This essay was an award-winning entry in the pre- and post-festival events for Roof Research Society’s “Scavenging Strategy: Rags Drum 2022.”
Away from realism! This is André Bazin’s warning to animation, born of his sustained attention to animation made by individual hands. Animation urgently needs to invent itself through the hands of animators, continually freeing itself from inherited concepts and techniques to distinguish itself through new and diverse forms of singularity. What, then, in the face of this injunction, are we to make of Japanese animation, that immense commercial and technological apparatus which, we might say, has never ceased to orbit the magnetic field of pseudorealism? If, as Bazin argues, the technological apparatus demanded by animation’s almost invariably figurative, narrative, and illustrative pseudorealism has constrained its once-vast horizons and become a barrier to thought, how should we confront the dismay and astonishment we experience when, watching Japanese television animation or an OVA, the reassurance of “this is animation” is shattered in an instant? To discover and confront an astonishment that has not passed away simply because it belongs to the past, but exists as an experience of the “present”: this is what the essay attempts.1
1. Takashi Anno, and Mourning Time
I. Magical Emi, the Magic Star: Semishigure
Broad-shouldered and thickset, Koganei rushes down the stairs to ask his subordinate Kokubunji about a proposal. Something has clearly gone wrong with Koganei’s memory: only a little earlier, he scrapped the proposal and told Kokubunji to rewrite it. Once he remembers, he turns away and begins reciting a mnemonic chant like a nursery rhyme, his large hands rummaging through the pockets of clothes that look cumbersome in the summer heat. He is checking his belongings and his list of things to do. But some thought seems to flash through his mind: he hurries back, calling loudly to Kokubunji, only to find himself unable to say what he wants. “Nothing at all? Nothing at all…” He turns away, muttering in bewilderment. This apparently insignificant, even ordinary and tedious interlude is conspicuous in Magical Emi, the Magic Star: Semishigure (1986; hereafter Semishigure), a work composed entirely of accumulated trifles. Anyone can see that one of its defining features is the way delay and hesitation break down the sensory-motor circuit; the characters’ lapses of attention are often read as intimations of change—intimations, that is, coming from the future. Here, however, Koganei seems to be toyed with by the past, wavering back and forth. On the surface, this looks closer to an entanglement of memory, a failure of recollection, like déjà vu: “I can’t remember, but somewhere…”
Set before the conclusion of the Magical Emi, the Magic Star television series, when Mai gives back the magic that allows her to become Emi, the OVA Semishigure recounts several summer days in the lives of Mai and those around her. It repeatedly depicts signs of her impending separation from the fairy Topo. No one would dispute that this is the substance of its story. When Mai’s mother sends her out to deliver something, Takashi Anno begins a sequence rich in symbolism and suggestion. Predominantly in long shots, he captures Mai’s tiny figure moving through an enormous, bleached-white town, loosely threading these shots through the parallel lives of the other people who inhabit it. We might say that Mai passes through a town of time, while everyone’s lives lie scattered through time in a way that could form an organic whole; or that this is a town of memory, the loose disposition of images a profusion of recollections, and Mai herself recorded within this town-mirror… Let us put these fantasies aside for now and take the safer course of a straightforward description. Mai puts on a hat, changes into a little dress, and sets out on her errand. The outward and return journeys reuse the same background paintings, Figure 1(a)–(d). But when she circles back to her starting point, Figure 1(d), something unexpected happens: music, wholly prohibited since the title appeared, begins to flow. On town roads she has walked countless times, she suddenly loses her way, Figure 1(e).
Mai’s passage thus becomes wandering stripped of its practical function. We could also say that she has strayed onto paths unknown to everyday life, into an unpeopled, secret realm where summer stretches on and the cicadas never cease. Making tangled string figures, she passes a broken warning sign, Figure 1(f). Soon a wall confronts her, along with a sign reading “Dead End.” The stray path ends; the melody stops, Figure 1(g). At this crucial symbolic moment, when the road has reached its end, why does Koganei begin reciting his strange mnemonic chant again, that spell summoning his own recollection? We are captivated by the ambiguous sense of displacement produced by the adjacent arrangement of images, by this obscure susceptibility to interpretation. If, as Anno suggests, we take the succession of images as a kind of simultaneity, then, just as Mai simply leaves laughing, humming and stepping to the beat, her receding back reflected in the sign’s curved mirror, Koganei, chanting as he sorts his papers, breaks the cup he has just set beside him. The cup falls, shatters. The fragments slowly bloom.
Koganei crouches down and picks up the fragments one by one, placing them in his palm. This fundamentally unusual action draws our attention, and a little later we discover that he has carefully piled them on the desk. Outside the window, it is already raining. The rain passes across the whole town and through everyone’s lives. Immediately after Koganei’s scene, Anno places several consecutive shots of the rain without people, Figure 1(h)–(k). Reversing the earlier order of Mai’s journey, Figure 1(c)–(f), he breaks the rain’s simultaneity into successive images. The shower retraces Mai’s route, then reaches the park where she shelters beneath a tree. After Shō gives her a small, glittering shell ornament, she suddenly notices, beyond the shell in her hand, that the rain is gradually washing away the drawing of Emi she has just made on the ground. In an instant, amid light and wind, the rain ends and the sky clears. This is unmistakably a revelation tinged with mysticism.
Mai stands still, staring at the world that has suddenly become noisy after the rain. But when she sees the rainbow in the distance above the town, she cannot help running a few steps forward, leaving Topo behind. We remember the title image, the miniature rainbow casually sprayed from the middle of a hose lying on the ground, and can only marvel at how much Anno loves carefully arranging and constructing symbolic systems. He wants to give these image-elements, which function like modifiers, a more fundamental status. Then, as Mai calls to Topo, who lies motionless and absorbed on the tree, the cicadas suddenly become audible. Their calls are different now, sparse and a little desolate, as though announcing the end of summer. As if to place us at Topo’s coordinates, the image shows Mai facing the camera, excitedly pointing to the rainbow. Wind stirs the ginkgo leaves and the rainbow-colored droplets on the railing. The droplets fall; on the ground are the vanished drawing and patches of water not yet dry. The essay “Gleanings from Takashi Anno’s Direction: The Transcendence of the Everyday” offers a remarkable account of this moment: “Now even the slowest viewers are like Topo: their hearing, sight, and touch become acute; bodily time stretches without limit, and every movement around them becomes incomparably clear…” Through the sustained cries of the cicadas, Mai is ahead of us, while Topo and we remain immersed together in the minute stimuli of the present’s tiny changes. For a while, we cannot even make out what she is saying. Only after a long interval do we hear her call to us: “If you don’t hurry, I’ll leave you behind!”
