A Note on the Archived Essay
This essay on Your Name was a milestone in my pursuit of criticism. It may be the most warmly received of all my articles. It was also the first review I was paid to write. The questions I left unresolved in my preceding essay on Hikaru Sugii were already beginning to take shape here. Look closely, and you will notice that, when discussing small gestures, I deliberately borrow lines from Sugii’s Please Remember Me (Owaru Sekai no Album) to interpret Taki and Mitsuha’s body-swapping. To some extent, this essay also laid the foundations for the style and structure of my criticism.
The essay began as “Fate in Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name: A Discussion through Sekaikei”, posted on the S1 forum. It grew out of the exchange of ideas among fellow fans in the dedicated thread, with S1 member Hari Seldon making the introductions and Anitama’s Uncle Jia serving as editor. The news about Anitama these past few days has left me deeply saddened. I hope this link to the original article never turns into a 404.
In China, Makoto Shinkai is often labeled “fresh and delicate” or “artsy.” His works are frequently seen as expressions of his personal experience. But this is not really the case. Distinctive though his works are, many other works share precisely what makes them distinctive. These are generally known as sekaikei. This essay will take sekaikei as its point of departure, clearing up some common misunderstandings before offering a reading of Your Name.
What Is Sekaikei?
The most widely circulated definition of sekaikei today comes from the Japanese critic Hiroki Azuma: sekaikei is a mode of imagination that directly connects the small-scale relationship between you and me to vast ontological questions, such as a crisis threatening the end of the world, without depicting mediating structures such as society.
A few points need to be added. Sekaikei does not necessarily have to depict a crisis in the form of a natural disaster. What matters is the ontological question behind the crisis: behind a natural disaster, for instance, lie abstract questions of life and death. Nor does sekaikei indicate that its creators lack life experience. Rather than childishly excluding society and others, it reflects a social condition in Heisei-era Japan in which others have become something like scenery. In sekaikei, the relationship between you and me moves in step with the world crisis, and that abstract crisis can generally be depicted symbolically only through this relationship.
The Meteorite and Fate
Starting from this definition of sekaikei, what is the world crisis—the ontological question—in Your Name? Many people’s instinctive answer might be “the meteorite disaster.” But the damage the meteorite causes hardly rises to the level of a “world crisis.” Moreover, while it destroys the whole town of Itomori, elsewhere in the film—in Tokyo, for instance, where the male protagonist is still a middle-school student—it is a beautiful astronomical spectacle. There is no sense of crisis or destruction. It is even “a stroke of luck for those of us alive in this era.” Of course, the meteorite is an important element of the film, and I do not deny its connection to the earthquake disaster of March 11, 2011. But the central crisis in Your Name is not “the meteorite destroys Itomori village”—if that were all, one meteorite would have been enough. Rather, just as the meteorite splits into two streaks as it approaches the ground, the crisis is that “the meteorite forces two people in love to exist in two stretches of time in which they cannot meet.”
The Body-Swapping Element
Sekaikei is often mistaken for a story formula. It is not. It is a mode of imagination. Your Name, for example, depicts local customs and the bustle of Tokyo in considerable detail. How can we say it excludes the depiction of society? The exclusion at issue is not the omission of society from the work. It means that the role of “society/others” between the relationship of you and me and the ontological question has been hollowed out. In Your Name, the body-swapping premise, one of the highlights of the first half, exemplifies this sekaikei tendency to exclude or hollow out society’s role between the relationship of you and me and the larger question. The defining feature of the “you-and-me relationship,” or romance, that arises from body-swapping is its “complete exclusion of others—of society.”
Japanese passage:
We’ll never find each other by searching blindly like this. We’ll never find each other, but there is just one thing I know for certain. If we meet, we’ll know at once, without a doubt: the one who was inside me is you; the one who was inside you is me.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
Searching aimlessly like this, we surely won’t find each other, will we? Though we won’t find each other, there is one thing we cannot deny. If we meet, we’ll recognize each other at a glance, without a doubt. Because the one inside me is you. The one inside you is me.
Inside you is me; inside me is you. As this quotation shows, Mitsuha and Taki’s feelings completely exclude others—society. Body-swapping is the means by which those feelings are expressed. Shinkai’s works are often said to depict the distance between people, but this is not quite accurate. Physical distance may repeatedly separate his couples, yet it often has no effect whatsoever on the minds bound so firmly together. It is the latter—the absence of any felt distance between their minds—that lies at the heart of his work. Before twilight arrives, Mitsuha and Taki are separated by an absolute physical distance, yet each can unmistakably feel the other standing right there. This sense that “even if you are not in this world, I can still feel you beside me” is thoroughly sekaikei.
