Death and life, leaving and staying: puppets upon a stage. When the single thread snaps, down they tumble.
I. The “Weather Theory” of Weathering with You
From Voices of a Distant Star to The Place Promised in Our Early Days, from 5 Centimeters per Second to The Garden of Words, the story of light and shadow has always been Makoto Shinkai’s third main narrative strand. In empty shots—shots without people—it serves as a wordless narrator; it also provides a guiding stage for people’s meetings and partings. Had Shinkai not invited that backstage worker, “atmosphere” in the painter’s sense, into the spotlight, we might hardly have noticed how much it contributes to a story’s staging. As our feelings follow the plot through its opening, development, turns, and resolution, our experience remains an inseparable tangle. Yet it actually consists of two basic elements: on the one hand, we experience emotional fluctuations within the story itself; on the other, we experience them through changes in atmosphere. Atmosphere anticipates the direction of the plot, while a climax must arrive within an atmosphere suited to it. The two stir one another, interweaving to create our multidimensional experience.
From a design perspective, atmosphere is the story’s second script: a language of the environment that expresses, through light and shadow, feelings the characters cannot put into words. Because a brush struggles to capture the subtleties of facial expression, arts that do not record their subjects with a camera often turn to atmosphere for want of a better option. Yet atmosphere can frequently convey a character’s emotional fluctuations more clearly and resoundingly than a face. The same smiling face, placed in the midday sun or reflected in a window streaked with endless rain, leaves an entirely different impression. This is also why reaction images, severed from the atmosphere of their surroundings, always invite misreadings and imaginative associations. Under social pressure, human expressions have always been deceptive: who can imagine how many blades might lie hidden beneath a calm smile? Atmosphere, however—provided it has been attended to—never lies. We might even say that atmosphere is the “color of a character’s inner life,” projected across the barrier of the body into the whole world. Inside and outside change places here: the external world becomes the character’s interior, more truthful than any words.
According to the scale of its patches of color, atmosphere can be further divided into “large patches of color” and “small patches of color.” Large patches lay down the emotional ground color; small patches carve out its details. The former are usually supplied by “weather,” while the latter are entrusted to particular images, such as the classic “withered vines, old trees, crows at dusk.”1 Analyzing the expression of intent through things would involve the relationship between metaphor and ontology, a deeper and more complex matter; this essay will therefore confine itself to the former category. Expressing feeling through scenery had already reached maturity in classical poetry and prose, and film and television have given it a new form of life. Strictly speaking, every screenwriter is a “child of the weather.”2 They summon wind and rain, commanding the entire sky at will to satisfy their own wishes, and no dragon god ever carries them away—isn’t that another kind of miracle? Dawn’s first light dispels darkness and opens the way for hope, deciding the outcome of countless battles. The light of midsummer noon breeds a languid restlessness that melts into steaming, sweaty desire. The sobbing evening wind brings an omen of something ill. Falling snow embraces the open fields, quietly sowing visions of the coming year. Of all the sky’s joys and sorrows, rain may be the most distinct feeling of all: drizzle is melancholy, a sudden shower frightening, a downpour enough to drown the soul. How many farewells have had rain for their accompaniment? How many tears have slipped down with its drops? This has almost become a convention, as though rain ought to be associated with sorrow. (Rain is sometimes also used to signify an emotional “renewal,” as in the final scene of The Shawshank Redemption. But this already draws on rain’s cleansing and nourishing powers, and thus belongs to the category of expressing intent through things.)3 Still, we might wonder: how is any of this possible?
—“Why are people’s hearts so closely bound to the sky?”
—“Why can just the way the sky looks move us so deeply?”
If this insight existed only as metaphor in Shinkai’s earlier films, Weathering with You undoubtedly makes that metaphor literal. As her powers increasingly escape her control, Hina changes from a sunshine girl with a hundred-percent success rate into the weather’s master. Her desolation condenses into summer snow, and her terror summons thunder from a clear sky. The shrine maiden’s joys and sorrows determine whether the sky is cloudy, clear, rainy, or snowy: an exact reversal of everyday circumstances. In Weathering with You, Shinkai carefully depicts the faces of people looking upward, their brows and eyes opening as the clouds part. Life leaps from gleaming train windows into people’s eyes. A man who was grumbling only a moment ago beams and opens his wallet generously once the mist and clouds disperse. Long-awaited fireworks look all the more enchanting reflected in pupils washed clean by the rain. These moments inevitably recall an answering scene from The Garden of Words: Yukino, still drowsy after crawling out of bed, hears rain outside the window, breaks into a smile, and murmurs, “It’s raining.” Although “rain” means something else to Yukino, the two sequences share the same spirit: clouds, sunshine, rain, and snow determine people’s joys and sorrows. The weather maiden’s duty is to protect these small but certain joys that blossom almost unnoticed. Hina passes her smile to the sky, and the sky reflects it back into the human world. Those smiles, in turn, shelter the small happiness in Hina’s heart and her sense of a reason to exist.