The unexpectedness of these words seizes us. After speaking, Mai freezes and slowly fades, dissolving into the night. This is the instant when the theme that has meticulously governed the entire animation’s construction, beneath its apparently haphazard accumulation of images, exposes itself outright and strikes us directly. Saint Augustine is said to have held that there are three presents: the present of the future, the present of the present, and the present of the past—the simultaneous existence of “what is about to happen,” “what is happening,” and “what has already happened.” Unquestionably, then, within the same present, Mai tends towards the future’s “what is about to happen,” Koganei is submerged in the past’s “what has already happened,” and Topo and we occupy the present of the present in the infinitesimal gap between them: the “what is happening” that the image projects and inscribes. We almost fail to keep up—or almost manage to keep up—with events and changes. Yet clearly, Topo’s disappearance / being left behind is the end of the story, and the end of the story is our end. We will eventually be left behind, cast into recollection, that ancient present.
We can therefore readily discover the recurring configurations of “what is about to happen” / intimation and “what has already happened” / déjà vu in Semishigure. Beyond the adjacent arrangement of Mai and Koganei in her wandering sequence, the scene in which Koganei calls to Kokubunji, wanting to say something but finding his memory subtly disordered, is immediately followed by several shots of Emi—Mai’s transformed self—suddenly stopping and turning towards the distant summer sky. Before the title image, everyone watches Emi’s magic performance together. Her grandfather gets the idea of making a music box with an Emi figurine, but we have no way of knowing exactly what Koganei, also struck by the performance, is muttering as if in a daydream. He seems caught in a confused dream composed of unstable, disordered recollections, unable to establish the closed circuit of recollection that would bring him back to reality. In another scene, when Mai accidentally snaps her string, Koganei opens his eyes wide and becomes motionless, as though this image of rupture has filled his entire field of vision. Once again, the pair of intimation and déjà vu is repeated. What, then, mediates between the snapped string and intimation while also linking it to déjà vu? We can only answer silently to ourselves: death.
Throughout, the music box plays the opening theme’s instrumental melody, warm and faintly melancholy. Koganei stretches out his broad palm to catch the single spark falling from Mai’s sparkler into the dim void, on the verge of extinction. Everyone leaves the room, concerned about his burn, while the camera and we remain / are left behind in the empty interior. Only the figurine music box repeats its monotonous movement, alone, until it stops. Enduring a cruelty so rarefied that it suffocates, we watch the Emi figurine become a photograph. Time congeals, clotted and obstructed; we are pinned to our positions, unable to move. The album the grown-up Mai turns through displays corpse after corpse. We already understand that we will eventually be left behind, but even after this certainty, another astonishment awaits: Anno forbids us to look in on the grown-up Mai. We do not know whether she has become the idol she dreamed of being. We cannot even see her whole face or hear her speak a single word. The room is dark. She barely moves, sitting quietly in her place. A dull, heavy agitation claws at us.
The album at the beginning and end triggers Mai’s recollection, and the entire past exists as her subjective memory: we must immediately reject this widespread, banal opinion. Not only because of the obvious fact that these summer days also include other people’s lives, which she never experienced, but because this view misses the depth of photography as a motif in Anno’s work. Photographs do not summon recollection; they destroy it. As in our own experience of looking at photographs, the image blocks recollection with an immense, coercive presence, preventing us from remembering what happened before and after the photograph was taken. This experience cannot be transformed into a concrete recollection flowing vividly in the present. What truly resembles the experience of a photograph is thus Koganei’s failure to establish a closed circuit of recollection, and the obscurity that can exist only as déjà vu. Like cold, hard fragments lying in the hand, the small burning pain in the palm also gives us a distant sense of loss. This tactile sensation resembles the cruel experience of looking at old, blurred photographs.
We can see, then, how Anno’s motifs continue into Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (1998), which he directed. Although the animation faithfully adapts its source, the consistency of his choice of material remains startling. In episode 1, Alpha wants to take a photograph but, confronted with the changing evening seascape, cannot extract it as a single, isolated image. She can only return home and silently recollect the moments of the landscape’s transformation. Where, then, does the photographic experience reside? In episode 2, looking out at night over the vast, glittering electrical system still operating in the submerged town, Alpha weeps from an empty yet abundant love of ruins. According to Mamoru Oshii, three times also flow through ruins: the past of “what once was,” the present of “what it has now become,” and the future of “what it will soon be.”2 The splendor of former days is gone, but we are certain that it once really existed. In this powerless sense of displacement, we embrace and miss the virtual image of what has passed away. This is love’s incapacity. Over there, the electrical system’s lights have lost their function, but as pure matter they play with one another in the dark. This play of matter finally finds expression through the medium of animation. Correspondingly, we immediately understand how the light given off by people in the past was imprinted on the silver ions of photographic film and became matter; how, after long years, this material light enters our pupils now. The people in the photographs existed in the past. They are now dead. And we, too, will die in the future.
II. Maison Ikkoku, Episode 27
Recollections of an animation auteur. “When I am silent, I feel full; I am about to speak, and at the same time I feel empty.”3 I look at the blank paper and feel full before the chaotic abundance it contains. But as my brush touches down, this abundance instantly collapses into a monotonous figurative form charged with a narrative function. I am startled and ashamed by the baseness and vulgarity of my intentions. Once completed, it will not even be a drawing, only a collection of signs that can be subsumed into a system called story. They crowd shamelessly together, showing themselves off, making a racket, utterly bereft of the blank paper’s earlier, full silence. All I can do is painstakingly construct rich appearances on the page, trying to evade every kind of shallow correspondence. Yet I discover that the apparently untrammeled signs I have poured my life into creating are still tethered to the centralized magnetic field called story. I cannot let them play freely in a world of depth, endlessly proliferating meanings. I can only bow my head and follow someone who knows how to tell a story, or fill the reverse side of pallid, empty figuration with some idea I have already thought through—a full figuration is always an empty figuration—pretending that this story and this idea could be expressed only through animation. The scholars of cultural studies have me firmly in their grasp.
