Instead of locating him, she finds herself in the arms of a one-night stand: “however hard I looked for the one I loved, she could not find him anywhere and the city delivered her into the hands of a perfect stranger” ( Burning Your Boats 63). “Flesh and the Mirror” follows the unnamed central female protagonist on a nocturnal odyssey through the streets of Tokyo’s love quarter, searching for her Japanese lover, who has failed to meet her as promised at Yokohama Dock on her return from a visit to England. While I do not wish to re-rehearse the arguments of my previous writing here, to dissect the adaptation process it is first necessary to outline briefly the original short story, both in terms of plot and narrative style and to discuss its relationship to Carter’s own biography and her attitude to life writing. The screenplay has had a long gestation, which began while writing my previously published chapter “‘The Other of the Other,’” developing and extending my argument about Carter’s engagement with Japanese culture through the lens of screen media practice. Combining live action, puppetry, and animation, the screenplay creates a generic hybrid which formally engages with Carter’s metaleptic techniques and draws upon the Japanese culture that Carter references, including manga comics, irezumi tattoos, and bunraku puppetry, in order to scrutinize-through practice-her representation of Japan and experiment with the aesthetics of narrative film itself. Using this central story as a portmanteau, the screenplay interweaves other short stories from the Fireworks collection and various articles Carter wrote about her experiences living in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The screenplay was developed in collaboration with screenwriter and producer Scott James Bassett and producer Douglas Cummins (Pinnacle Pictures), with the support of the British Film Institute (BFI) Development Fund. This article critically reflects on the process of adapting Angela Carter’s “Flesh and the Mirror,” one of the short stories collected in Fireworks (1974), into a feature-length screenplay of the same name.
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