High banks become valleys; deep valleys become hills.1
1. Not Entirely “Sekaikei”
Weathering with You is clearly not entirely sekaikei. Consider a few features of sekaikei. First, the social middle ground is rendered insubstantial. Weathering with You, by contrast, undoubtedly contains many social elements: runaway teenagers whose identities and backgrounds are not blank (Hodaka and Hina’s status as “people on the margins” is clearly more “social” than that of “ordinary people” such as Taki and Mitsuha); sex and violence outside an adult-entertainment establishment (women and guns); and the intervention of forces of social discipline, including the police and Child Guidance Centers. Second, sekaikei features an all-encompassing, world-changing power, whereas the “weather maiden’s” power is local. This local character has two aspects. First, most of the time she can change only the “local” weather, in a particular place and for a particular stretch of time, safeguarding a life of “small but certain happiness” amid the downpour. Second, weather itself is only one “local” factor she can change, while the obstacles facing the young people in the film clearly extend far beyond its reach.
If we examine the film closely, we find that Weathering with You actually contains two separations. The girl offers herself as a human sacrifice to stop the rain: this is the “first separation,” comparable to the meteor crisis in Your Name. Society’s disciplinary power separates the boy and girl: this is the “second separation.” When they meet again three years later in a submerged Tokyo, they are still full of fear and anxiety. The conflict driving Weathering with You no longer rests entirely on sekaikei’s “miracles”; it incorporates social problems. Hodaka is a runaway. Hina is fifteen, passing herself off as eighteen while supporting a household alone. Nagi needs a guardian. Making their way through an adult world full of sex and violence, they can hold up only a small patch of “clear sky” for themselves in the pouring rain. Whether or not the rain stops, society’s disciplinary power will separate the boy and girl. Unlike the meteor crisis, their predicament has no simple cause and no simple solution. Their relationship is already on the verge of falling apart before Tokyo’s night of unprecedented rain arrives. So even when the girl cries out reset and the boy risks everything to pull her from the sky back to earth, they still cannot avert the “second separation” imposed by society. The “weather maiden’s” power cannot break society’s disciplinary power. In the end, it remains a “local” power.
2. What If the “Rainstorm” Does Not Exist?
The sekaikei elements of Weathering with You are markedly less satisfying than those of Your Name. In particular, the logical transition to the choice on that rain-soaked night—“save the girl or save Tokyo?”—is extremely clumsy. To a large extent, this problem arises because Makoto Shinkai has forcibly stitched sekaikei and realistic elements together.
A sekaikei crisis is necessarily an imaginary crisis, with an “empty” core. Take Your Name: its meteor crisis is empty. It has no signified; it is a pure “miracle”—something that completely overturns everyday understanding, or a “sacred thing.” The “romance” in Your Name is made entirely of miracles. Its very blankness in relation to reality produces the ultimate beauty of aestheticism. Weathering with You is different. It has a clear real-world referent: behind the rainstorm crisis lies another, real crisis constituted by social factors—society’s disciplinary power pursuing the boy and girl and correcting their “abnormal” way of life.
Here I will try stripping the sekaikei elements out of Weathering with You and reconstructing the whole story. Just as Voices of a Distant Star declares that “the enemy does not exist,” I will declare that “the rainstorm does not exist”—or rather, that it does not exist in real-world Tokyo. It is nothing more than the young people’s anxiety externalized. “Tokyo in the rain” is simply a Reality Marble, an inner landscape made external.2 The “rainstorm” is only an imaginary crisis.
Weathering with You spends considerable time discussing the relationship between “weather” and “mood.” From this new perspective, however, the relationship it presents is reversed. Rather than “sunshine girl appears → weather clears → mood improves,” it becomes “sunshine girl appears → mood improves → weather clears.” Ever since arriving in Tokyo, the boy and girl have lived in “rain”—or, in anxiety. Only when they earn money through work and can sustain their small, meager yet immensely happy life does it occasionally “clear up.” But this life, regarded by disciplinary power as “pathological,” has its limits, just like the “weather maiden’s” lifespan. Society will not allow fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds to live independently in Tokyo as a “quasi-family.” They must be sent back to the institutions that raise and supervise children: families, schools, Child Guidance Centers. And so, on the night when society’s disciplinary power finally tracks them down, the boy is to be sent home and the girl is to have a new foster family. Their overwhelming anxiety brings on a night of unprecedented rain. When the girl asks the boy that night, “Do you like sunny days?”, we would do better not to reduce her question to whether Tokyo should be saved. Rather, she hopes to relieve his anxiety by letting him go, leaving on her own and bringing this bitter “romance” to an end.
Read this way, Weathering with You still makes sense even if we cut out all the sekaikei flights into the heavens and back. It is actually closer to another Shinkai work, the noncommercial The Garden of Words. A teacher–student romance violates the social order; the distance between the lovers is that of an “illicit” relationship. The “quasi-family” life of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds likewise violates the social order; here too, the distance between the lovers is that of an “illicit” relationship. Our man Shinkai3 gives us a scene in which the boy encounters women and guns outside an adult-entertainment establishment, and another in which the boy fires a gun, using adult violence to resist adult violence. Were it not for commercial considerations, I believe Shinkai would very likely have followed The Garden of Words and written a scene bringing the boy and girl together—if they are imitating adults, imitating family life, why not go ahead and imitate sex too?—pushing this “illicit” intimacy to its limit. He may not have wanted to make the story so “youthful”; he may instead have wanted something quite “pathological.”
