Death and life, leaving and staying: puppets on a stage. When the single thread snaps, down they tumble.1
A word before we begin:
The main business of Penguin Highway is solving a mystery. That means there is a truth worth hiding. If Aoyama, a fourth-grader, is trying so hard to reach the world’s end, how can we adults watching him not make a little more effort ourselves? (The film deliberately conceals the Lady’s name, mentioning only the Miyata Dental Clinic where she works. For clarity, let us call her Miyata for now. Some people think she has no name because she comes from outer space. But there is another possibility: Miyata’s real name contains the answer to the mystery.)
The conclusion first
The world’s end leads to the Lady’s breasts, to Miyata’s inner world. She creates this dazzling dream full of penguins to fulfil a wish and make up for what went wrong in childhood. As the Sea is liberated, Miyata too is liberated from the past that has haunted her. And so, at the story’s end, she waves goodbye to Aoyama and vanishes on the wind.
Chinese subtitle: “…is perfectly made by genes.”
I. The master of the dream
Through the Looking-Glass ends with a famous acrostic. In the closing rhyme of this poem spelling out his lover’s name, Carroll writes: “Life, what is it but a dream?”2 This is an unmistakable pointer to the world’s end.
Miyata has countless marvellous powers. She likes penguins, so she conjures penguins; she fears the Jabberwock, so the Jabberwock slips out of her imagination; no sooner has she said she hates bats than a chess piece flaps its wings and flies away. These moments when dreams flood into reality should, in fact, be understood the other way round: so-called reality is merely Miyata’s dream, and that dream is under threat from the sea of her hometown.
Aoyama’s initial hypothesis is that penguins and bats are both connected with sunlight. But the appearance of the Jabberwock overturns this hypothesis, making us realise that Miyata’s ability to conjure things is intimately connected with her changing moods. Every strange phenomenon in this world revolves around Miyata alone. So rather than trace these fantasies back to a boy’s adolescence, let us return to the Lady and her breasts that rival cake.3
Miyata is the master of the dream. Only as its master can she conjure penguins at will and pass freely between the world and the “Sea”—or that is how things ought to have been—until the dream begins to crumble…
To the boy, this woman who sometimes looks sad, gazing thoughtfully into the distance, may harbour every mystery in the world.
“Why does looking at her face make me happy? Why is a face that makes me happy created so perfectly by genes and brought before my eyes?”
Could it be…?
3 It is the Lady who has imagined the boy, not the boy who has imagined the Lady. Trying to understand Miyata by following the clues of sexual desire and the perfect woman will only lead down a dead end: it cannot account for the story as a whole.
II. Is the Lady an extraterrestrial?
Clues pointing to extraterrestrials are scattered through countless details: the UFO on Uchida’s shirt, the NASU on Aoyama’s cap, the oddly shaped white tower, the meadow resembling a meteor crater, and the “silver moon” suspended in mid-air. Even Miyata ventures a wild guess: “Penguins are cute tools that extraterrestrials use to stupefy earthlings.” Perhaps this is the identity she has woven for herself within the dream. A censorship mechanism guards our dreams, forcing the desires and wild imaginings that leak out of the unconscious to clothe themselves in logic, so that we do not wake too soon.
Miyata knows perfectly well how absurd this makeshift identity is. Rather unimpressed, she retorts: “Young man, do you take me for an idiot?”
Chinese subtitle: “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”
The “extraterrestrial theory” is a workable explanation, but we arrive at it far too easily. It scarcely merits a “Eureka.” We therefore see it more as a clumsy way for the dream to paper over its holes (manifest content), while the dream’s deeper meaning (latent content) remains undisclosed.
Just before the mystery is solved, Aoyama hallucinates during a high fever. He travels by spaceship to an Earth where the penguins have died. There he meets the Lady who has filled his thoughts and dreams.
Aoyama: “How strange. I thought I’d gone somewhere very far away.”
Miyata: “If you really go far enough, you end up back where you started.”
Back where? Earth—but not Earth either. To escape reality, Miyata has hidden inside her own dream. Distance here is not the gulf between stars, but those eyes—unwilling to open—that stand between dream and reality.
