Though the story ends in anguished bafflement, director Jun Ichikawa, who also adapted Haruki Murakami's book, exerts as even an aesthetic control over this production as Tony does over his drawings--nothing is permitted to mess it up. The story is related to us by a narrator rather than in dialogue; at times the narration passes from the narrator to the characters for a short phrase and then back, and while this technique is smooth it makes you aware of how thoroughly planned the movie is. Many of the transitions between narrated scenes are accomplished by wipes from right to left, as if the narrator were turning pages in a book, i.e., something already written, not happening in front of your eyes. In addition, the palette is muted so that everything has a grayish cast. It might be called "elegant" gray rather than "drab" gray, but it underlines the general containment of the movie.

As for Eiko's clothes, which are central to the narrative, they're gorgeous but we're not meant to be tempted by them. (This movie couldn't be farther from a clothes-horse picture like George Cukor's The Women (1939), with its centerpiece Technicolor fashion show.) In the sequence that establishes Eiko's shopping mania, the camera is often at ankle level as she traipses from one high-end boutique to another, which conveys her compulsiveness more than the physical qualities that she treasures the clothing for. (This also keeps the movie from scolding about materialism, which is a plus.) After Eiko is gone, leaving Tony alone with her wardrobe, the camera scans down a line of jackets but only a few square inches of fabric come into focus at a time. It's the blurred vision of regret rather than of longing, and altogether Ichikawa's visual approach--with the lulling wipes from scene to scene and interpolated shots of water and sky--keeps things very cool.

Some people may complain that this puts a damper on the emotions, while others, projecting onto the material more than Ichikawa's handling asks them to, may be stirred intensely. I think both reactions would be beside the point. Being asked to "like" the characters and to feel what they feel is not the only way, or necessarily the most interesting way, that narrative artists engage us. Tony Takitani is an allegory, which as a genre does not express psychology or emotion in the straightforwardly representational way that naturalism does. Allegory functions fully by presenting an intricately structured idea about psychology; Tony represents an aspect of personality and the narrative dramatizes an idea about that aspect. In this scheme Eiko is not Tony's wife so much as a personification of the kind of temptation capable of seducing the qualities of character that Tony for his part personifies. (Among allegorical works, this abstract-functional role for the seductress is nowhere clearer than in Tannhäuser, in which the protagonist loses the devout Christian maiden because of his dalliance with Venus, the pagan goddess of love, in the flesh.)