The Helplessness of Sekaikei
Sekaikei works are often suffused with helplessness. The fate of the world and its crisis tend to rest on the heroine’s shoulders, while the male protagonist can often do no more than offer her emotional support. In the end, it is still the heroine and the world that determine how things turn out for them. This is clear in both Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days. In Your Name, however, that helplessness is considerably eased. One reason is body-swapping. When Taki realizes he cannot persuade Mitsuha’s father on his own, the helplessness we would expect him to show is softened because the audience sees Mitsuha’s outward appearance. Body-swapping also allows Taki’s efforts to become Mitsuha’s efforts. In the first half of the plan to evacuate the villagers, Taki-in-Mitsuha’s-body makes the preparations; in the second half, Mitsuha herself takes on the crucial task of persuading the village head. This arrangement deftly eases the helplessness that the protagonist’s position would otherwise make the audience feel.
The Impossibility of Fate
Body-swapping itself is hardly uncommon. But in Your Name, this seemingly lighthearted, everyday device is pushed to a kind of limit. Let us approach it from another angle. We know that our man Shinkai’s theatrical debut, Voices of a Distant Star, was named by Azuma as one of three representative sekaikei works, alongside Saikano and Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (Iriya’s Sky, Summer of the UFOs). Yet we have never understood why he set off down the road toward sekaikei.
Let us consider what others have said. In early September, after seeing Your Name, Azuma—the critic who proposed the definition of sekaikei—made the following comments on Twitter:
What I want to emphasize again is that this is not a work about ending up with the person you are fated to be with. It is a work about why people have the illusion that such a person exists for them. Behind this reading lies “game-like realism” … but explaining that on Twitter is impossible. (Laughs.)
There is no such thing as a person you are fated to be with. All that exists is the feeling that “there must be someone I am fated to be with”—some people have that feeling, and some do not. A fantasy arrived at by working backward from that feeling is the essence of sekaikei.
Hifumi Nakayama replied with an observation that Azuma endorsed:
This interpretation of Azuma’s takes as its baseline reality the world in which the residents of Itomori do not die in the meteorite disaster, and the protagonists meet without remembering each other’s names. In short, I suppose this is a way of reading the entire film as a fantasy in the past conditional—a possible world—generated retrospectively.
This reading in terms of possible worlds, reminiscent of Steins;Gate, is illuminating. Shinkai had already experimented with possible worlds in The Place Promised in Our Early Days. In Your Name, too, the character Tessie uses a possible-worlds hypothesis to explain the strange things happening to Mitsuha. The film does indeed contain elements of possible worlds and time travel. But the most illuminating part of Azuma’s reading lies not here, but in “game-like realism.”
Azuma proposed game-like realism in his 2007 book The Birth of Game-like Realism: The Animalizing Postmodern 2. The concept has a great deal to it, but what matters to us here is above all the question of what makes fate fate.
Take galgames—romance games with multiple heroines. On the one hand, the player has a unique romance with each heroine and regards each as the one they are fated to be with. On the other, the structure of multiple heroines and branching scenarios undermines that uniqueness. If anyone can be the one you are fated to be with, fate itself loses its meaning. Likewise, no matter how fiercely the author of a story in otaku culture resists, they can never stop fan works from exploring “this possibility” or “that possibility” in the original. A character’s fate in the original work is diluted by countless fates in fan creations, losing the uniqueness that fate requires. More broadly, the decline of grand narratives in what Lyotard calls the postmodern condition means that no narrative—no story—can escape the possibility of other ways of unfolding: it becomes plural. The task of game-like realism is to confront this question: how can a unique fate still be guaranteed when this proliferation of possibilities is unavoidable?
The famous classical tragedy Oedipus Rex is one example. In such tragedies, religion—that is, the authority of God—guaranteed fate. But the rise of the Reformation and the Enlightenment invalidated religion’s guarantee. In modern literature, ideologies based on a materialist conception of history guaranteed a work’s “unique unfolding.” By the postmodern era, however, systems of thought and ideologies such as Marxism no longer had their former power to unite everyone’s thinking. In this postmodern condition of increasingly plural ideas and values, nothing remained that could guarantee “what makes fate fate.”