Anno is not a particularly gifted auteur. He simply persists in enumerating pallid figurative forms according to his own blueprint, seemingly to no purpose whatever. We call Semishigure Anno-like because it uses more unpeopled shots and somewhat longer takes than other animation, avoids musical accompaniment, or carefully considers the depiction of its characters… No. Rather than these characteristics, which even in combination cannot make a work by Anno, the real reason worth identifying is this: through repeated enumeration, all the work’s elements imperceptibly and spontaneously converge on a structure of countervailing forces, revealing another aspect that sounds in concert with the story. Here, we might say, emptiness and fullness reverse in an instant. The work constructs the gap described earlier, and this invisible, blank gap is precisely a full gap. Conversely, it is this invisible blankness that gives the surrounding figurative forms their real intensity. It is this structure that expresses time, the most expansive of territories, inexhaustible in speech and therefore silent.
During the production marathon of the Maison Ikkoku television series, its course changed twice—an unusual occurrence. The first change came with the replacement of the main production team at episode 27 (1986). Takashi Anno became chief director from this episode onward, and this was the only installment for which he personally drew the storyboard. From then on, series composition went to Kazunori Itō, Akemi Takada took over character design, and color designer Michiyo Yasuda and composer Kenji Kawai joined the production. Naohito Takahashi, one of the series’ animation directors, who liked its heroine Kyōko Otonashi so much that he adopted the pen name Ryūnosuke Otonashi, commented: “The first change of course was especially startling. Even the character designs changed. Things were very chaotic [on the production floor] at the time. But I think this change of course taught the staff how to make everyday performances look more appealing.”4 Episode 27 does, in fact, contain several production errors that could even be called serious. I nevertheless choose to discuss it at length because of the force with which it declares itself Anno-like, and because of the incomparably beautiful experience of animation it gives us.
In the first image after the opening song, a plump, heavy-looking persimmon hangs close to us on a branch. At the same time, we can clearly follow a contrail sliding upward through the distant sky. Within the quiet flow of time, we feel two forces intersect: one settling towards stillness, the other slowly moving. From their relative strength and tension, we anticipate the coexistence of “something seems about to happen, but nothing actually happens” and “nothing appears to have changed, but something has quietly changed.” This antagonistic structure of forces governs the development of the story and the endless circular movement of everyday life. The same combination appears as a sign of seasonal change in episode 22 of Magical Emi, the Magic Star (1985), often called the prototype of Semishigure. Anno arranges a small interlude functioning like a modifier: Yukiko puts her hand into the running water rinsing the vegetables, is surprised by its coldness, then notices that the persimmons outside the window have ripened. The image dissolves into the ascending diagonal of a contrail…
The autumn persimmon establishes the framework of narrative and recollection at the very beginning of this Maison Ikkoku episode. Despite the disorder of the production handover and the pressure of the schedule, Anno tirelessly makes persimmons recur eight times, in different forms, as details of the scenery over a little more than twenty minutes. But unlike the scattered seasonal fragments in Magical Emi, which collide with and strike Yukiko directly, here they merely look on from outside the story, declaring to us only the at once simple and strange fact that they exist here.
After a shot of flowers swaying in a light breeze beside a sloping road, Kyōko and Ikuko, the niece of her late husband Sōichirō, approach us from a distance, talking as they walk. Unlike in the manga, Kyōko does not state outright that, although she still thinks of her dead husband, lately it seems she no longer feels such pain and sadness. Instead, after Ikuko says she is going home to eat with her grandfather, a timely close-up shows a slightly thoughtful expression cross Kyōko’s face. In the manga, Ikuko prompts her recollection by asking why she gave the dog the same name as Sōichirō. In the animation, she simply smiles and runs towards Ikuko, who is playing with the dog, calling Sōichirō’s name. As a lyrical melody begins, the shot cuts to a town in her recollection, unfamiliar to us and reddened by the setting sun. Then comes an abrupt, brief close-up that jolts us: the short-haired Kyōko, who as yet knows nothing of what the future holds, suddenly notices something. Momentarily at a loss, she begins reading the list in her hand. “Green peppers, pork cubes… I think I’ve forgotten something…” She is on her way home to cook after buying ingredients.
In this sudden lapse of memory, so reminiscent of Anno’s touch, she sees the silhouettes of a man and a dog climbing high up the slope, an enormous setting sun behind them. Softly murmuring Sōichirō’s name, she gives a reassured smile that makes us envious. Then she calls to Sōichirō and runs towards them. Man and dog turn back at the same instant, with an overwhelming force of intimation. At this decisive moment, their turning figures, backlit by the sunset and rendered in black, freeze. The title appears: “Sōichirō Vanishes!? Memories Smell of Grilled Meat Skewers.”
“Sōichirō Vanishes” unquestionably exploits the double meaning of the man and dog sharing a name. Compared with the manga’s title, “Sōichirō Suddenly Looks Back,” which stresses the coincidence of their turning, it enters into a deeper relation with Kyōko’s deleted line about no longer feeling pain and sadness—a line signifying forgetting—and with the black silhouettes in the sunset, which seem to suggest the ambiguity and haziness of memory. What else draws us to the image is probably that enormous, telephoto-like setting sun. Within recollection, it dyes the sky red and bathes the town in its final splendor.
Here we encounter animation as a magnifying apparatus: a world that compresses distance without limit, restraining the rule by which nearby things appear large and distant things small; a world whose constituent elements never converge on a single point but spread and stream towards the periphery. Have the houses behind Kyōko not already suggested this, their seemingly non-intersecting parallel lines scattering through the air to give the town its telephoto quality? Animation magnifies distant things and brings them right up against the characters, constructing a town that towers around them, rich in accumulated historical time and collective memory… We immediately remember the rows of submerged streetlights and the far-reaching electrical system in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō. However distant, they share a single plane. On this plane of animation, the transmitted lights of matter flow, spread, and play with one another. Again, we can only marvel at how perfectly this suits Anno’s world.
In fact, both the enormous sunset and the distant town behind the figures on the slope recur continually across past and present, just as the sound of the river in Semishigure passes through time and continues into the present. At its opening, we already encounter an apparatus for amplifying sound: we clearly hear the river’s silent clamor somewhere beyond the window, out of sight. We hear a wind chime, Mai turning the album’s pages nearby, children playing in the distance, a train passing… Anno constructs acoustic depth through multiple layers of sound. Behind the image, the clamor of the river, which nurtures people’s lives and accumulates time and memory, grows, fills, and spreads.
