Burning Across Borders: Lee Chang-dong’s Transnational Reading of Murakami Haruki’s Barn Burning

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) is a remarkable example of transnational adaptation and intertextual dialogue. Based on Murakami Haruki’s short story Barn Burning, whose title explicitly evokes William Faulkner’s story of the same name, the film substantially expands and transforms its literary source. Moving Murakami’s narrative from Japan to South Korea, Lee brings into the story a sense of anger, despair and social tension that recalls the world of Faulkner, while exploring the anxieties and inequalities of contemporary Korean society.

This lecture examines how Burning brings together three writers from different cultural and literary traditions: Faulkner, Murakami and Lee Chang-dong himself, who was an established novelist himself before becoming a filmmaker. Rather than simply translating a literary form into visual form, Lee creates a new narrative in which different literary voices and sensibilities intersect. The result is a film that crosses national, cultural and artistic boundaries, revealing how cinema can become a space for dialogue between literary traditions and for the creative transformations of their themes.