III. Star’s End and three reversals of the world’s end
Aoyama: “They say this channel leads all the way to the world’s end.”
Uchida: “But the Earth is round, so there isn’t an end anywhere on it, is there?”
Aoyama: “Then the real world’s end must be far away in outer space.”
Well-read science-fiction fans may notice that the film’s three reversals in our understanding of the world’s end can be traced to Asimov’s Second Foundation: “Star’s End is on Trantor.”4 Everyone marvels at the instant the answer is revealed. That excitement comes only after a long preparation, after one conjecture after another has been rejected. From the far side of the Galaxy—the end of a line—to “A circle has no end”—the end of a ring; from Terminus to “All roads lead to Trantor”—the end of a disc. With the final reversal, readers move from an end understood in geometrical terms to one understood in sociological terms. In Penguin Highway, we can readily see a similar ingenuity in the three reversals of the world’s end. Aoyama’s conjecture moves from the Earth’s end to the universe’s end, then returns from the universe’s end to the city within the Sea—the world’s end in topological terms. Finally, the third reversal reveals every answer at once: he escapes from the city in the Sea and flees into Miyata’s inner world, the real world guarded by her eyelids—the world’s end in the abstract.
Chinese subtitle: “…can be seen as hidden inside the bag.”
Aoyama: “I know about the world’s end. It ought to be much farther away. On the other side of the universe, for example.”
Dad: “That isn’t necessarily true. The world’s end doesn’t always have to be on the far side.”
Aoyama: “What do you mean?”
Dad: “Once folded over, what we call the end lies inside the world. For instance, do you think this bag could hold the whole world?”
Aoyama: “I don’t know.”
Dad: “If you turn it inside out like this—look—the inside of the bag becomes the outside. The whole world has now been turned inwards, into the bag. So we can think of the world’s outside as hidden inside the bag.”
Very few reviews notice this scene. Taking the conversation to be detached from the main plot, they miss the crucial key to the mystery. In the film, this exchange is immediately followed by research on the silver moon. At first, we may mistakenly assume that the bag containing the world refers to the silver moon—the Sea turned inside out in topological terms. Yet something Aoyama says at the end shows that the truth is not so simple:
“Seeing the world’s end might be a sad thing.”
Why would the city in the Sea make us sad?
Chinese subtitle: “I make penguins to plug the holes in the world.”
IV. “Caves,” “Hollows” and “Breaches”
The story tells us that the world’s end is a “hole.” There are two ways to understand this, and they ultimately lead to the same place.5
The first is to understand the “hole” as a “cave.” Since antiquity, philosophers have seen the cave as a stairway from “illusion” to “reality”—which echoes the conjecture at the beginning of this essay. If the world’s end is in fact a cave, then outside it is the real world, and inside it is Miyata’s dream. Now turn the bag “inside out,” reversing inside and outside: Miyata’s dream becomes Aoyama’s reality, while actual reality is hidden inside Miyata’s inner world—her breasts. This is the first explanation of the world’s end: to see the end means realising that the whole world is merely Miyata’s dream. That is why it is so sad.
The second is to understand the “hole” as a “hollow,” an emptiness. This corresponds to the penguins’ task. Aoyama says that they exist not to destroy the silver moon but to “patch the holes,” preventing the Sea from invading reality. Our second clue also tells us that both Miyata’s ability to conjure penguins and the size of the Sea are closely connected with her moods. By now, the conclusion is almost inescapable: this hole is in fact the emptiness within Miyata, the past she refuses to face and the hometown buried deep in her dream. That is why cold, gloomy weather and nights of tossing and turning breed monsters. That is why Miyata must enlist the sunlight to conjure penguins—and they must be penguins. Their friendly, guileless appearance possesses the “energy” to heal the heart and dispel its gloom: “penguin energy.”
The argument so far leads naturally to the answer to the Sea’s mystery.
Aoyama: “The Sea can warp space and disrupt time, so I infer that it wasn’t supposed to exist in our world in the first place.”
If Aoyama’s world is Miyata’s dream, then the Sea is made of fragments of memory that cannot enter that dream. It is a dream deep within the dream—the repressed unconscious. The evidence lies in the strange structures of the city within the Sea, which bear traces of Surrealism. Surrealism’s central purpose is to explore the human unconscious and give it visual expression.