But is there an apparatus for amplifying smell? Animation cannot, after all, capture smells. Yet the title “Memories Smell of Grilled Meat Skewers” connects us to this thread of the story: the dog is forever seeking scents that evaporate and disperse from scattered objects. With its sensitive nose, it can recognize the dead man’s smell on his wooden clogs. In this sense, it amplifies the details and forms of smell that remain unfamiliar and fragile to human beings. Following the aroma of grilled skewers beneath the setting sun, it comes to Kyōko’s home. Then, one day, it leaves again, sniffing the same aroma as before, a scent that has endured across a long expanse of time. Finally, Godai finds it at a similar hour of dusk, with the horizon reddening… Godai has found “the vanished Sōichirō,” who disappeared in pursuit of a smell from the past. This is unquestionably a metaphor. It already foretells that Godai will bear the weight of Kyōko’s longing for her late husband—or, we might say, the weight of the dead. By this point, all the constituent elements organized around the episode’s ending have been put in place.
Watch these works closely and it is easy to see that Anno’s towns are always conducting secret rituals. A place passes from functional space into ritual space: Mai encounters a dead end while wandering in Semishigure; Alpha gazes at streetlights that come on one by one simply for the sake of shining in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō. The town secretly arranges a tiny miracle unknown to anyone else. Already at the end of Magical Emi episode 22, Susumu, who has run away after a failed magic trick, stands on high ground in the park—the park in Semishigure is also elevated—and looks at the scattered lights of the distant town. Suddenly he remembers the second half of a nursery rhyme that had eluded him. He leaps from a swing as though performing the magic of flight. The bird’s-eye view of the town gradually enlarges, as if its distance from him has momentarily contracted.
At the end of Maison Ikkoku episode 27, the town’s ritual / miracle gives us “a sweet experience bordering on cruelty.” We could say that here Anno reaches the summit of his career. A shot pans slowly right across flowers swaying in a light breeze. Kyōko appears far below on the slope, with night hanging low over a town of lighted windows behind her. A side view shows distant houses bathed in the sunset. Then she notices the silhouettes of a man and a dog climbing high up the slope, an enormous setting sun behind them. These are clearly Godai and Sōichirō. After she calls Sōichirō’s name, man and dog, backlit by the sunset and rendered in black, turn at the same instant. They hold still, like a photograph.
Suddenly a strong wind howls. In a shot panning left, the reverse of the earlier movement, we see flowers leaning left. Kyōko’s long hair and clothes blow left, and a train suddenly appears, moving left through the distant town behind her… As though this were not enough, the close-up of Kyōko’s eyes, astonished by the excessively coincidental image before her, also moves left. This inevitably recalls the rightward movement of the close-up of her eyes in recollection, when she tells the dog searching for the dead man’s scent, “Sōichirō is gone.” The reversal of movement forces us to recognize that, for Kyōko, everything happening in this twilight amounts to a ritual of resurrecting the dead.
The overwhelming familiarity of the blackened man and dog, frozen like a photograph extracted from recollection, gives Kyōko a one-in-ten-million hope. Apparently contradicting what I said earlier about the photographic experience, the photograph has been summoned by the town’s ritual and restored by reality. The absolutely lost past has broken through the manifold obstructions of time and space and descended, impossibly, into the present. During this prolonged watching, the clatter of the passing train and the streetlights coming on one by one, from far to near, become the rhythmic thudding of a heart in the stillness of dusk. In the manga, this suffocating ritual is no more than a single panel with a heartbeat sound effect.
Although we do not believe Godai will become Sōichirō, here we can only hold our breath and wait for the words that have settled deepest in the passage of time to burst forth. At last the streetlights illuminate Kyōko and the flowers beside the slope. Her hair flies in the strong wind; her astonished profile is extraordinary. We know that this time the call will be addressed to the man, not the dog. Sōichirō’s name is about to burst from her body—but at the decisive instant the words catch at her lips, because one of the advancing streetlights illuminates Godai’s face. Only then do we understand that this was never a ritual of resurrection, but the cruel development of a photograph. There is absolutely no possibility of Sōichirō’s face appearing here, no room for even the smallest further wish. His face as it was then is too far away, lost forever, irretrievable. The trauma of photographic development lies precisely in its inability to change itself: the moment of developing means a permanent failure to meet with every possibility.
Animation’s intrinsic unreality and discontinuity naturalize Godai’s prolonged motionlessness. The streetlight’s development of Godai is precisely the instant when Takashi Anno exceeds the intentions and imagination of the original author, Rumiko Takahashi. Development stresses the repetition of the same; the repetition of the same points towards the other’s death / burial. Between the light’s coming on and its not yet having come on, in the antagonism of the living and the dead, we again encounter the infinitesimal gap. It overturns emptiness and fullness in an instant, ruling the entire episode through its absolute traumatic force. A powerless sense of annihilation takes possession of Kyōko’s body. For a moment, she cannot move. At this moment, when nothing else could possibly do, a song called “Alone Again (Naturally)” begins.
Alone again. Once more, alone. Gazing at Kyōko, lost and regained (?), Godai and the setting sun behind him dissolve gently and forlornly into the Milky Way pouring down through the night sky. Following its flow, the camera moves down to the clock at Ikkoku House. After this dusk of revived recollection has ended, beyond the window’s deep blue night we see a brilliant river flowing silently through the town like an open wound.
Then we see the persimmon again. Beginning as the detail of the landscape that determines recollection’s seasonal framework, it has recurred over and over, and at the end we return to this material object: beginning again, back to the starting point. Its relation to recollection cannot be spoken. No connection can be seen. It is simply, incredibly, quietly there, beyond the entire configuration yet everywhere present through its various configurations. Its self-iteration seems to interrogate the viewer about this circular story of loss and recovery: its happening and not happening—potentiality—its remaining unchanged and its changing—becoming. In a slowly rotating overhead shot, the few drops of warm light from Ikkoku House look so weak beside the town’s innumerable lights. This story, too, is only one among countless tiny stories.
At the end of the song, editing gives one “Alone again, naturally” to Godai upstairs and another “Alone again, naturally” to Kyōko downstairs. Softly calling Sōichirō’s name to the dog (?), Kyōko again gives a faint smile. Thus the episode that began with a persimmon and a contrail comes to an end. But as though echoing the story, at the end of the closing song we see Godai walking beneath the cascading Milky Way. A dog named Sōichirō suddenly appears beside the road and joins him. In the boundless night, they look at each other. They recede.
