I understand why there are so few film adaptations of Haruki Murakami’s fiction. His novels and stories are inherently literary—their most important developments tend to take place in the protagonists’ thoughts, while the narrative turns tend to emerge from outside of the characters’ agency. His protagonists are generally passive; they don’t drive the narratives, but rather things happen to them. By employing these strategies, Murakami conveys how bewildering and overwhelming contemporary life can be, suggesting that our lives, however deliberately we plan them, are ultimately governed by forces beyond our control. This worldview seems difficult to translate into cinematic narratives, which often thrive on concrete actions. Tran Anh Hung’s film of Norwegian Wood (2010)—the most ambitious movie adaptation of a Murakami work prior to Lee Chang-dong’s Burning—demonstrated this all too well. Tran simply couldn’t get inside the protagonist’s head, so the character’s feelings of confusion and sad fascination (which drive Murakami’s novel) didn’t come through. In the end, the film set a mood and accomplished little else.

The film differs from Murakami’s story in several crucial ways. In the source material, the protagonist is older, married, and relatively successful, and his relationship with the young woman is chaste. His interest in her and his jealousy of the rich gentleman are essentially hankerings for connection that he can’t quite articulate. Lee, who wrote the film’s script with Oh Jungmi, gives the character enough of a backstory so that audiences can fill in the details of the character’s longing. We learn that Jong-su is not only frustrated in writing, but underemployed; one reason he moves back to his father’s farm is that he can’t find a job in Seoul. Jong-su also comes from a broken home. His mother left the family when he was a boy due to his father’s anger problems, and the father now awaits sentencing for having assaulted a government officer. Lee devotes a fair amount of Burning to the father’s trial and Jong-su’s efforts to clear the old man’s name, but this subplot amounts to something of a red herring, providing little insight into the hero’s obsession with Hae-mi. And where Murakami’s story ends soon after the young woman disappears, Burning goes on for about another hour, with the hero mentally unraveling as he searches in vain for clues.

Directed by Lee Chang-dong. In Korean with subtitles. 149 min. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11.