Chinese subtitle: “All I know is that I have memories of time spent with her.”
We soon realise, then, why Miyata must disappear at the story’s end. Since her reason for existing is to repair the “breaches” between consciousness and the unconscious, the Lady’s true identity can only be the mechanism of “dream-censorship.” In Freud’s theory, this mechanism disguises unconscious desires through metaphor, substitution, condensation and other means—just as Miyata transforms “cheerfulness” into “penguins”—releasing accumulated pressure, or libido, through dreams. Now, once Miyata has completed her repression of the inescapable past within her unconscious, while also creating a dream in which desire can find symbolic expression, the censorship mechanism no longer has any reason to exist. This is the second explanation of the world’s end: to see the end means making peace with the past and being freed from what she cannot let go of. In Aoyama’s eyes, however, the whole tragedy becomes the sight of the Lady waving and dissolving in the sunlight.
We have now distinguished three worlds. One is the dream-world Aoyama inhabits. Another is the real world, turned inside out and hidden deep within Miyata. The last is the unconscious world imprisoned in the Sea. They interlock to form the answer to Penguin Highway.
But the questions do not end here.
Why does Miyata construct such a dream? What wish does she want to fulfil? And why does she imprison the sea of her hometown in the cage of the unconscious, reaching towards it yet not daring to touch it?
V. A seaside hometown and a city she cannot leave
Images and objects connected with the sea are scattered like fireworks into every corner of the story: the penguins, the silver moon, cola, the Jabberwock transformed from a seal—echoing a moment in the hallucination—the photographs on the wall, the city at the world’s end, and the “Seaside Café” the two often visit. According to Freud’s principles of dream interpretation, the motive behind the dream lies hidden in these inconspicuous yet insistently recurring details. To evade censorship, elements of the unconscious split themselves among many images, smuggling themselves into the dream. Something must therefore have happened by the sea in Miyata’s hometown. She wants to forget it, but has never quite succeeded.
The sign reads “Seaside Café.”
“I remember you saying you grew up in a seaside town. Is that right?”
“Why?”
“What was it like?”
“Well, there were lots of streets sloping down to the sea. Our house was on high ground, so we could see the sea all the time. The sea breeze came through the window, bringing the smell of the sea.”
“What does the sea smell like?”
“I’ll tell you what. If you solve the mystery, I’ll take you to visit our seaside town.”
Yet this promise remains unfulfilled, even at the end.
Aoyama and his companions try twice to leave town, and fail both times. The train stops at Kadoichimatsu Station. At the end of the tracks lie a tunnel, mountains, and, beyond the mountains, a coast they can never reach. Once Miyata and the penguins get too far from the city, they become dehydrated, deteriorate and grow listless.
This episode is heavily symbolic. The sea of her hometown has been folded into the silver moon, making Aoyama’s world a Möbius strip without an end. It echoes Miyata’s sigh in the hallucination: however far she goes, she always returns to where she began. She has imprisoned herself in a city where time stands still, unable either to return to her hometown or truly to get away from it.
Miyata has never escaped the shadow of childhood. She merely recoils instinctively from remembering that expanse of blue, now on the verge of overflowing. She is therefore doomed to wander through a city where she “can neither reach a distant place nor move beyond the past.” More sadly still, she does not even realise this herself, and can only turn to Aoyama for help.
“Penguin energy comes from our city. It might even be inside you.”
As Aoyama explains this conjecture to Miyata, the camera turns to the drinking bird on the windowsill. A brief look into its history reveals that this toy, which once astonished Einstein, is a symbol of the “perpetual-motion machine.” Together with the “Amazon River” that flows around itself, its head meeting its tail—an ouroboros symbolising infinity—it repeatedly hints at the stasis of the entire city. That stasis comes from wavering between past and future. This is the drinking bird’s sorrow, and Miyata’s too. Aoyama, meanwhile, symbolises growth and change. He “surpasses his former self every day.” That is why only Aoyama can open Miyata’s eyes and guide her out of the shadow of her past.