2. Naohito Takahashi, and Gazing at Eyes
I. A Surface That Forbids Penetration
Countless points of light floating in the dark compose a wound. Following the river through the whole town, it persists, tenderly and cruelly. Through a repetition of sameness—the turn of a head resembling the dead, held motionless for a long time—this presence is torn open and exposed in the town’s deep blue night. As a mourning of time, we cannot say that this wound has not already been intimated in Semishigure: there, a structural repetition splits the three simultaneous presents. Even though Mai’s identity as an idol has not yet died, the wound has been present in the work from the beginning.
With Naohito Takahashi, this fundamental dimension degenerates into the pure repetition of the surface called the image. In episode 12 of Figure 17: Tsubasa & Hikaru (2002), we cannot help being moved by the thinness and emptiness of the northern sky, in which nothing can be seen. Hikaru, who has always been inseparable from Tsubasa as though they were twin sisters, learns that they must eventually part and begins avoiding her from time to time. When Tsubasa stands alone in the snow, a laterally moving low-angle shot shows steeply jutting branches in the manner of Shichirō Kobayashi surrounding a sky without any outline, like ink spreading across paper.
Then a boy sees a girl waiting alone at the bus stop. They stand side by side, their lines of sight never meeting. “I have an important matter to attend to today, so I’m taking the bus,” he explains himself, using language a little grand for an elementary-school child. He looks at the girl, who keeps her head lowered in dejection, then immediately turns away again. As the image cuts once more to a sky surrounded by branches, almost indistinguishable from the earlier one, a lyrical melody begins. This time, however, the image does not move laterally: as though drawn towards that sky, it keeps enlarging into an emptiness containing nothing at all. Standing silently together, they hear the wind howling in the distant woods. Their hats catch the snow falling steadily from above. Since the girl was waiting before the boy arrived, the snow has accumulated more thickly on her hat and scarf.
At last the bus arrives with the shrill sound of tires grinding over ice and snow. They sit together in the back row. The distant mountains of the snow country slide slowly past, and even inside the bus we see the vast sky in low-angle shots through the window. “I heard you’re going back to Tokyo.” Again, the boy is the first to break the silence. Only then do we realize that this briefly shared time and space, the somber sky and landscape of the snow country, have quietly contained the ritual quality of a farewell all along.
Although the boy speaks, he does not look at the girl. She turns her head to look at him, but before he finishes speaking and turns towards her, she has already lowered her head. The arrangement that repeatedly makes their gazes miss each other is threaded into the conversation with extraordinary naturalness. We can only admire Takahashi as a director who knows how to film dialogue. He places his characters with absolute aptness, constructs their eyeline relations and the timing of their shifts with precision and rigor, and attends delicately to the orientation and turning of their heads and bodies. He thereby makes full use of the narrative economy and effectiveness of the gaze. Only when the boy rises a little to press the stop button and prepares to leave do the two, captured from a wide-angle position, seem to steal glances at each other. For the first time, their eyes almost meet.
During the conversation on the bus, the upward view of the sky through the window recurs three times, filling their intermittent silences with an emptiness in which nothing is seen. This negative, passive mode—what we might call “negative expression”—is indeed characteristic of Takahashi’s repetition of the thin surface. But it would be a grave mistake to think this exhausts what he does. We soon discover that his repetition is, rather, something more unreasonable.
Near the end of the same episode, Hikaru and Tsubasa, in the woods, suddenly notice a few fine flakes of falling snow. The gentle music gradually stops; only the howling wind remains. As they stand and look up, a downward tilt gives us a glimpse of the gray sky surrounded by branches. Is this not the very sky we saw at the bus stop? Because the impression lasts only an instant, we remain doubtful for the moment—until the identical painting stubbornly appears a second and a third time in this sequence. We can only stare in astonishment at this wilful act of violence. Yet since no comparable tilt ever linked the pair at the bus stop to this sky, we would have no answer if Takahashi asked why the bus-stop sequence had to use a different painting.
No: it is precisely after seeing this sky that Tsubasa summons the courage to ask Hikaru about the eventual separation she has begun to sense. The sky in a fixed shot silently watches the two small figures embrace and sob in the snow. Has it not become an eternal pattern, recalling the vault of heaven above everyone in the world who has ever parted? Even as it exposes itself completely as a thin surface, it says nothing. We can no longer simply attribute it to a particular place. It persists as an impenetrable planar pattern in its own right.
Rhythmic animated movement and editing, whether harmonizing with music or driven by it, have been continually explored because of their high degree of controllability. Sometimes these practices even surrender without resistance to the reassuring, simple effects that spectacle or other cheap devices offer the spectator. Yet animation is a medium so accomplished at silence and stillness. For Naohito Takahashi, in the repetition of a wholly silent surface, a stirring as fine as gossamer comes into being invisibly. Takahashi is emphatically not an auteur who stirs up spectators in time with music or whips them into a frenzy through story. He is committed to the linkage of one shot with another, through which animation’s subtle sensibility gradually takes shape.
But the so-called scholars of cultural studies understand neither live-action cinema nor animation. They privilege and inflate montage, which is only a technique for arranging and editing shots, while caring nothing for the actual forms of shot linkage or the concrete images. They therefore cannot understand the unfreedom, powerlessness, and impossibility of images. Takahashi’s negative expression can be said to be deeply rooted in this impossibility.
Episode 8 of To Heart (1999) quietly and steadily maintains a space in which Akari’s and Hiroyuki’s gazes meet. They scarcely ever touch. The distance between the two seated opposite each other is, of course, a necessary condition for their lines of sight to exist. Conversely, their gentle looks make an originally vague and delicate awareness of distance clear and unbreakable. While contact is prohibited, their bodies calmly sense the existence of the body opposite, across an interval. Their unforced mutual gaze confirms once again that they share this intimate, tranquil time and space.
According to Shiguéhiko Hasumi, the closest union can occur only by killing off the eyes’ function; a line of sight can exist only through the intervention of distance. The repeated shot/reverse shot at the end of episode 8, which consistently sustains this contrary relation between gaze and contact, must therefore not be understood merely as a delay intended to emphasize the everyday condition in which “something seems about to happen, but nothing actually happens.”
With astonishing courage, Takahashi arranges completely identical still images within a short span of time. After a repetition approaching stagnation, an identical, slightly longer medium close-up of Hiroyuki over Akari’s shoulder shows her suddenly lifting herself a little. Gentle music begins, and Hiroyuki raises his head in response. Akari, it turns out, is silently watching him. The image slowly enlarges towards her wordless gaze… The shot/reverse shot that makes time and space tend infinitely towards stasis clearly privileges this present exchange of looks among the countless exchanges of ordinary daily life. Here Akari’s gaze is first of all a waiting, or an indication that she is waiting. Yet complete silence and stillness make her gaze impenetrable, infinitely ambiguous.
