Black” scribe Ed Solomon, but that iteration has vanished. Adamson went on to pen three more Billy Chaka novels.

One of the most well known Westerner-in-Japan stories is James Clavell’s 1975 global bestseller Shogun, which was turned into an equally popular NBC miniseries in 1980. It concerns an English sailor shipwrecked with his crew and taken captive in feudal Japan at the end of the sixteenth century and details how the two camps learn about each other’s cultures. An earlier Clavell novel, King Rat, about Western and Australian soldiers in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during World War II, was turned into a film in 1965. Other movies spun from books about Westerners in Japanese captivity during World War II include Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun,” adapted from J.G. Ballard’s 1984 novel about a British boy in occupied Shanghai, and “Paradise Road,” which was partially based on White Coolies, the memoirs of Betty Jeffrey, who was imprisoned in Indonesia with other women during the war. The 1983 prisoner-of-war drama “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” was adapted from Laurens van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower and The Night of the New Moon.

James Salter’s 1956 novel The Hunters was loosely adapted for a movie of the same name two years later that starred Robert Mitchum as one of several Air Force pilots traveling back and forth to Kyoto during the Korean War. And the classic 1959 film “Hiroshima mon amour” follows a French actress and Japanese architect as their brief relationship comes to an end and they discuss the vagaries of memory and loss. Marguerite Duras, film director and author (The Lover), wrote the original screenplay. Alessandro Baricco’s 1996 novel Silk, about a nineteenth century French smuggler who becomes obsessed with a local baron’s concubine after he travels to Japan to replenish his town’s supply of silkworms, was spun into a 2007 movie that starred Keira Knightley and premiered at the Toronto film festival.

Of course, Hollywood has often bypassed source material and taken its own initiative to place protagonists in Japan. Sofia Coppola won a screenwriting Oscar for her bittersweet 2003 comedy “Lost in Translation,” about two lost American souls finding each other overseas; Ridley Scott directed the 1989 action thriller “Black Rain,” which pitted Michael Douglas’ New York cop against the yakuza on their home turf; Quentin Tarantino sent The Bride to Tokyo to get revenge in “Kill Bill Vol. 1”; Mitchum played a marine MP who returns to Japan years later to retrieve the kidnapped daughter of an old friend from a gangster in the 1974 crime thriller “The Yakuza” (script by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne!); Scott Glenn crossed swords with Akira Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune in the 1982 actioner “The Challenge,” about an American boxer who takes an ill-advised job smuggling a valuable sword back into Japan (John Sayles co-wrote the screenplay); and “The Grudge” and “Shutter” perpetuated the J-horror trend of dim-witted Americans stumbling onto terrifying curses (and loads of creepy Japanese kids).

Hell, even the Karate Kid and the Bad News Bears got their passports stamped in Japan.

What are your favorite books and movies about Westerners in Japan?

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