The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1988).
Taichi Yamada’s novel Ijintachi to no natsu (1987)—the title literally translates as Summer of the Strange People; the book was published in English as Strangers—intertwines a tale of loving human connection with a dense meditation on navigating personal history. A screenwriter, Hideo Harada, feels stalled in his life after a divorce; he lives in a mostly uninhabited high-rise where he works in solitude on TV scripts. When visiting his old hometown, Asakusa, he meets a couple who bear a striking resemblance to his long-dead parents, and very soon he realizes these are their ghosts. While this surreal experience pulls him in one direction, his sole neighbor in the building, Kei, pulls him in another, as they begin a romantic relationship. His parents’ ghosts offer a chance to playact a childhood he never got to experience due to their untimely passing, but the present is where the possibility of a meaningful future exists.
As the novel progresses, Strangers pushes its supernatural elements further. As Hideo spends more time with this couple and with Kei, his visage ages and curdles, and he is slowly drained of life. His parents mean him no harm; this is an unavoidable byproduct of engaging with a long-dead person,a fantastical literalization of the way that someone might lose themselves in the past. Finally, he lets go of his parents, having come to understand that loss is natural and he must move on. When Kei is also revealed to also be a ghost draining Hideo of life—in part out of spite for him ignoring her on the night of her suicide, in part out of a tragic desire to cling to the living—he lets go of her as well. It’s a hopeful moment, and it’s followed by Hideo returning to normalcy, but with a renewed passion for living, making meaningful connections, and coming to terms with the fact that what happened in the past has happened for a reason.
Strangers is a text rich enough to spark wildly different interpretations, and it’s no surprise that more than one filmmaker has been drawn to it. The novel was first adapted by Nobuhiko Obayashi in The Discarnates (1988), and then by Andrew Haigh in All of Us Strangers (2023). Obayashi films the action more or less as it appears in the book, continuing in the Japanese tradition of blending melodrama with the supernatural. Haigh’s approach is to accentuate certain features of the novel to suit his own purposes. He strips back the horror elements to focus on the interpersonal drama at the novel’s core, even omitting the way that the ghosts vampirically sap life from humans. He settles on restrained melodrama, verging on realism, and his ghosts are practically indistinguishable from the living. By making the romantic relationship same-sex and contemplating what life was like for a family with a queer child during the height of the AIDS crisis, Haigh’s adaptation also ties the emotional to the political.
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023).
Adam, Haigh’s version of Hideo, is as much of a cipher as any of the ghosts that surround him. Like Hideo, Adam is also a screenwriter, but Haigh evinces little interest in exploring what that means to the character. Haigh’s emphasis is on interiority, and on the way that a certain era of repression has left a mark on Adam, via his parents. While Hideo’s past is a point of interest in the novel—be it his divorce, his collaborations in television, or even just mundane interactions with strangers—Adam seems to have no connections in the real world; he’s isolated after the pandemic, and many of his friends have moved away, priced out of expensive London. His life is largely limited to his computer and his fixation on the ghosts in his life. Haigh’s work is at its best when it’s about people attempting to repress their complicated emotions while presenting a facade of self-sufficiency; his 45 Years (2015) focuses on the impact of such compartmentalization. The way Adam floats around as if he has no place in this world coalesces intriguingly with the novel’s premise; whether he’s having dinner with his family or dancing at a club after a ketamine bump, he is a man with no presence. It isn’t just that he never speaks to a soul who isn’t his boyfriend or parents, apart from a waitress who can’t see ghosts, but that Haigh frequently frames Adam in the center of the shot, as though nothing outside of his orbit actually exists.
By removing the horrifying toll that the ghosts take on Hideo’s body, Haigh defuses the danger of Adam returning to the past: the warmth and stability offered by his parents and partnernever come with any repercussions. Where Hideo seeks a perfect balance of work, life, and love in the face of his divorce and distance from his own son, Adam’s lived experience as a queer man has rendered the heteronormative baggage of marriage and childbearing largely irrelevant; he came of age without parents in a world that was hostile to queer people. Haigh’s adaptation also longs to bring contemporary politics of acceptance into Adam’s parents’ era, and his parents seem more like devices than people, revived solely to correct their mistakes in raising their son. When Adam’s father tries to apologize for the impact of his homophobia and toxic masculinity, the conversation suggests wish fulfillment on Adam’s part, an impossible desire to reconnect meaningfully as adults. In contrast, Hideo realizes in Strangers that the attempt to recapture his past isn’t worth giving away his future.
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023).
At other points, this dynamic has greater complexity, as when Adam and his father first meet again; Haigh frames this moment with the utmost intimacy, evoking a cruising pickup. The discomfort in this scene—and the mere concept of Adam cruising his own literal daddy, long dead—is rather brilliant on a Freudian level, conveying a perfect note of “am I attracted to him because he reminds me of my father?” Even the soundtrack, populated by queer artists like Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, conjures the cultural context in which Haigh would have experienced queerness in his youth, and suggests the way that his parents (or Adam’s parents) would have looked at gay men in the AIDS era, and perhaps how they might have perceived queerness as a death sentence in light of artists like Freddie Mercury passing away. It’s a return to the explicitly queer subject matter of Haigh’s Looking (2014–2016) and Weekend (2011), as opposed to the merely queer-coded 45 Years and Lean on Pete (2017).