The reality, though, is that Weathering with You has to insert sekaikei into “the social.” Although social conflict drives the story for most of its running time, at the decisive climax it needs sekaikei to supply the emotional tension. The result is that sekaikei’s imaginary crisis usurps the place of the social crisis under disciplinary power. The story leaves behind the police pursuit of the boy and girl and is strangely redirected toward “save the girl or save Tokyo?” To some extent, this is the audience’s “misrecognition”: the girl’s choice may not be about how to stop Tokyo’s “rainstorm,” but about how to stop the “rainstorm” in the boy’s heart—leave or stay? A “short circuit” thus occurs between the rainstorm crisis and disciplinary power—or, to put it another way, between a “normal” sekaikei story in the manner of Your Name and a social story with the “pathological beauty” of The Garden of Words.
This short circuit undoubtedly exposes Shinkai’s immaturity in combining the two. The final result is a half-finished “chimera.”
3. Embracing a “Formless” Life
Finally, I want to draw a comparison between Makoto Shinkai and Mamoru Oshii.
There is, to some extent, a touch of Oshii to Shinkai’s directing. Before he embarked on his folklore series, the science-fiction and war themes of his early work overlapped substantially with Oshii’s concerns. Voices of a Distant Star could easily be seen as a Patlabor 2: The Movie for the 2000s.
We can compare Voices of a Distant Star and Patlabor 2. Both capture a kind of anxiety—whether end-of-century anxiety or adolescent anxiety—and give it visual form as “war.” In this war, we fight an “invisible enemy,” because anxiety is invisible, like “air.” Tsuge can conjure “nonexistent fighter jets” over Tokyo with a casual flourish. Electronic warfare technology is one side of this; the government’s overreaction in a state of anxiety is the other.
The difference is that, at the end of Patlabor 2, this anxiety will take up permanent “residence” in our lives. We must adapt to a “risk society.” What we call “risk” is a politics of possibility: reality is “formless,” and it “may” take a turn for the worse. When we choose a reality, we cannot avoid living alongside its possibilities—that is, its risks. It is also in this sense that Foucault describes the modern world as “dangerous.” Modern life is a process of continually choosing among possibilities. We must tolerate risk taking up permanent “residence” in our lives; we cannot expect a once-and-for-all solution.
In Voices of a Distant Star, by contrast, war—and anxiety—merely “brushes past” our lives. The girl joins the military to fight aliens at the edge of the solar system, while the boy remains on Earth and returns to ordinary life. This separation is momentary: it will soon be worked through as they grow older, returning only occasionally as “phantom pain” on some lonely night in the future. If the girl in Voices of a Distant Star represents the boy’s anxiety, then as the distance between them grows, and the distance radio signals must travel grows with it, her appearances in his life as “text messages” become less and less frequent, until she finally disappears. Consider the familiar passage from Voices of a Distant Star: “Hello, twenty-four-year-old Noboru. This is fifteen-year-old Mikako. Even now, I still love you very much.” The boy has grown to twenty-four, but anxiety remains at fifteen. The “certainty” of the adult world will eventually replace adolescent anxiety.
Yet in Weathering with You, we can see the return of an Oshii-like “formless” life. Notice that the meteor crisis in Your Name destroys at least one village, whereas in Weathering with You, even when Tokyo is submerged, there are no scenes of death, no reports of deaths, no death tolls given. Here Shinkai uses the “rainstorm” to evoke not disaster but an aesthetics of living: everything solid in personal life will be water. “Love” does not mean “an end to the rain”4—finding something to lean on and somewhere to belong once and for all. On the contrary, it means choosing to live in water, accepting that life is “formless,” and weathering its storms together.
At the same time, “rain” has another connection: the “rain” of cyberpunk. Through images of “rainstorms,” “neon lights,” and the “submerged metropolis,” our man Shinkai, intentionally or otherwise, pieces together a vision of “wasteland punk” in Tokyo. But what appears here is not the resistance to “false peace” through “eternal civil war” found in Patlabor 2. Instead, wasteland punk in Tokyo is rendered harmless, made part of everyday life, and turned into spectacle. To some extent, this suggests a neoliberal “aesthetics of living”: that better, solid life does not exist. We are living amid an unprecedented “rainstorm” after the end of history, like the “rain of calamity” Noah endured. Against the intrusion of late capitalism’s systemic risks, against the surveillance of all-encompassing forces of social discipline, against every risk that makes our lives uncertain, we cannot resist; we can only accept it all in silence.
The boy and girl cannot, in the end, live in the clouds. Once they land on the ground, they can answer the separation imposed by society only with three years of silence. Then they meet again. And live on in submerged Tokyo.