Within this arrested time and space, her waiting is no longer confined to the present moment. It unexpectedly expands across the entire history of her relationship with Hiroyuki. Or perhaps it is precisely because the scene takes only one of their countless everyday exchanges of looks that this gaze projects its meaning endlessly outward, conferring it on other ordinary gazes. Akari’s look does, after all, occupy a privileged position throughout the television series.
Only, Takahashi can do no more than repeatedly and futilely film the two looking at each other simultaneously from one side, or break their gaze apart, filming shot and reverse shot and editing them alternately. Even if, like Mamoru Oshii in Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984), he keeps the camera revolving at the center of their lines of sight, the camera cannot capture the fronts of two people facing each other within the same frame. It cannot capture both their gazes at once. Hasumi precisely identifies this wretched condition: when two people face each other, the camera can only film helplessly from the side or intervene and destroy their simultaneity. In a sense, he pronounces a death sentence on filming the encounter of one eye with another.
This incapacity is obvious on a live-action set, but the same despair and misfortune exist in animation. Mediocre auteurs disregard the dangerous territory of the eyes’ collision and casually, carelessly connect one eye to another. Day after day, they repeat shot/reverse shot while avoiding repeated camera positions, hoping to evade their own mediocrity. Perhaps it is with an awareness of this that Oshii advises making every effort to reduce unnecessary shot/reverse shot in dialogue scenes. Naohito Takahashi, however, ventures into the difficulty of constructing a gaze and, through an almost obtuse repetition of surfaces, makes the gaze a crucial motif of his images. Subtle differences emerge in absolute stillness and repetition. Paradoxically, change occurs through remaining the same.
Episode 13, which takes To Heart beyond dispute to the furthest extreme of romantic animation, stubbornly attempts to represent the encounter of eye and eye. In a scene in the gymnasium, we continuously hear rain pattering outside. Following the gaze of Akari, who stands against the wall, we see Shiho far away in a line of girls. The camera then keeps pushing towards Shiho, who faces right. A close-up of Akari inserted into this movement stresses the sustained attention directed at Shiho. Suddenly Shiho, who has remained still for a long time, seems to notice something—or can no longer endure being watched. She turns her head slightly and glances at Akari.
After a cut to Akari looking a little surprised, Shiho, in a fixed shot from the unchanged angle, quickly turns her face back and lowers her head slightly. The camera begins pushing towards Akari. We cannot help admiring how Takahashi does not attempt to change the camera angle, but turns a moving shot into a fixed shot and a fixed shot into a moving one: an alternating exchange, a passing of the ball. Although the cuts remain successive, this suggests a more ambiguous change in the characters after their gazes have met across a distance. In Akari’s case, this is not conveyed through an expression corresponding to a psychological state: once her surprise passes, her face is completely unchanged from before.
This insistence on repeating the thin surface becomes still more evident in the scene at the episode’s center, when Shiho visits Akari. Anyone would marvel at the incomparable beauty of its succession of interior shots. The tremulous, monotonous sound of a kettle persists through time. Akari sits on the bed, Shiho beside it. They sit not at right angles but at a shallow angle to each other, almost facing the same way. When they turn their faces and bodies slightly towards each other, light from the window behind them strikes their cheeks. When they turn back, their cheeks sink into shadow. We become absorbed in the image’s delicacy, watching the soft lines of shadow on Akari’s ear, cheek, and neck tremble slightly as she speaks.
Hasumi argues that the “psychological face” fabricates the fictitious depth of psychological shadows, whereas the “face in the image” exposes shadow itself on the surface. Akari’s and Shiho’s expressions, with their sustained alternation of light and shade, are unquestionably “faces in the image.” Shiho, for example, twice denies liking Hiroyuki. The first time she evades Akari’s gaze, turning her face into shadow. The second time she stands, turns towards Akari, and says that she does not like that kind of guy at all. Light illuminates both their faces. From this moment until the scene ends, there is no more shadow on either face.
We feel both an inexplicable sadness and something like relief. Lyrical music begins as the kettle’s sound gradually vanishes. We understand Shiho’s helpless defeat under the pressure of transparent, continuous time, amid the eloquence of the history lodged in that stage apparatus, Akari’s bedroom.
Like shadow, the pupil exposes itself silently on the surface. The other astonishing feature of this scene is unquestionably the nearly dangerous mutual gaze captured by the silent shot/reverse shot after Akari asks whether Shiho likes Hiroyuki, Figure 2(a)–(d). This is plainly a reckoning in their relationship, yet we have no way of knowing what the apparently penetrating direct look reveals or conceals. Has the pupil not already disclosed itself as a fullness of nothingness? It has never been a window onto the soul. At the surface, it repels the forces probing into depth. Only now do we realize: the pupil is the strongest barrier of all.
In fact, repeated shot/reverse shot as a means of depicting mutual gazes is hardly rare in live-action cinema. Examples include the sequences in Tai Katō’s Meiji Kyōkakuden: Sandaime Shūmei (1965) and Norifumi Suzuki’s Sukeban Blues: Mesubachi no Chōsen (1972), Figure 2(a′)–(d′) and (a″)–(d″). But in both sequences, the actors’ expressions, the camera angles, and the shot scales undergo minute changes. Put the other way around, animation’s discontinuity is its disadvantage compared with live action’s continuous movement. We have said that discontinuity naturalizes Godai’s prolonged standing still, but we could equally say that the gaze’s stagnation cruelly displays animation’s unnaturalness and unfreedom. Through an absolute repetition that fundamentally prohibits movement and renounces changes of angle, Takahashi produces complete cuts and ruptures. Conversely, feeding on this total disadvantage, he drives the repetition of the empty, full surface towards its limit.
Within the crisis of the gaze, unexpectedly cutting off an image’s relations of movement and suspending it timelessly in the air: this is a device Naohito Takahashi uses at crucial points in his images. At the beginning of episode 28 of The Adventures of Mini-Goddess (1998), a superb wordless short, a girl sits alone on a veranda, gazing vacantly at the rain. Her eyes meet those of a crow perched above her. The same motionless girl’s composed gaze appears twice. The crow’s unnatural, mechanical turn of the head and its sudden, ominous stare are startling. More startling still is the girl, who shows no surprise, as though she had expected it. When the crow flies away, she instead looks as though she wants it to stay.
