Borrowed From the Page

Netflix's new East of Eden just dropped this week, Florence Pugh leading a fresh adaptation of Steinbeck's well-known novel, and it got me thinking about how often film has leaned on novels to do the heavy lifting. Some of the best movies I've seen started as books I hadn't read yet (Project Hail Mary comes to my mind as the most recent example), and a number of the directors I admire have said that a novel was so good that they just had to make the film (or TV series) version of it.

We had covered a few such films in previous Oblique issues: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, adapted from Wang Dulu's wuxia novel, and Farewell My Concubine, from Lilian Lee's. Everything else had come from original screenplays, true stories, or source material that never got the same kind of credit, such as manga. Asian cinema has frequently leaned on its own literature for over a century, except the novels themselves rarely travel with the films that made them famous outside their home countries.

So this week, three Asian films, three Asian novels behind them. This also comes timely as the Nobel Literature Prize winner was announced this week (more on that in the Signal section).

— Yubin

A middle school teacher stands in front of her class on the last day before spring break and calmly announces that two of her students murdered her four-year-old daughter. Then she tells them exactly how she plans to get even, and sits back down. That's the opening of Confessions.

The film is based on Kanae Minato's 2008 novel Kokuhaku, her debut piece, which more or less invented a genre the Japanese publishing world now calls "iyamisu," unpleasant mysteries built less around who did it than around how ordinary people justify what they did. Minato structures the book as a series of first-person confessions: the teacher, then two students, then a classmate, then a mother, each one reframing their own versions of the story. The readers then assemble the truth the way they would piece together a rumor, from several people who all have different things to tell.

Nakashima keeps that same structure but makes it visual: slow motion stretched past the point of comfort, a soundtrack built around Radiohead and the Japanese band Boris, a color grade so cold and blue it feels like the whole film is underwater. The plot turns on an actual legal fact, Japan's Juvenile Act shields minors from criminal prosecution, which is exactly why the teacher can't go to the police and instead builds a slower, quieter kind of revenge, until everyone in the room understands what they actually did.

Confessions swept the Japan Academy Prize for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Editing, won Best Asian Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and made Japan's shortlist for the Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language category the following year. It's the kind of film that gets recommended via word of mouth, and it's held up remarkably well over fifteen years.

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル) — Kinji Fukasaku (Japan, 2000)

Before The Hunger Games, before the entire dystopian-teens-fight-to-death section at any bookstore, there was Battle Royale: a class of ninth graders dropped on an island, fitted with explosive collars, and given three days to kill each other down to one survivor. It's based on Koushun Takami's 1999 novel, not the manga which came slightly later and is often mistaken for the original source. The film was genuinely controversial in Japan, debated over its violence, and it's gone on to become one of the most influential genre films of the last twenty-five years, cited directly by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino. Fukasaku, who made it in his late sixties, said he drew on his own childhood memories of wartime scarcity and the ugliness it could bring out in people. It's brutal and a little absurd, and definitely at a cult status. 

Stream free on Tubi, Pluto TV, PLEX (Trailer)

The Last Princess (덕혜옹주) — Hur Jin-ho (Korea, 2016)

Deokhye was the real last princess of the Joseon dynasty, sent to Japan at thirteen and kept from returning to Korea for decades. Kwon Bi-young's 2009 novel Princess Deokhye takes those facts and builds historical fiction around them, inventing characters and scenes, most notably a loyal childhood friend named Kim Jang-han who never existed. The novel was a bestseller specifically because it let readers sit with Deokhye's grief with sympathy.

Hur Jin-ho directs with restraint rather than overt patriotism, more interested in a woman slowly losing her language, her name, and her mind than in staging history as spectacle. Son Ye-jin's performance won Best Actress at both the Grand Bell Awards and the Baeksang Arts Awards, and it's the quietest, saddest film of the three this week, which felt like the right note to end on after more brutal Confessions and Battle Royale.

Stream free on Tubi, Roku TV, PLEX (Trailer)

October feels like a month for quieter listening, so this week is entirely acoustic: one artist I've followed since childhood, one mid-tour right now, and one who keeps returning to the same unfinished story.

I've followed Sungha Jung since he was a kid. He got discovered on YouTube at nine years old (in 2005!), playing fingerstyle guitar arrangements with such precision that it was just unbelievable to watch. I went to one of his concerts when he was around twelve, in what's one of the clearer memories I have of being amazed by a child in person. 