The answers are already in place. Now only one piece of the puzzle is missing: what exactly happened in the past that Miyata has tried so many times to escape, only to return to it again and again?
VI. Hamamoto’s story and Miyata’s childhood
The plot of Penguin Highway consists chiefly of four parts: 1. researching the penguin highway; 2. researching the Sea; 3. the Sea’s expansion; and 4. rescuing the father. The mysteries and clues from the first two run throughout the film, until Aoyama connects them with a quiet “Eureka.” In this respect, the mystery is actually quite intricately constructed.
Yet in terms of dramatic tension and narrative tightness, Penguin Highway feels somewhat loose, because Miyata’s and Hamamoto’s storylines take up equal space. This weakens the young nurse’s presence to some extent and leaves many viewers baffled by the whole plot. Once we pick up the crucial clue, however—“Aoyama’s world is actually Miyata’s dream”—we can examine the entire course of the plot from another angle. In other words, Penguin Highway has had two heroines from the start.
The crucial inference now is this: since every character appears within Miyata’s dream, the supposed two heroines become embodiments of the same person—Miyata in the real world. Her actual self appears as the young nurse, while the childhood she cannot escape accompanies Aoyama in the form of Hamamoto. (A deeper implication of this conclusion is that Aoyama, too, has left his mark on Miyata’s life. But let us set that aside for now and look first at Hamamoto’s story.)
We take Hamamoto to embody Miyata’s childhood because this fills a major gap in the story, answering its final mystery: why the sea of Miyata’s hometown has become a shadow she cannot escape. In the story, Hamamoto’s—Miyata’s—father is swept into the Sea. The little girl is convinced that the accident is her fault, because she and Aoyama had promised to keep their research on the Sea secret, and she had not told her father how dangerous it was. Now, if readers accept the dream hypothesis, we can assert that Hamamoto’s story is the form Miyata’s childhood memories take within the dream. Through “symbolism + displacement,” it recreates Miyata’s conflict with her father and the tragic consequences of that conflict. A father suffers an accident because of his daughter’s wilfulness: a similar tragedy happened to Miyata, but it has been deliberately forgotten. Symbolism and displacement are entirely necessary in this dream, for only through disguise can unconscious desire break through the restraints of censorship and find expression. The ultimate means of satisfying this unconscious desire is to make amends for her own wrongdoing: to enter the Sea and rescue her “father.”
The central concern of Penguin Highway, then, is the redemption of the past through a dream. The penguin highway—the fixed route penguins follow as they advance from sea to land—is Miyata’s inner journey out of the sea of her hometown, setting off anew towards the land.
VII. Evidence that “Hamamoto = Miyata”
Evidence 1: The name
In Japanese, hama (浜, はま) means “seashore,” while moto (本, もと) means “root.” Put together, they give us “rooted by the sea.” This is plainly a hint at Miyata’s hometown.
Evidence 2: Sweets and dentistry
Hamamoto’s father loves sweets, which neatly complements Miyata’s identity as a dentist. The way the two fit together explains why Miyata chooses to become a dentist in her dream. Becoming a dentist is, by implication, a symbolic response to her guilt towards her father.
Chinese subtitle: “This is what happens when you eat too many sweets.”
Chinese subtitle: “What are you doing here? Go home at once.”
Evidence 3: Chess
Hamamoto and Miyata are both excellent chess players. Miyata teaches Aoyama to play, and later he defeats Hamamoto on his teacher’s behalf. This suggests that Miyata’s chess has improved as she has grown older.
Evidence 4: Foreigner and extraterrestrial
The chief obstacle to connecting Hamamoto with Miyata is that Hamamoto comes from another country: the two do not even look alike. But let us not forget that resemblance in dreams often lies not in appearance but in concepts. Once again, the creator’s ingenuity reveals itself. Hamamoto’s identity within the dream is that of a “foreigner”; Miyata’s is that of an “extraterrestrial.” Both express, in abstract form, the original impulse to “flee her hometown.” Both carry the loneliness and helplessness of being far from home.
Evidence 5: Self-loathing
Why is Hamamoto so hostile to Miyata? At the level of the story, she is obviously jealous over Aoyama. She hates Miyata just as Suzuki hates Aoyama. But in the dream’s latent content, this is a symbol of self-loathing.