Then she wanders through an empty city in the rain. The camera keeps returning to her wordless gaze, and a desolation suffuses the images. Rain dims the lifeless world; in the rain, the swollen river and the sea’s waves move without end. These three sounds seem to be all that fills the space of this world. In fact, only the beating wings of crows and gulls stand apart from the rain’s sound. On the shore she sees a rotting tree trunk on the ground and a doll abandoned by someone. Her gaze as she silently looks at these dead objects is again repeated twice. The resemblance of this structure to the earlier one compels us to connect the crow with the dead objects.
Then she approaches a flock of gulls strangely motionless on the ground. Suddenly they beat their wings and rise. At the same moment, she reaches towards the sky. But we cannot see the sky as it appears to her. Where does she want to go? No, the answer is already plain. We have gradually come to understand that the ill-omened crow is an apparatus linking this world to the underworld, and the gulls, too, are messengers traveling between this shore and the other. Consider carefully how Takahashi handles the collision of the eyes: the crow at the beginning is inviting her to die. Or, conversely, her composed gaze is precisely a suicide’s gaze.
We cannot help shuddering at a Naohito Takahashi who does such things in animation as though nothing were the matter. At the end, a gust blows away her umbrella, which might be the only vividly colored object in this world. The crow appears again. Her slow, determined steps towards it make our hearts sink. But the appearance of her companions makes the world warm and bright in a brief instant. Moved, we silently reflect on how precious an auteur Takahashi is: he connects the gaze, that fated limit of the image, with a solitary death.
II. From Touching the Untouchable to Seeing the Unseeable
Animation cannot render meat: a piece of meat about to fall from the bone, an eye gouged from a skull and stuffed into a vulva, a penis spurting semen and urine alike. In other words, animation cannot render the colors of meat. In animation, the material of flesh is always covered by an organized spatial structure called line. Animation therefore cannot truly let meat, as “the common zone of man and the beast,” escape from structure and present itself—swim in a violent space that annuls every distance, touching the untouchable. It can only turn into a structural grotesquerie of deformed shapes. On the other hand, Tatsumi Kumashiro is said to have believed that the close-up of Taiji Tonoyama’s withered penis in Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) surpassed all acting to express the totality of human existence: ridiculousness, shamelessness, sorrow, and all the rest. On this basis, we can only say: there is no penis in animation.
The OVA Stainless Night (1995) is a copulation of lines absorbed into color fills5 and black outlines. The two kinds of line intertwine and lick each other. This is the eroticism of lines belonging to the surface. Folds of clothing, light and shadow, even the fine creases of the bedsheet pressed beneath a body genuinely become part of that body through contact and linked movement. Or, conversely, as lines covering flesh, as textures on the surface, they are the fundamental, erotic existence. Flesh must always be covered by something in order to be seen. When we speak of the body in animation, we already confront a perversion: the suggestive covering is fundamental. How do the ends of the hair fall against the body, for example, and how do they separate into strands?
This is an attempt, by every possible means, to use surface texture to suggest that something “is there.” But is what truly fascinates us not, conversely, the fully exposed texture itself—as trompe-l’œil suggesting something else behind it, as a representation offering another representation? The suggested body, the “being there” behind it, is often tediously reduced to signs. In contrast, texture gives us an experience that flows without cease. In this sense, we arrive once again at the surface that forbids penetration. It must be on the basis of such an awareness that Takahashi lights the two most important sex scenes so intensely, making light and shadow continually tremble and change over the bodies. This is a modulation of light and shadow that never stops changing: it is not molded into a fixed form but remains in motion and responsive. And the penis—we can only call it a false penis—also becomes transparent, transmitting light, with liquid surging inside it. I will not enumerate the expressive features this work shares with 鏡 (1997), the second series of the OVA Yūwaku Countdown.6 But the false penis is the most prominent feature connecting the two.
As noted earlier, animation cannot penetrate to the touch of meat simply through the movement of lines covering the surface. On the other hand, even at the level of the visible image, the cel is too smooth. Within this cleanliness almost devoid of impurities lies a profound suspicion of such purity—or naïveté. And what of the background painting? Before background paintings that, we might say, cannot change continuously, the camera has only three impoverished resources: moving, zooming, or remaining fixed.
Within this painful and cruel self-interrogation of unfreedom, Naohito Takahashi’s 鏡 is an exceedingly rare work that puts animation’s decadence into practice, and must therefore retain its name in animation history. If Belladonna of Sadness (1973), the object of Takahashi’s dreams, is animation beyond animation, then in this sense 鏡 is not animation at all. Led by Kuni Fukai, who was responsible for the artwork, the former easily abandons the problem of meat and blithely pursues the phenomena of animation’s collapse induced by line’s polysemy and freedom. The latter, through a self-prohibition that displays discontinuous estrangement in everyday scenes and freezes even the lines on the cels, exposes as fiction the simulation of fleshy touch through line in animation. Indeed, the story directly makes the taboo of the untouchable its theme. Confronting this contradiction head-on, animation loses the premise supporting its existence. In this decadence, animation itself collapses.
Even in the sex scenes, which stand opposed to the manipulation of premature or delayed still images in the everyday scenes and must display sensual touching, we cannot see the actual point of intercourse. The visual texture simulating va and ps remains far removed from bodily tactility. Even in the sex scene at the end of episode 2, the bodies become still, leaving only transmitted light licking the lower body of the heroine, Kaname. Takahashi never depicts ejlation—or rather, suggests the absence of ejlation from s*x itself.7
It is easy to see that large numbers of fine, densely arranged long lines frequently appear in the backgrounds almost exclusively when the male protagonist, 鏡 (full name 雨夜鏡), is with his older sister. The texture, or tactile quality, cut into the image by these scratch-like lines represents the relationship that has bound him and his sister together since childhood. More simply, the scratches crawling over the backgrounds are the representation of a relationship in which the act of touching is governed by the sister. Whether she pierces 鏡’s ear and initiates a kiss in episode 2, or stands and touches the seated 鏡’s cheek with her palm in episode 3, does the background not momentarily turn into a space in which fine lines proliferate at speed?
