Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
The Representation of Disaster
The disaster in Your Name is a meteor. We see its entire descent and explosive impact; moreover, it appears alongside fireworks, which lend its explosion an inexplicable beauty. The whole course of the disaster is plainly aestheticized. What we see is a fully represented, highly aestheticized disaster.
Weathering with You is different. Its disaster is the exact opposite of the one in Your Name. The meteor falls and explodes in an instant; the downpour lasts for months. The meteor is represented in full; months of torrential rain can only be represented in part. The meteor brings light; the rain brings darkness. The meteor is highly aestheticized; the unending rain is necessarily “de-aestheticized.” Why? Because we cannot capture this disaster at all. It is liquid, flowing liquid; it is endless. Much of the harm it causes cannot be seen, in stark contrast to the meteor’s direct impact.
The meteor delivers an overwhelming blow, beside which the village’s other contradictions seem irrelevant. Tokyo’s heavy rain is different. Its direct effects do not seem quite so terrifying; what it does, rather, is draw out the other contradictions.
In an earlier article, “Disaster as Ideology”, I distinguished two kinds of disaster: one straightforward and easy to understand, like a monster; the other unseen, like a fog. Heavy rain clearly belongs to the second kind. In itself, it is nothing much. Rain will not bring about a devastating catastrophe—at least not in the short term, not the way a meteor destroys the world in an instant. This means that ending the rain cannot save the world, either. Rather, the rain means that the world was like this from the start. This world does not need saving, because it is beyond saving. Some problems can be solved once the rain stops, but that does not mean problems disappear. The two protagonists can “solve” only some particular problems for some people, whereas everyone’s problems are endless. That they quit their work praying for rain also proves the point.1 This differs from the traditional heroic model of disaster, in which the hero’s aim is to end the disaster once and for all. And everyone’s problems after the disaster? Sorry, heroes don’t bother with little things like that. But the disaster in Weathering with You is precisely this kind of “everyday disaster.” The endlessness of everyday disaster is what “a disaster that destroys a world” tries to conceal.
World-destroying disasters such as meteors lead us to presuppose a harmonious world before the disaster. The rain is a critique of precisely that assumption: it shows that the world was ruined from the start. The rain’s ambiguous character as a disaster shows that disaster is cyclical, always already there. The old lady in Weathering with You says as much at the end:
Did you know? That part of Tokyo used to be the sea … So sometimes I think it’s just gone back to the way it was.
What is interesting is that the very next shot cuts to the older guy, Keisuke Suga: “What’s with you? You’ve been thinking about that for three whole years?”
I thought this was absolutely brilliant. The old lady is a character from Your Name. And Weathering with You came out three years after Your Name. Her words can thus be read as Shinkai’s criticism of Your Name, and the older guy’s words as a wisecrack about that criticism: What, you’ve been thinking about this for three whole years?
You can say I’m overreading it, but it really does seem pretty obvious to me. I haven’t read any Japanese critics’ reviews of Weathering with You, so perhaps one of them has written about it too … who knows.
An Outside Perspective
Now we need to look at another important character: the older guy. In Your Name, Shinkai was still giving us a textbook demonstration of the sekai-kei formula.2 In sekai-kei, every character apart from the two romantic leads is “rendered ignorant” to foreground the relationship between “you and me”: they know nothing about what is changing the world. The two protagonists, with their privileged knowledge, make the “world” itself their shared romantic secret. This is how Your Name works. Apart from the two leads, everyone is ignorant of what is happening.
Weathering with You is different. The story of its two leads, Hodaka and Hina, is no longer a secret. Instead, it lies fully exposed to the eyes of the police and an older man. And it is precisely through the older guy’s help that Hodaka can finally reach the rooftop to see Hina. Under a dependable adult’s protection, the boy and girl’s “space of fantasy” can unfold. At the end of the film, too, Hodaka goes to see Hina at Suga’s suggestion. Yet the older guy is also what tears the film completely apart. At the end, he says:
You think you two changed the world? Not a chance, idiot. Don’t get so full of yourself.
Don’t worry about it, young man. This world was never normal anyway.
The older guy’s position is deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, he explicitly says that the boy and girl could not really have changed the world. On the other, he implies that they did change it—by making it worse—and indulgently tells them not to worry about it.
The older guy is an excellent father, an excellent guardian. Running alongside the protagonists’ romance is another, less conspicuous thread throughout the film: the struggle between Suga and the police. It is a struggle between an adult who is not exactly respectable but knows how to play the game, and adults who are respectable but rigid. Suga is an image of an exemplary adult for a new age. On the one hand, he is thoroughly realistic; on the other, he will encourage children’s fantasies when necessary. Of course, these two qualities reinforce each other. A good adult has to learn that.
Clearly, the older guy’s position is Shinkai’s own: the position of an interpreter, an ambiguous position that must be taken in an ambiguous age. There is absolutely nothing contradictory about the older guy. Reality itself is contradictory. What he is really saying is: reality may be what it is, but if fantasizing does you good, then fantasize all you like, because your fantasies are part of reality too.
Cities, Cities Everywhere
At the end of the film, Hodaka settles the question of whether he has changed the world not through any evidence (though, if you insist, it is not as if there is no evidence; it simply is not what he is thinking about), but through a purely psychological process. He has simply persuaded himself. And to a large extent, he is merely putting Suga’s subtext into words. Don’t forget that, on his way to see Hina at the end, he keeps repeating what the older guy and the old lady said. If Your Name excluded adults and offered its audience a beautiful fantasy through children, then in Weathering with You it is no longer the audience that needs fantasy, but the characters themselves. In the end, Hodaka gives the impasse in reality a conventional imaginary resolution. His certainty stands in sharp contrast to the older guy’s uncertainty. A child so utterly certain in his teens begins, as he grows older, to waver under the influence of adults. By the time he becomes an adult himself, perhaps he will be another older guy like Suga.
In Your Name, the plot’s opposition revolves around city and countryside. As Mitsuha moves to the city, cityscapes gradually unfold, accompanied by the boy’s monologue: “Why do the sights of a town that no longer exists haunt me so?” By this point, the two main supporting characters have also come to the city. Everything is folded into the city. Shinkai then presents a sequence of wallpaper-like cityscapes, highly aestheticizing the city’s various forms of “everyday life.” In Weathering with You, the countryside has been excluded as a setting from the outset. There is nothing but the city. The film focuses more closely on the city’s dark side, turning its attention to Tokyo’s filthiest district—Shinjuku. Don’t forget that, early on, the boy keeps appearing on screen with a book: The Catcher in the Rye. That novel’s protagonist is also a boy walking through a sinful city. But his dream is a field of rye. A simple question: why does a boy carrying The Catcher in the Rye leave the countryside for the city? Wasn’t the countryside back home good enough? Perhaps, as Eliot said, urbanization is the greatest sorcery of all. The abandoned Yoyogi building is the finest altar. An image of the (abandoned) city in its natural condition.
Weathering with You abandons this countryside–city opposition. It also abandons the opposition between this world and the other shore:3 the countryside, equated with the shrine, corresponds to the other shore, while the city corresponds to this world. The shrine is folded into the Yoyogi building. Ancient natural power emanates from an abandoned building. One possible reading is that nature’s power does not exist beforehand; ultimately, it is nothing more than a fantasy shaped by the city. Nature itself is the greatest urban legend.
Abolishing the distinction between this world and the other shore also means that we no longer have two worlds. We have only one world, split by two perspectives: the older guy’s and the children’s. These two perspectives are at odds. Neither can fully justify itself, but each can hint at the problems in the other.
