Translation Rights TQE / Maps of The Sounds of Tokyo

A narration by Isabel Coixet that arises from the movie script.

The tale of a love story with Tokyo as its backdrop.

Midori’s suicide at a young age drives her father mad. Mr. Nagara, a rich Japanese business man, cannot get over the loss of his daughter and seeks vengeance for her death. David, Midori’s boyfriend, a Catalan man who owns a wine shop in Tokyo, cannot forget her either. As a way of dealing with his grief, David begins a relationship with Ryu, a solitary and enigmatic girl that appears in his store and with whom he will take the same walks and undergo the same rituals as he had done with his previous girlfriend, until they both give into their desperate sexual passion. The witness and narrator of this peculiar love story is an engineer who has also fallen for Ryu and who is obsessed with recording the sounds that surround her in different places – from Tsujiki, the noisy fish market in Tokyo where she works the nightshift, to the cemeteries that she likes to visit on Sundays. And yet both David and the narrator are oblivious to the fact that Ryu has another occasional occupation: she is a hired killer.

The tale is organized according to the tapes recorded in different Tokyo neighborhoods that trace the fascinating map of the sounds of the city. The narration speeds up as the pieces of the desolate and tragic puzzle, and the relationships between the characters, all fall into place. As a backdrop, in the words of Isabel Coixet, “the quasi-material vibration emitted by the city of Tokyo at night: a mix of expectation, mystery, shadows and sweetness that leaves a deep print”. The work also pays homage to Japanese culture and, most especially, to the disturbing atmosphere in the novels of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto.

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo arises from the script of the movie and offers the reader a vibrant and intelligent story about the intertwined lives of several characters. It speaks about loneliness, melancholy, passion, and pain in the modern city par excellence.

Isabel Coixet (Barcelona, 1962) has a degree in History from the University of Barcelona. Before becoming a film director, she worked as a journalist for the cinema magazine Fotogramas. Her first feature film was Demasiado viejo para morir joven (Too Old to Die Young, 1988), followed by Cosas que nunca te dije (Things I Never Told You, 1996), A los que aman (To Those Who Love, 1998), Mi vida sin mí (My Life Without Me, 2003), La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words, 2005), Elegy (2008) – an adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal – and Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio (Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, 2009), which premiered in the official selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and won the prize for best sound, and which has already been sold to several countries. Coixet’s films have not only achieved prizes and international projection but have also won the director great prestige due to her distinctly unique personal universe.