The work depicts with painful intensity 鏡’s condition: surrounded by the tactility of lines, he cannot reach the orgasm of meat = animal sacredness. Looking at people absorbed in physical contact throughout the urban landscape, he says, “It’s only bodies that are connected, anyway.” This line of dialogue sharply identifies the sorrow and decadence of the body of lines. 鏡’s very name—written with the character for “mirror”—and the mirrors that recur throughout not only imply that he is imprisoned in a circuit of mirror images with his physically similar sister, unable to turn his eyes from the virtual image and see other people. They also directly disclose the virtual space beyond the mirror, existing as an absolutely untouchable depth. This placeless place is precisely the site of the taboo animation cannot bear. 鏡’s hand, reaching into the void, therefore cannot touch the fullness beyond the mirror. The uniform he strokes, which once covered his sister’s body, is the emptiness set against it.
Only, the restrictions in force at the time prevented Naohito Takahashi from realizing the original manga’s incestuous ending.8 Let us imagine what would have to be done to maintain the consistency of the theme of touching the untouchable. The physically similar sister and brother would have to fall, in blindness and murk, from bodies of lines into animal meat. In copulating across the taboo, they would have to touch sacred violence. This could only be a fierce, painful mutual ravaging: a frenzied self-sacrifice and destruction of infinite expenditure, a dizzying apparent death and swooning that rise above the pleasures of line.
Even if the false penis were discarded for a real one, and the smooth cels abandoned to show us his obscene, rotting sister drenched in shit, piss, and semen, it would still be hard to say that images could truly go beyond concepts and achieve, through vivid images, a shock so close to the domain of literature. The thematic migration in 鏡, from touching the untouchable to seeing the unseeable, can therefore be said to arise from a necessity of image theory. Hence the movement from the real penis to the penis’s reduction to nothing, from animal copulation to angelic copulation, from animal meat to angels’ eyeballs: the necessary reversal of the work’s built-in double structure.
We need only look at the opening of episode 1 to understand how the paired themes of seeing and touching coexist. In the church at the town’s highest point, a close-up shows the light and shadow of a stained-glass sacred image covering 鏡’s pupils. He looks up, but the sacred figure inclines its head and does not look at him. He has no way of knowing the virtual point towards which it looks. In fact, we soon discover that the sacred image, in another double of itself on the ground behind him, is looking at him. This surreal line of sight vividly suggests, conversely, the emptiness and powerlessness of our own looking: its blindness, able to face only the visible object before it, unable to open towards the invisible. He then reaches out to touch the void and says, “I’m thirsty.” This confession of the poverty of existing within cels is an important moment at which animation theorists and cultural-studies scholars ought to gaze.
At the bottom of animation’s endless decadence, Naohito Takahashi, as stubbornly as Takashi Anno, attempts to acquire the third eye that might be born within a gap: the eyeball that at last no longer sees only what is seen. Once we understand this, we clearly cannot overlook the repeated shot/reverse shot of 鏡 and Kaname gazing at each other, placed at crucial points in episodes 1 and 3, Figure 3. Through this structural repetition, is Takahashi not also calling on the audience to look at invisible differences? If the repetition of 鏡’s expressionless surface in (a)–(c) means that he saw, yet in fact looked at no “thing,” then (α)–(γ) reverses this: he looked at nothing, yet saw “something.” This is the eyeball’s transgression of its own limits. The visual order collapses. The eyeball can directly experience the other person’s very existence; a gaze alone can bring one directly to orgasm. The third eye is the experiencing eye.
We have, in fact, already realized this. In front of the church, Kaname immediately recognizes 鏡, cross-dressed and with his hair loose. Even by the ending, his cross-dressed visual appearance never becomes a question she raises. Look still more closely, and only she and 鏡 possess eyes that can momentarily detach from their bodies and cease to belong to a functional structure. Her former boyfriend, who does not even have eyes, provides the exact contrast.
On the desk in 鏡’s bedroom is a photograph of his sister. On Kaname’s desk is a painting: two angels who mirror each other—or an angel and its mirror image—seem about to kiss. The motif here is no longer the superficial resemblance of close kin but an identity of inner essence. The eyeball breaks through the surface and invades the inner realm, no longer distinguishing itself from its object. What remains here of genitals invading or being invaded? We can scarcely identify any trace of the penis. 鏡 has never removed his cross-dressed clothing; his skirt covers his penis throughout. We can only call this the penis’s complete reduction to nothing. As it looks like two women embracing, this is no longer sexual intercourse in the usual sense but sex-less intercourse.9
Angels, as beings superior to humans, are said to be spherical in their true form, growing around the most geometrically perfect organ: the eyeball.10 Angelic copulation is therefore nothing like the mechanical thrusting of animal intercourse, but the cyclical rotation of planets. Through this erotic perversion, Takahashi successfully excludes all the mechanical, tedious back-and-forth repetition of animation, making 鏡 and Kaname revolve around each other and rotate on their own axes instead. It is in this sexless rotation that 鏡 reaches orgasm for the first time.
Only, for us, who do not even possess eyes, this copulation of angels is no more than a miracle falling like snow on a holy night beyond the glass doors that reflect our virtual images. It melts at once in our palms of lines, like the lonely tears that fall as we wake from a dream. Thus, as with live-action cinema, because we have no eyes, no one needs good animation; frowning over bad animation does no good either. Only, to escape the body of lines, we must live within this collapse that ought to collapse.
References
- Makoto Sumii (角井誠), “Far from Realism: André Bazin’s Theory of Animation” (「リアリズムから遠く離れて：アンドレ・バザンのアニメーション論」). André Bazin Studies (『アンドレ・バザン研究』), no. 5, 2021.
- Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981.
- Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Lessons in Looking: Special Lectures on Film History (『見るレッスン 映画史特別講義』). Kōbunsha Shinsho, 2020.
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1985.
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1980.
- Shiguéhiko Hasumi, What Is a Shot? (『ショットとは何か』). Kōdansha, 2022.
- Shiguéhiko Hasumi, A Cinephile in Ozu’s Margins (『映画狂人、小津の余白に』). Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2001.
- Eureka, special additional issue, October 2017: “Shiguéhiko Hasumi” (『ユリイカ 2017年10月臨時増刊号 総特集＝蓮實重彥』). Seidosha.
- Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Shiguéhiko Hasumi’s Mythology of Cinema (『蓮實重彦の映画の神話学』). Tairyūsha, 1979.
- Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Cinema’s Memory Apparatus (『シネマの記憶装置』). New edition. Film Art Sha, 1997.
- Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, 1928.
- Film Director Tatsumi Kumashiro (『映画監督 神代辰巳』). Kokusho Kankōkai, 2019.
- Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Directed by Yasujirō Ozu (『監督 小津安二郎』). Expanded edition. Chikuma Shobō, 2003.
- Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, 1957.