Evidence 6: Symbolic reconciliation with the father
Hamamoto’s father is quite old, while Aoyama’s father is extremely young. This exposes a flaw in the dream and also reveals the form of censorship called “condensation.” Through the association “scientific research—father,” Miyata’s real-life father has been broken up into two figures, one representing the ideal father and the other the actual father. In the film, Aoyama’s father is always asking Miyata to look after his child, faintly reflecting a wish for reconciliation with the father. Meanwhile, that wish finds more direct expression in the actions of Hamamoto’s father. He approaches Miyata, hoping she will tell him the secret his daughter is keeping so that he can study the Sea. Now, once we recognise that Miyata’s inescapable guilt stems from “not telling her father how dangerous the Sea was,” we can see that, by inventing precisely this sequence of events, Miyata corrects Hamamoto’s wrongdoing and makes up for what went wrong in childhood: by helping with the experiments, she communicates the Sea’s dangers to her father. That is why, when Aoyama finds her, she looks so relieved and says, apparently out of nowhere, “Let’s go to the seaside town tomorrow.” The first stage of her wish has been fulfilled. Miyata has begun to long for the sea of her hometown, rather than abandon it in the moss-grown depths of her inner world. To leave her hometown, she must begin by returning to it. To move beyond the past, she must begin by accepting it.
Chinese subtitle: “Let’s go to the seaside town tomorrow.”
We have now returned to the possibility raised at the beginning: it is not that Miyata has no name. In fact, her name is Hamamoto.
VIII. The “condensation” of Aoyama and Suzuki
Penguin Highway’s greatest deception is to tell the story from Aoyama’s point of view, leading many viewers to think that the film’s central concern is a boy’s growth. In fact, Aoyama is not the protagonist. He is merely the character who threads the story together, planted there to guide viewers towards the true nature of the dream. It is hard to say that the boy has grown at all, since he has been “perfect” from the beginning. His so-called growth amounts to no more than shortening the distance to adulthood from 3,888 days to 3,748. He has not moved beyond his fantasy of the Lady. Even his words remain unchanged, from beginning to end: “By the time I’m an adult, I expect lots of women will want to marry me. But I’ve already decided to marry another woman, so I won’t be able to marry them.”
Viewed in terms of the dream’s manifest content, this perfect boy should be a composite of the boy Hamamoto—Miyata—liked and her childhood ideal. The reason is that Hamamoto and Aoyama have remarkably similar family backgrounds. Both have fathers who work in scientific research, so both have been well educated from an early age and have become precocious and exceptionally intelligent.
Viewed in terms of the dream’s latent content, however, the boy seems to symbolise the “superego” within the psyche. The superego is the internalisation of social morality. It pursues perfection and sets itself up as a model. These qualities correspond, one by one, to Aoyama’s character, so rigorous that it borders on rigidity. He goes to sleep at precisely nine every night, dances like a robot, wears a solemn face all day and has to theorise about everything he sees. Strictly speaking, it is indeed the superego that assists censorship in reshaping the dream, which fits the plot exactly.
Having discussed Aoyama, let us turn to Suzuki. Here is the story’s chain of romantic attraction:
Suzuki → Hamamoto → Aoyama → Miyata
While looking at the resemblance between Hamamoto and Miyata, we must not forget that Aoyama and Suzuki also form a complementary pair. This provides further answers to three mysteries:
- Why is Aoyama so unwilling to let Miyata have contact with the researchers? Is it simply because he does not want her to disappear?
- What deeper meaning lies in his conflict with Hamamoto over this?
- Why will Hamamoto “never forgive Suzuki for as long as she lives”?
Let us begin with question 3. In terms of the plot, the answer is obvious: Suzuki broke a promise and disclosed the Sea’s secret to her father. But here is the contradiction: we never see a promise between Hamamoto and Suzuki. We see only a promise between Hamamoto and Aoyama. This seems to mean that Suzuki, not Aoyama, was Miyata’s actual childhood companion. Aoyama is merely an ideal Hamamoto has invented. He is ideal because he is Suzuki’s exact opposite: one readily tells her father the Sea’s secret, while the other chooses to remain silent to the very end. Aoyama has also been created to make up for what went wrong in the past. Had Suzuki’s disclosure not led Hamamoto’s father to investigate the Sea further, he would not have been swept into it. We can now assert that the scene in which Hamamoto quarrels with her father is not an invention within the dream, but a memory of something that actually happened. It became the fuse that set off the tragedy.
