Pink Bullets

Messages to the Public, Jenny Holzer, 1982

Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

“Wong’s chief inspiration for Chungking Express was a short story entitled ‘On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning’ by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The story is about the mutability of perceptions, and begins with the sentence, ‘One fine April morning, I passed my 100% woman on a Harajuku back street.’ Chungking Express similarly begins with a chance encounter, which becomes a motif in the first episode… Wong develops the themes of chimerical relationships with the same evanescence displayed in Murakami’s short story. People’s lives just touch but never interpenetrate (maybe they do not even touch but just brush past, mere possibilities, foregone opportunities to connect, impermanence). Like Murakami, Wong injects a sense of magical element into everyday life but with a sense of fatal consequences. Like Murakami, he invokes icons from popular culture to suggest the part that memory plays.” (From Wong Kar-wai by Stephen Teo, 50-51)