Once a story’s unfolding loses its uniqueness, depicting “fate” becomes impossible. To state the conclusion first, this problem gave rise to the whole range of time-loop and meta works of the 2000s. Time-loop works are stories involving loops in time; meta works, such as Ever17, bring the player’s viewpoint into the story. By introducing a transcendent perspective—often that of the reader—they use the reader’s unique life and gaming experience to guarantee the work’s unique unfolding. Countless works employ this method, including Ever17, Baldr Sky, Muv-Luv, and Steins;Gate. Nitroplus’s 2013 eroge, or adult game, YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story can be regarded as one pinnacle of this kind of work.
A Love Fated to Be
As everyone expected, Your Name is also a work about fate. Mitsuha goes to Tokyo to find Taki. But this Taki is still in middle school. He has not met Mitsuha yet. As he watches her walk away in disappointment—
Japanese passage:
A thought suddenly strikes me. This strange girl might be someone I ought to know.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
The thought comes to me unbidden. This strange girl might be someone I have to get to know.
“Someone I have to get to know,” or the promotional line on the official website, “I will go looking for you, though we have never met”: these expressions of feeling are deeply romantic, full of a sense of fate. In the novel’s afterword, Shinkai also explicitly says that the work is dedicated to those who “keep waiting, firmly believing that they will meet the person they have never met.” Clearly, Your Name does depict fate. How, then, does Shinkai confront the question of “what makes fate fate” in this film?
Let us begin with possible worlds. First, the work contains two possible worlds.
A. The timeline in which Mitsuha and the villagers of Itomori die.
B. The timeline in which Mitsuha and the villagers of Itomori do not die, and Mitsuha and Taki meet without remembering each other.
There is also a clear loop structure.
The reason they swap bodies is the braided cord. Mitsuha gave the cord to Taki three years earlier. Yet the reason Mitsuha went to Tokyo three years earlier was that she had swapped bodies with the Taki of three years later. Cause and effect thus form a closed loop in space and time: the reason for going to Tokyo lies three years in the future, while the reason for swapping bodies three years in the future is that she went to Tokyo. Fate first arises within this closed loop of space and time.
When Mitsuha wakes beside the shintai—the sacred object embodying the deity—three years in the future, she remembers having died once already. Carrying that memory of her own death, she lives through October 4, the day the meteorite falls, a second time.
Most of us probably prefer possible world B, where Mitsuha and Taki reunite and reach a happy ending, to possible world A, where life and death separate them. In principle, however, these two possible worlds are equivalent. Recognizing either one alone cannot solve the problem of “guaranteeing fate.”
If we recognize only A, B still exists. The ending in A appears to be a tragedy in which fate decrees that they can never meet again. But the existence of a happy ending prevents it from becoming a true tragedy of fate. Imagine playing through a game to a stirringly tragic, fated ending, only for someone to tell you that the game also has a thrilling route that ends with everyone happily reunited. The tragic ending loses its sense of fate.
If we recognize only B, A still exists. What appears to be a happy ending in B becomes an incomplete one, because we cannot save the Mitsuha of every world. Saving the Mitsuha of this world is merely a matter of chance, and fate without necessity is no longer fate. Fate loses its meaning as fate; a “Happy End” never feels truly happy. How does Shinkai solve this problem? His method is not very different from those of the works mentioned above.
He decrees B to be “fate,” then works backward to construct A, deftly blending the two possible worlds through a narrative trick. Logically speaking, there is no “world crisis” in possible world B. The crisis exists only in possible world A. Only there are Mitsuha and Taki separated by life and death, existing in stretches of time in which they can never meet. Using the audience’s linear viewing perspective and the “body-swapping romance,” he links the “world crisis” of possible world A to the relationship between you and me in possible world B—that is, the two people who finally meet on the stairs. Fate, born from the closed loop of space and time in A, is thus deftly repurposed as fate in B. The pair in A and the pair in B thus become one and the same pair. This solves the problem of what makes fate fate.