This conjecture supplies the last piece of the puzzle, laying the whole story of the past before the audience. First, Miyata’s father learned from Suzuki what his daughter was researching. Thinking the subject too dangerous, he ordered her to stop. This caused a rupture between father and daughter, and another between the childhood companions Suzuki and Miyata. Miyata felt that her father had broken his word—you must not casually tell others about a truly important research topic—and, out of spite, did not tell him how dangerous the Sea, her research subject, was. This ultimately led to her father’s death.
Chinese subtitle: “…will die.”
In the film, as Hamamoto’s father is sucked into the rapidly expanding Sea, Aoyama’s little sister suddenly comes into his room, sobbing, “Mummy will die.” Perhaps real memories are also mixed into this scene. The little sister alludes to Miyata as a child, who first became aware of “death” only after her father died.
From then on, Miyata “never forgave Suzuki for as long as she lived.” She abandoned her childhood dream of becoming a scientist, left her hometown alone and settled in an unfamiliar city. That is why Miyata imagines herself as a foreigner and an extraterrestrial in the dream: foreign countries and outer space both symbolise coldness, unfamiliarity and exile. “If you really go far enough, you end up back where you started.” All this means is that “even hiding inside a dream cannot save you from being pursued by memory.” Yes, Miyata has never truly escaped the blue of her hometown. She has lingered by this sea for hundreds of millions of years, standing there from the Cenozoic all the way to the Cretaceous. There is a small detail in the story: after the umbrella is struck by a ball of water, plants spring up all over it, making Aoyama realise that “time inside the Sea is different from time outside.” This detail also has its counterpart in the dream’s latent content. For Miyata, her hometown remains forever in the past, at the moment her father was swept away by the sea.
Until Aoyama suddenly bursts into Miyata’s life and knocks open that tightly shut door.
The dream is created to fulfil a wish through metaphor and symbolism. Miyata was once imprisoned in memory, but with Aoyama’s help she finally recovers her wish.
When the penguin army has assembled, forming an “ark” beneath their feet that spans the two worlds, is this not also a secret act of remembrance for her dead father? Perhaps the girl who has stood lost in thought by the shore for hundreds of millions of years has never stopped hoping that one day a flock of friendly penguins will carry her father home from the far side of the sea.
“Go, penguins! Peck the sea before you to pieces! Like Jingwei, carrying stones to fill the sea!”6
Laughing aloud, the girl runs freely with the boy through the reflections scattered across the ground as the sea breaks apart. This is the Sea’s liberation, and Miyata’s own liberation. The dark clouds have dispersed, and in the gentle sunlight the penguin highway stretches without limit into the future.
Chinese subtitle: “Strange changes are happening all over the world.”
IX. Afterword
This essay has been an attempt at dream interpretation under Freud’s guidance, involving details large and small: from Alice to Asimov, from the allegory of the cave to Surrealism, from the hometown they promised to visit to the hometown within the Sea, from the resemblance between Miyata and Hamamoto to the complementarity of Aoyama and Suzuki. Taken separately, these details may not amount to much. Together, however, they interlock to depict Miyata’s deeply buried inner world and past. For all I have said, I do not intend to let theory distort the story too much. It is enough for readers to know that such an interpretation is possible. Only in the lingering resonance of what seems true yet may not be can we better savour the story as a story.
Ricoeur criticised Freud for doing no more than repeating his Oedipal theory in his interpretations of myth and religion. He justly pointed out:7
what is important is not that the myth is repeated, but that each time it is repeated, its meaning is added to and thereby transformed. This transformation means that even if the original myth is a manifestation of the childhood desire to kill the father, this is no longer true of the subsequent versions.
I think this criticism also applies to some readers of Lacan.
Editor’s note: Perhaps we could attend to the form of the dream rather than its content.