This “emotional cycle,” hidden behind the “water cycle,” now constitutes Shinkai’s prized “weather theory.” If the shrine maiden’s prayer must be called a miracle, why shouldn’t the sky’s prayer be one too? Perhaps the sky itself is a shrine maiden, praying that people will respond to her feelings. Perhaps the joys and sorrows that arrive with clouds, sunshine, rain, and snow are those prayers being answered. Who knows? There is no law against imagining things, after all. Shinkai says that another ecosystem lives above the atmosphere, and that this is also the world to which souls return. Seen this way, perhaps weather itself is the gift and protection that “things departed” bestow on the world. Fallen blossoms are not without feeling; becoming spring soil, they nurture flowers still.1 The flesh and bones that remain merge into the soil and bring forth new flesh and bones. But what of the soul? Might souls follow a similar cycle? If the souls of all things can remain, why shouldn’t they flow with the rain into the sky and bring forth new souls? Thought of this way, “people’s hearts are closely bound to the sky” acquires a deeper ontological significance.
II. From Clouds, Sunshine, Rain, and Snow to Joy, Anger, Sorrow, and Delight
Of course, imagination needs no evidence. What concerns us is what sustains it. As Wittgenstein puts it, “What is mysterious is not how the world is, but that the world is like this.”4 What we want to know is this: How is expressing feeling through scenery possible as a technique we use “without a second thought”? In other words, why do we “naturally” attribute the qualities of our feelings to the sky? Why can just the way the sky looks move us so deeply?
This question requires us first to establish the proper field of inquiry. Asking whether expressing feeling through scenery is a metaphor amounts to asking whether weather is a “reasonable object” for eliciting emotion. We must attend to the historical conditions of that question. In agricultural and pastoral societies, when human beings were directly exposed to nature, weather may have had a more intimate relationship with human life. It determined both long-term labors such as harvests and migrations and short-term activities such as hunting and gathering. The rise of cities gradually removed the former from the center of people’s lives, but the latter remained, though the content of those short-term activities changed. Even when high-rises cut the sky to shreds, wind, rain, and sunshine still find ways to break into our lives, bringing little troubles or surprises to otherwise uneventful days. Yet attributing the melancholy of rainy days to disruptions of everyday life is too hasty. Often, even when we have decided to stay indoors, the darkened sky still weighs heavily on our hearts. Does that oppressive feeling, then, originate in the darkness itself? Not entirely. The dimness of a rainy day is no different from that of dawn or dusk, yet the latter do not carry sorrow on that account. We might even say that the emotional coloring of the word “gloomy” is itself inherited from rainy weather. Rain seems innately hostile and estranging. It blurs the certainty of past and future, isolates the heart from the world, and imprisons it in a displaced present. The loneliness we experience in rain answers the loneliness that comes with parting: this is why so many stories choose rain for their backdrop.
In fact, “reasonable” is still too broad a word. To answer the question, we need to consider expressing feeling through scenery alongside other phenomena, including but not limited to: (1) synesthesia; (2) mappings from color to emotion; and (3) the theory that music contains neither grief nor joy. In phenomenon (1), a perception belonging to one sense is experienced as a perception belonging to another. In phenomenon (2), the perception of a color is steeped in feeling: blue points toward melancholy, for example, and purple toward elegance. As for phenomenon (3), Ji Kang writes that what we call grief and joy arise when something has already affected us inwardly, and are then stirred as we listen to music; what originally gave rise to the feeling has nothing to do with the music itself. Cognitive linguistics places the first two phenomena within the category of metaphor, while Ji Kang’s account also makes us aware that music is not directly linked to emotion. Drawing on psychological data, Churchland describes a model that makes phenomenon (1) possible: “Qualia are points in multidimensional sensory spaces; the three coordinate axes of these spaces are the spike frequencies of neural channels … For example, the visual perception of pink is a 95Hz/80Hz/80Hz chord, while the smell of a rose is a 95/35/10/80/60/55 chord.”5 If Churchland’s model is sound, then certain multidimensional sensory spaces can be mapped onto one another. These mappings preserve the relative distances within each sensory domain, thereby becoming cross-sensory analogies. They are sufficient to provide a basis for synesthesia. Meanwhile, phenomenon (2) has also been shown to be a branch of metaphor, because it is possible only if we conceive it as a mapping between two domains—the domain of color and that of emotion—taken as wholes, rather than as a color independently evoking an emotion. That is to say, to make blue a metaphor for melancholy, we must place the other colors within the mapping as well. Blue is not independently linked to melancholy by virtue of its own qualities. Rather, through its “differences” from other colors, it is linked to “the emotional domain as a whole.” What happens here is like using a bottle cap to replace a missing chariot in Chinese chess. We point to the cap and say, “This is the chariot.” Yet there is no necessary connection between cap and chariot: we could just as well put something else in the cap’s place. The only requirement is that these substitutes must not resemble the other pieces. In other words, it is precisely the “overall differentiation” of the pieces’ appearances that makes their mapping onto another domain possible. Blue in the color domain and melancholy in the emotional domain stand in a similar relationship. Formally, phenomenon (3) may be regarded as identical to phenomenon (2). We therefore now have two types of metaphor: metaphor (1) involves a psychological resemblance, while metaphor (2) involves a mapping between whole domains.