This formal account may seem a little complicated. Put more simply, it goes like this:
After Taki drinks Mitsuha’s kuchikamizake, the sake made from rice she has chewed, both he and Mitsuha gain a perspective that transcends their current possible world, A. Retaining their memories of A—as shown by Mitsuha still remembering her death in the meteorite disaster when she wakes in Taki’s body at the shrine—they meet at a twilight that transcends both worlds. As the evacuation progresses, and possible world A moves toward possible world B, this transcendent perspective is gradually withdrawn. Memories from A slowly disappear, leaving only something outside memory: “the feeling that I seem always to have been looking for someone I am fated to meet.” This feeling actually comes from A. In other words, the sense of fate and the identity of the Mitsuha and Taki who finally achieve their fated meeting in B have been brought from A to B through a transcendent perspective and a love that transcends space and time. Through this connection, Shinkai successfully integrates the fates of the two possible worlds, making them one.
Moreover, this transcendent perspective actually coincides with that of the audience watching the film. The film opens with a flashback, sandwiching possible world A, in the form of a “dream,” within possible world B and giving the audience the illusion of a “memory.” Yet it is entirely possible that the Taki and Mitsuha of possible world A never met in the first place, never swapped bodies, and have no memories, no braided cord, no evidence whatsoever that they ever met. In other words, it is we, the viewers, who can guarantee that the Mitsuha and Taki of A are the same people as the Mitsuha and Taki of B. The film’s linear narrative time and our linear viewing experience make the two worlds one. Taki and Mitsuha’s fated meeting is guaranteed by us, outside the work.
This is what makes Your Name so addictive. Only when we watch can the Taki and Mitsuha of A become one and the same pair as the Taki and Mitsuha of B and reach a happy ending. So countless fans stream into cinemas, one wave after another, for the sake of that beautiful ending. Each time we watch the film, we reinforce Taki and Mitsuha’s happy ending. At the same time, we reinforce their separation and their pain. To ease that pain, we go back to the cinema to reinforce the happy ending again. Round and round, without end …
Other Possibilities
Japanese lyrics:
Where did the wind that passed between us bring its loneliness from?
The sky after we cried was sometimes so strangely clear.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
The wind that brushes between us brings loneliness from who knows where.
The sky we gaze up at after crying has an extraordinary clarity.
In this happy ending, where they turn and call out to each other, we find release and satisfaction. Yet even though we feel that release, even though they have met again, Yojiro Noda’s singing brings a trace of loneliness to the wind blowing between them. Satisfied as we are inside the cinema, we remain troubled by loneliness and solitude once we leave. This happy ending cannot last beyond the cinema.
But must it really be this way? Is there truly no other possibility? Can Taki and Mitsuha’s meeting really not exist independently of us? Are their everyday happiness and their efforts truly so powerless? I do not want to think so.
Then how about this explanation? They never forgot each other at all. Their love transcended the world’s revision, preserving their memories and allowing them to meet at the end. Such a reading would make Your Name a film steeped in romanticism, preserving in full both the joys of everyday life and their efforts to change the world. But what about their efforts after the world has changed? What about the Taki and Mitsuha who forget each other and pass each other again and again on the streets of Tokyo for eight years? What about the Taki and Mitsuha who do not even know whether they are looking for a person or a thing, yet keep struggling, feeling “just a little longer, just wait a little longer”? Do their efforts not count as efforts? Is their struggle worth less than those happy everyday moments?
We cannot let the regrets left in possible world A negate their efforts in possible world B. We cannot pursue the utmost romance while ignoring the “loneliness and solitude” that are its other face. We cannot deny the value of that ending simply because we cannot let go. If this were merely a work of romanticism, there would be no need to erase their memories. One line—“I’ll be waiting for you in the future”—would suffice. They could simply reunite in the future with their memories intact.
What Your Name depicts is not something as grand as “breaking the shackles of fate.” It is “small struggles within fate that win a small victory at last.” That is why it is “just wait a little longer, just a little longer.” If Your Name were merely a work of romanticism, it would be nothing more than a rehash of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
An Indelible Feeling
Even so, I do not want to regard their final meeting as an ending full of emptiness and regret. Our hypothesis leads us to infer that they have never met, but that does not mean they are not the two people who saved the village. What we must do is begin from the premise that these two are not those two, and seek another guarantee of their identity without relying on a narrative trick or the audience’s perspective.
Then what about using the film’s concept of musubi, its generative, binding power, as the guarantee of their identity? Musubi inscribed their memories deep in their souls. Even if history and the world have changed, even if they have never met in history, at the level of their souls they remain the two who met. But like the interpretation above, this ignores their efforts after the world changes. It explains their final meeting by appealing to gods, musubi, and ways of thinking that rely on external powers.