All of Us Strangers is also attuned to the way that these fears would have influenced Adam, making him long for a sense of stability. His conversations with Harry are as mundane as they are loaded, about how nice it’d be to just cuddle up together while also acknowledging that, for a long time, being queer (or “gay” as Adam self-describes, citing his personal baggage with the term “queer”) was a source of fear and discomfort, where “even a blowjob could send me into three months of sweats and swollen glands.” To a person living with such hang-ups a man who seems normal—who wants to sit around and talk while in the tub, or fuck monogamously—could understandably seem like The One. Although he initially rejects Harry—his neighbor and lover—Adam is drawn to the relative stability that his newfound family and love both offer. When he is with them he does not have to worry about what comes next, about having to leave the comfort and safety of his home (be it his apartment or his family’s old house). Even before Harry is revealed to be a ghost himself, there’s a sense that Adam is lulled into the comfort of a relationship rather than seeking to be challenged by anyone in the world beyond him. This desire for stability isn’t an unusual one, especially for a queer man who grew up surrounded by loss, but in Haigh’s depiction, Adam is never pushed to grapple with his retreat inside himself.
Top: All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023). Bottom: The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1988).
Haigh’s film arrives 35 years after a lesser-known adaptation of Yamada’s text. This alternate take, The Discarnates (1988) (or Ijintachi to no natsu, just like the novel, in its original language), comes from one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose work has not been widely distributed outside of his native country other than the Criterion Collection’s staple home-video release of House (1977) and more recent Blu-ray releases from Third Window Films and Crescendo. The Discarnates plays into Obayashi’s lifelong fixation on adaptation—be it from a manga like The Drifting Classroom (1987), or from the lives of historical figures like Sada Abe in Sada (1998)—and he refashions the novel elegantly. The filmmaker understands why Yamada’s character is drawn to the past; for Hidemi (Obayashi’s new name for Hideo), spending time with his family is as appealing as remaining in the “real” world with his new girlfriend. One set of ghosts lets him indulge in the comforts of reverting to his childhood; his parents cook dinner for him and teach him how to play card games that he never learned in his youth. The other ghost offers him the pleasures of adulthood that he lost in his failed marriage, a sexual and emotional connection that’s truly mutual. Contrary to the way that Haigh’s protagonist easily navigates both realms without guilt, both Yamada’s prose and Obayashi’s film ensure that this man’s life is at odds with and inextricable from the wider world.
These newfound relationships with the dead offer comfort and inspiration for Hidemi’s work, bringing him a joy he hasn’t experienced since his divorce, but they are also actively destroying him. Hidemi’s face rapidly ages during the film, and its increasingly grotesque appearance reminds us of this toll. Hidemi learns that, amidst all the discomfort of the world—from his former collaborator wanting to date his ex-wife to the reveal of his girlfriend as a vengeful monster—there is still a chance to find some semblance of stability. His life may always be changing, he may never stop experiencing loss, but those experiences are a key part of his being.
Obayashi breathes new life into the novel in the same way that a translator might strive to bring a fresh perspective to the source text while remaining obedient to the original. His images and sequences are as carefully crafted as Yamada’s prose, channeling the meaning behind the words. Hidemi’s scenes with his ghost parents, for instance, are shot with a warmth and brightness that is absent in other scenes, set in colder and lonelier spaces. These visuals suggest how vivid this relationship is for Hidemi and emphasizes its otherworldliness.
The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1988).
Hidemi’s career in television, likely influenced by Yamada’s own years working as a screenwriter for television dramas, becomes a visual and thematic anchor for the film. The Discarnates opens on a shot of the television: a lonely object, one to stare at in the darkness, in which to lose oneself. The more time that Hidemi spends in his fantasy, the more the heightened aesthetics of ’80s television slowly crossfade into the world at large; the ghosts are intangible, and the setting, Asakusa, looks period-accurate. In the opening sequence, as Hidemi stares at his television, the pitch-black room—much like his life—grows brighter and brighter.
Perhaps because of its age, or simply because of cultural differences between the East and the West, The Discarnates revels in unfamiliarity, in that sweet space between the real and the unreal, whereas All of Us Strangers is preoccupied with historical context. Obayashi’s film evokes a soap opera that might have been written for Japanese television, as much a contemporary slice of life as it is a timeless fantasy. That fantasy isn’t just dictated by how Hideo’s writing and actual life intertwined in the text, but by the way that Obayashi would often draw from his own history (from his childhood to his daughter’s dreams) for his work. Obayashi preserves the childlike wonder of House in his adaptation; not only does he give Hideki a juvenile sense of humor and joy that contrasts with Haigh’s and Adam’s proclivities for melancholy in All of Us Strangers, but he also embraces a sense of artificiality at every turn.
The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1988).
Take one of the film’s most surreal sequences: the climactic moment in which Hidemi’s girlfriend is revealed to be a ghost who has latched onto his soul. Early in the film, Hidemi is told that including Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” (an aria from the opera Gianni Schicchi expressing the tension between family and romance) to punctuate a scene in his script would be too obvious. But Obayashi knows that using Puccini would work; the dramatic weight of the song, regardless of its context, is the point. As the world spins around Hidemi—his girlfriend floating in the darkness, wanting to bring him down with her—a record of the aria spins as well, scoring not just the tragedy of their doomed romance but the tragedy of Hidemi’s separation from his family just hours prior. The impact of that goodbye scene is emotionally heightened by the way Hidemi’s parents slowly fade into the sunlight, their bodies becoming more and more translucent by the second, rather than just disappearing with a cut, as in Haigh’s film.
At one point in Yamada’s novel, Hideo thinks, “I flailed about, unable to put my finger on exactly what it was that I wanted, dissatisfied with what seemed too sober, recoiling from what seemed too wild, looking for something that simply did not exist.” Though Haigh and Obayashi both approach their adaptations with this line as a skeleton key, their interpretations of it differ in revealing ways. For Haigh, it results in a character trapped in this state of thought, never able to escape that dissatisfaction with the real world and, thus, recoiling into comfortable numbness. For Obayashi, it’s about growth: once you’ve realized that the dissatisfaction comes from within, there’s a chance to discover that what you thought didn’t exist has been in your heart all along.