For a long stretch of his career, that was the story: prodigy plays other people's songs in an inventive and skillful way. Monologue is the record that rewrote his narrative. It's his fourth full album and the first made entirely of his own compositions. Eleven tracks that he wrote and produced himself rather than just arranged, built around a national tour that moved through Busan and Seoul under the same title. He'd already played alongside Jason Mraz, performing "I'm Yours" together in 2013, and alongside G-Dragon the year before that.

What Monologue shows, track by track, is that he's a composer who happens to have started as a prodigy, and not the other way around. He's since built an audience of more than seven million on YouTube alone, and this is still the album I'd recommend to someone who only knows him as that kid who went viral.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

bad pieces — wave to earth (Korea, 2026)

Daniel Kim, Dong Q, and John Cha formed wave to earth in Seoul in 2019, and built their audience almost entirely through streaming rather than any traditional industry push. Their lo-fi, jazz-inflected songs quickly found listeners well outside Korea before most of the Korean music press had caught on. bad pieces, their second full album released this August, marks a real expansion from that earlier sound into fuller, more confident arrangements without losing the flavor that made people pay attention in the first place. The tour behind it, billed as "Pieces," has sold out the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and Radio City Music Hall in New York, and is still working its way through Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Toronto, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul. Worth catching if they come anywhere near you.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Luminescent Creatures — Ichiko Aoba (Japan, 2025)

Her ninth studio album and best reviewed to date, Luminescent Creatures continues a fictional narrative Aoba began on 2020's Windswept Adan, a record she described as the soundtrack to an imaginary film about a girl exiled from her homeland. This one picks up that same heroine after death, following her through a kind of reincarnation into early sea life, grounded in Aoba's own diving trips around Okinawa and the Yaeyama islands and built in part from real whale-song samples. Whereas Windswept Adan leaned maximalist and orchestral, Luminescent Creatures folds that scale back into her earlier minimalist acoustic style, which makes it the cleaner fit for a month built around quieter listening.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Hyungsun Kim has lived on Jeju Island since 2012, photographing the haenyeo. They are the island's women free-divers, most of them over sixty, who work without oxygen tanks at depths around twenty meters for sea urchin, abalone, and seaweed. Getting the pictures took longer than most photography projects. Kim waited, sometimes for days, to be accepted by a given diving community before he was permitted to photograph at all, and once he was, he set up a makeshift studio right at the shoreline, catching the women the moment they emerged from the water rather than posing them.

The resulting portraits are stunning. Kim has described wanting to capture what he calls "this extreme duality," real physical and mental strength next to visible fragility, the women tired and breathless in the same frame. There's none of the heroic, National Geographic-style framing that these subjects usually portray. The images just capture the women in their daily profession.

The series was exhibited as Haenyeo: The Sea Women of Jeju Island at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, from March to June 2021, produced with the Korean Cultural Centre Australia and Jeju's provincial government to mark the 60th anniversary of Australia-Korea diplomatic relations. There's real importance underneath the images beyond the photographs themselves. Haenyeo diving was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016, partly in recognition of exactly this kind of risk: the number of registered divers has fallen from roughly 23,000 in the 1960s to about 4,000 today, almost all of them elderly, and the practice could possibly disappear within a generation. Kim's portraits read less like documentation of a tradition and more like a last close look at the people who are still keeping it alive.

Follow his work on his website and IG @hyungskim

Anne Carson won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, announced on October 8. The more interesting fact sits a layer underneath that headline. No Japanese writer has won the prize since Kenzaburo Oe in 1994, only the second Japanese laureate ever after Yasunari Kawabata in 1968. That's a thirty-two-year gap, and it holds despite Haruki Murakami being one of the most consistent favorites for roughly two decades running. Reuters was already listing him among the "perennial favorites" back in 2008. Ladbrokes had him as the outright favorite by 2014. He resurfaced near the top of the odds again in both 2025 and this year, which means he's now spent close to twenty years as the writer everyone expects to win, and then doesn't.

It's an odd structural fact more than a snub, and it's worth separating the two. Murakami is arguably Japan's most globally translated, most commercially dominant living novelist, read in airports and taught in universities at the same time. None of that has moved the actual prize in three decades. The Swedish Academy has its own, often opaque reasons for who it rewards, and Murakami's commercial ubiquity may genuinely work against him there rather than for him. But the gap itself says something larger about how unevenly global literary recognition still gets distributed, measured against how widely a country's fiction actually travels. This gap doesn’t diminish Murakami’s greatness in any way, but it’s still worth thinking about it.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com