An interpretation that favors preserving memory undermines their struggle and destroys what is precious about the ending. One that favors their struggle negates their former everyday life and casts a shadow of emptiness over the entire work. Yet if we do not seek this guarantee within the two of them, but appeal to a transcendent perspective, we fall into an endless loop. Appeal to supernatural powers, and we sink back into a way of thinking based on dependence.
How, then, can we solve this problem? How can we find, within so many constraints, a possibility that does justice to both? The answer is that feeling which cannot be erased, even across worlds. This feeling is precious: descriptions such as love and romanticism cannot do it justice. Yet it is also utterly ordinary, something small rather than grand. It is within the two of them, dependent neither on the audience nor on supernatural powers. Precisely because it is within them, they can finally win after eight years of struggle. Yet it does not belong to them, nor is it a matter of their own agency. It is not memory; it is not conviction. But it runs deeper than conviction. What, then, is this feeling?
Though Memory Has Vanished
Before answering, let us revisit a scene. Sayaka has been discovered, Tessie has been called to a halt by his father, and Mitsuha, watching the comet split, falls hard to the ground. She recalls a promise she made with someone, though she does not know who. As she opens her tightly clenched hand, “Sparkle,” the song that had fallen silent, begins again.
Japanese lyrics:
Even the way I loved carried your scent.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
Even the way of loving gives off your scent.
Japanese lyrics:
Even the way I walked rang with your laughter.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
Even my footsteps ring with your laughter.
Looking at “I love you” in her palm, Mitsuha finds courage and understands her own love, even though she no longer remembers who wrote this to her, no longer remembers whom she has fallen in love with. Not knowing who gave her this courage or whom this love is for, Mitsuha gets up, crying and smiling. When she starts running again, her stride already carries something of Taki, just as the lyrics suggest. She is no longer the Mitsuha who ran so timidly during the swap. Her stride, the swing of her arms: they are so resolute, so close to Taki’s stride.
Yes, even when memory has vanished, even when your name is forgotten, one thing remains. And this is the indelible feeling we have been seeking.
Gestures That Do Not Belong to Oneself
Japanese passage:
There are habits I have picked up without knowing it.
Touching the back of my neck when I’m flustered, for instance. Peering into my own eyes in the mirror when I wash my face. Stepping out the front door and looking at the scenery for a while, even on mornings when I’m in a hurry.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
There are habits I have picked up at some unknown time.
Touching the back of my neck when I’m nervous, for instance. Staring deep into my own eyes when I wash my face. Stopping to look at the scenery after stepping out the front door, even on mornings when I’m in a hurry.
—From the Your Name novel
There is nothing at the back of the neck, yet the hand always reaches there when nervous. These are one’s own eyes, yet there always seems to be something inside them. There is no time, yet one always stops to look at the same familiar scenery. These habits, habits that should not belong to oneself, are precisely the indelible feeling that has troubled Taki and Mitsuha—and sustained them—for eight years. This feeling belongs neither to memory nor to the body. It is, rather, a form of “the unconscious.”
From the standpoint of philosophy and psychoanalysis, what we call memory belongs to the subject in the Cartesian sense of “I think, therefore I am”: the self = consciousness. The unconscious precedes the mind = self. The self cannot perceive it, but it is not material. It is the part of oneself—of one’s own existence—that belongs to another. Here is one example. Once, while I was eating in the cafeteria, a classmate suddenly pointed out how strangely I held my chopsticks: my index finger never touched them, giving my hand something of the delicately poised “orchid fingers” gesture. I had lived for over twenty years, and this was the first time I had learned that I held my chopsticks this way. It felt uncanny, as though the hands holding them were not mine. I had no memory of having such a habit, yet this habit = the unconscious unquestionably existed within me.
What troubles Taki and Mitsuha is precisely this sort of “gesture that does not belong to oneself.” On waking, tears fall against their will. Against their will, they look at their palms. Against their will, they find themselves gazing at the scenery outside the front door. None of these habits belongs to them; they seem to belong to someone else. We can even borrow lines from Please Remember Me, itself a sekaikei work: in a single blink, a single heartbeat, a single rise and fall of the breath, they feel something that is not their own. Everything has taken on the color of that person they have forgotten.
In that everyday life of swapping bodies, what they exchanged was not just their bodies, not just their minds.
