The years race by; resolve ebbs with the days.
Copyediting & proofreading (Chinese edition): HMS Hood; Yuan Qing Riyue Lang (袁青日月郎); Fangcao Jin Damen (芳草进大门).
The barriers between minds and the ways words go astray have been depicted in dramatic, even intensely dramatic, terms ever since humanity invented literature. Hidden thoughts, so often dancing in the dark, seem to be at odds with the bright world of reality in some irreconcilable way. The exquisite contradictions born of this conflict rise like mist on a stage, swirling among the characters and even the spectators. And so we are caught in this vortex of irreconcilable contradictions—we are in the author’s cage, prisoners shackled hand and foot. However many impulses stir within us, we can only sob helplessly in the gloom of narrow paths.
And so we are caught in the cage called A Silent Voice. Yes, the work is controversial. But isn’t that controversy powerful evidence of its hold on us? From the moment we begin watching, the mist hanging between its characters has already spread into your heart and mine.
The gathering and dispersal of this mist might serve as a portrait of the relationship between Shoko Nishimiya and Shoya Ishida. In elementary school, Nishimiya is bullied by her peers because of the stigmatized identity attached to her deafness in both ears. Out of cowardice—or, rather, a sense of inferiority—she responds to bullying with apologies and retreat, only to face ever more vicious bullying. Ishida is one of her tormentors. But after an incident that even these unruly children consider excessive, he brings everyone’s hostility down on himself. His changed circumstances awaken guilt and self-reproach. He isolates himself in this abyss, cutting off contact with everyone else.
The mist still hangs over them, waiting for someone, or several people, to part the clouds and let the sunlight through. Ishida and Nishimiya meet again when they are older. Ishida hopes to become friends with Nishimiya, probably out of a desire to atone. Amid love and hate, as events intertwine and overlap, the mist is finally blown away. Nishimiya and Ishida are reconciled, and Ishida emerges from the abyss he himself entered.
In an interview, the manga’s creator, Yoshitoki Oima, said that the work depicts “how difficult it can be for people to communicate their feelings to each other.”1 She chose the title to tell readers that the story is about communication. The film’s director, Naoko Yamada, offered this message: Wanting to understand others, and trying to do so—this wish and intention find expression in many forms, different for every person.2
So how should we understand the dispersal of the mist between people? Or, to put it another way, how do people achieve what we call “communication”?
We must first clarify how people understand the meaning of someone else’s words. The philosopher of language Donald Davidson offers a good explanation through triangulation. Meaning necessarily has a public character, and therefore requires effort from both interpreter and speaker. To prevent their languages from being wholly out of alignment, the speaker’s expression of propositions must be grounded in interaction with the external world. In short, for the speaker, the truth conditions of every proposition must be constrained by its connections with the speaker’s other beliefs and with the external world. The interpreter tries to determine whether the proposition offered by the speaker is true, but cannot know all the speaker’s other beliefs. The interpreter therefore uses their own logical standards to understand the speaker, while also observing the things in the external world to which those propositions relate. (This latter step is enough to avoid the consequences of radical relativism.) Under these conditions, the interpreter’s and the speaker’s perspectives intersect, and a proposition acquires truth conditions that can be publicly understood. Davidson considers this sufficient to constitute the proposition’s meaning.
The account above applies to both speaker and interpreter, but it is still not enough to explain how the meaning of words is understood. The interpreter must also presuppose the principle of charity, which has two components. The speaker’s beliefs are assumed to be logically consistent, even though the interpreter determines the logical standards in question: this is the principle of coherence. The speaker’s beliefs, especially those about their surroundings, are assumed to be largely true: this is the principle of correspondence. Understanding, and hence the meaning of propositions, is possible only on the basis of this principle of charity. As the interpreter seeks to understand the speaker, the crucial question is this: If the speaker’s response differs from what the interpreter expects, how can the interpreter identify the speaker’s error? If the answer is that there is no way to locate the error, we slide into radical skepticism, and communication between people becomes impossible. The principle of charity is established to solve this problem. In the story, we see that Ueno initially treats Shoko as an ordinary person. She does not refuse to take the principle of charity as her starting point. Yet she never manages to understand Shoko, and the problem remains.
To explain more clearly how such interpretation is possible, it is best to conduct a thought experiment: imagine an omniscient interpreter. To qualify as an interpreter, this omniscient interpreter obviously cannot know everything—everything that happens in the world and everything in people’s minds—as a religious deity does. In that case, there would be no question of “interpretation” at all. This interpreter merely shares the same background beliefs as the person being interpreted and does not make trivial mistakes. Such an omniscient interpreter could, at least, exist in reality. Translated into the terms of the story, let us imagine someone who, like Shoko, is deaf in both ears, just as kind, and just as relentlessly bullied. Could such a person understand Shoko’s inner life? The answer is quite obvious. Nor need the conditions be so stringent: after being bullied himself, Shoya Ishida begins to understand Shoko, at least in part.
Shoko Nishimiya’s difficulty is that she cannot produce sounds normally. Although she can, in essence, still be a speaker through sign language, her inability to use language as normal people do has already become an obstacle. On the other hand, a speaker must be connected to the world before their language can be understood. The world here includes not just the physical world but also the community formed by other people. When the other people in that community cannot understand her behavior either, anyone trying to understand her encounters yet another difficulty.
More importantly, the omniscient interpreter is only a logical possibility. But when Shoko Nishimiya was being bullied in elementary school, what she needed was for someone actually to understand her then and there—not the theoretical possibility of being understood, and not Ishida’s future understanding and remorse in secondary school. Justice that arrives too late should not count as justice, because the harm has already been done. Only spectators can glibly claim that what happens later is enough to wipe away what went wrong in the past. What the victim feels is pain, vividly alive in the present. A future apology may soothe the wound, but it cannot erase the fact that the wound existed.
Armchair philosophers can talk at length about logical possibility and claim that the theory suffices to ground certain metaphysical propositions. The difficulty is that these theories are not enough to guide people living in the world. When we mistakenly put these theories into practice, what emerges is the arrogance of “normal people,” as we see in the claims of certain political philosophers. They declare that everyone can reason sensibly, that everyone can defend their position in the public arena, and that through this process of justification everyone arrives together at supposedly neutral second-order principles of justice. They further declare that, so long as the community abides by these principles, everyone can enjoy full respect and fulfill their aspirations for self-realization. But those who lack the ability to communicate have no voice in establishing the principles of justice.
More seriously still, we begin our reasoning with the universal “human being,” yet the principles of justice we arrive at can be put into effect only within the community. Here a question arises: with such immense differences within a community, how can people merely imagine one and yet genuinely feel themselves to be its members? The answer is actually very simple. Before Shoko arrives, everyone may like or dislike one another, but there is no community. Once Shoko joins the class as a transfer student, a community of “normal people” comes into being as everyone excludes her. As everyone turns against Shoya’s behavior, a community of “people who do not bully others” comes into being. Community is founded on excluding others as they are imagined to be.
We see the world welcome Shoya and Shoko with goodwill as a result of their efforts; understanding between people is no more, and the story reaches a happy ending. But ultimately, “understanding” is something between two people, not between a person and some abstract community. The attitudes of Ueno, Kawai, and others have not changed. This so-called “goodwill” is nothing but a lie grounded in a sense of shared identity at that moment.