Japanese passage:
Her body heat and heartbeat, her breathing and voice, the vivid red filtering through the eyelids, the fresh, vibrant wavelengths reaching the eardrums—I had felt them all, unmistakably.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
Her body heat, heartbeat, breathing, voice; the bright red seen through the eyelids, the wavelengths transmitted through the vibration of the eardrums—I had felt them all, unmistakably.
—From the Your Name novel
How she breathed, how she listened, how her heart beat.
How he walked, how he smiled, how he blinked.
How her hair swayed behind her head, how the curves of her chest bounced.
Where his gaze could reach, how much warmth his body heat could give.
Even though memory has vanished, even though the mind will never return to that body in that world, the way of breathing, the way the heart beats, the way of blinking—the things we once exchanged that belong neither to memory nor to the body, things we never even committed to memory, never even noticed—remain in the unconscious. They have crossed the divide between two worlds and remained.
Breathing from someone unknown. Heartbeats from someone unknown. Blinks from someone unknown.
A stride that became resolute at some unknown moment. A smile that became lovely at some unknown moment.
And so they cannot stop searching: to whom do these gestures in the unconscious—gestures that are not their own—actually belong? They have this feeling, yet do not know who left it there, or what left it there—or whether it is merely their own delusion. What remains in the unconscious gives Taki and Mitsuha the courage and hope to keep searching. But it also casts them into profound despair.
Why They Recognize Each Other
What, then, finally brings them together? Something within oneself that belongs to another. Turn the perspective around: something within another that belongs to oneself.
That girl I have never met, that girl who has never appeared in my memory: her stride carries something of me. Her smile has my color. Her blinking, her breathing, her heartbeat, the tear she sheds, that single sob—all have a part that belongs to me.
That boy I have never met, that boy who has never appeared in my memory: his eyes seem to have my depth; his hair has my lightness. His blinking, his breathing, his heartbeat, his hesitant gestures, his decisive turn to look back—all have a part that belongs to me.
So the one who left these things that are not mine here within me is you.
And so the one who left these things that are not mine here within me is you.
After recognizing each other at a glance from the moving trains, they run in such peculiar ways. Mitsuha, in high heels, runs with such resolve. Taki, in his ill-fitting suit, runs rather timidly, with a slightly effeminate air. Their habits, their unconscious, have already become deeply interwoven. There is Taki in Mitsuha’s stride, and Mitsuha in Taki’s.
The reason they recognize each other, that indelible feeling: looking back now, it was already there in this line.
Japanese passage:
If we meet, we’ll know at once, without a doubt: the one who was inside me is you; the one who was inside you is me.
The essay’s Chinese gloss:
If we meet, we’ll recognize each other at a glance, without a doubt. Because the one inside me is you. The one inside you is me.
The official Chinese translation seems to have rendered this as “You’re the person I swapped bodies with, and I’m the person you swapped bodies with.” To my mind, that erases the profound meaning the line holds. Here, 入っていた (haitte ita, “was inside”) is not only a past progressive form. It can also express the result and state of an action. Even if we are not swapping bodies now, as a result of that exchange, I—my unconscious—remain within you, and you—your unconscious—remain within me.
The guarantee of their identity, the reason Taki and Mitsuha can meet, is not some grand conviction or romantic love. It is an everyday movement, a breath, a beat of the heart. Their fate lies not in musubi, not in their memory or will, still less in our perspective as viewers, but in their unconscious. Even without knowing whom to look for, they keep struggling within this unconscious. Within it, forgetting each other’s names actually helps bring them together. For the first time, both their former everyday happiness and their present perseverance and struggle are honored without sacrificing either. For the first time, the ending’s precious quality is established: reunion and loneliness as two sides of the same thing.
Shinkai’s Sensibility, Sekaikei’s Sensibility
There is more to the story I told above. Some time after my classmate pointed out the habit I had not known I had, one day in November I was getting ready to head to Hong Kong to watch Your Name again. The night before I left, I stayed with a relative, who invited me out to dinner. At the table, I noticed that both this relative, whom I had not seen for years, and their child, whom I was meeting for the first time, held their chopsticks in the same way I did. At that moment, I felt that perhaps this was what Shinkai wanted to depict. Blood ties, fate, love, other people—even the entire world—are hidden in the everyday life around us that we have never noticed. The coexistence of the everyday and the extraordinary in sekaikei is not a matter of being oblivious to the extraordinary or running away from it. The extraordinary has been there, in the corners of everyday life, from the very beginning.
First published in Anitama; © Hongcha Pao Haitai / Anitama.