Clearly, expressing feeling through scenery shares something with all three phenomena, allowing us confidently to classify it as metaphor. At this point, we can reasonably define it as a mapping from the domain of weather—clouds, sunshine, rain, and snow—to the domain of emotion—joy, anger, sorrow, and delight. But the question remains: is this mapping closer to metaphor (1) or metaphor (2)? (1) If it is the first, then the metaphor has a physiological basis. Weather and feeling correspond one to one: clouds themselves have the power to weigh upon the heart, sunshine itself the power to spread joy. This emotional mapping is universal. (2) If it is the second, then the metaphor has a genealogical history and an arbitrariness in its social origins, just as Greek mythology associates wisdom with the owl while Egyptian mythology associates it with the baboon. In this case, weather and feeling do not correspond one to one. The actual metaphor operates between the whole “changing sequence” of weather and the whole “changing sequence” of feeling. Changes in the weather evoke changes in feeling, just as the rises and falls of music stir the rises and falls of emotion. An emotional leap can occur when sunlight breaks through the clouds, but equally when welcome rain ends a long drought.
It is worth noting that a metaphor’s physiological basis does not necessarily make it universal, nor does its genealogical history necessarily prevent universality. Take a simple example: fear of snakes has a physiological basis, but that does not mean every culture casts snakes as enemies, because in some places snakes are uncommon. If an animal is rare and prized, it will still be worshipped as a symbol of power even when its existence threatens human beings. In the case of weather, we find a world of difference between attitudes toward snow in southern and northern China. Northerners, for whom snow is commonplace, may think of it as nothing more than frozen rain: it makes travel difficult and is a nuisance to clear away. To southerners, however, snow often symbolizes a sacred gift, blanketing the fields in stillness and an all-embracing openness, making heaven and earth new. This comparison seems to suggest that feelings about weather cannot be reduced entirely to either physiological or social factors. They certainly have a universality of their own, but that universality is shared only by “certain groups of people.” Note that this is not an appeal to racial classification: these groups are distinguished by their “different ways of living.” Under this distinction, urban and rural inhabitants belong to different groups, but no disparagement is intended. It means only that urban ways of living give “weather” a decorative, marginal role, whereas rural ways of living necessarily make weather something that matters. It is always already ready-to-hand within the circumspective gaze of practical concern. The discussion below will take country and city as its examples, but ultimately we will discover a series of more fundamental modes of living where these two different paths converge.
III. An Ontological Interpretation of Weather
In stories and in reality alike, weather and mood seem to be linked at a more primordial level. We have referred to this in ordinary language as “ways of living,” and it is here that we encounter Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.6 These thoroughly unrigorous reflections have no wish whatsoever to get caught up in troublesome disputes over words. For ontology’s contribution is precisely to tell those old pedants fixated on the opposition between subject and object not to place their excessively serious work above life. Before plunging into thought, try going back to where thought set out. In life’s homeland, we inhabit the world more freely, and more emotionally. “Knowing is a mode of being-in-the-world”: knowledge, in other words, is a branch growing from the great tree of life. Unfortunately, as its “cells differentiate,” knowledge also loses its original potential. It becomes shortsighted and set in its ways: “Theoretical observation has always already reduced the world to the uniformity of entities present-at-hand.” Yet “it is precisely in an inconstant view of the world, flickering with mood, that things ready-to-hand appear in their distinctive worldhood; the world as world never remains the same from one day to the next.”
To prepare the discussion that follows, we need only sketch three of Heidegger’s insights. (1) The world is not “made up” of things ready-to-hand. “Being-in-the-world” means being absorbed, through concern, in the world’s familiarity: circumspectively rather than thematically absorbed in the interconnected references that constitute the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment. (2) Things ready-to-hand are, proximally and for the most part, what concern deals with. The hammer has its involvement in hammering; hammering, in fastening; fastening, in shelter from wind and rain. And the totality of involvements always relates to a possibility of Dasein’s being, leading back to an ultimate “towards-which.” This is Dasein’s authentic and sole “for-the-sake-of-which,” something Dasein has always already understood. (3) Mood is a primordial way of being for Dasein. Dasein is always already in a mood; this everyday condition of “being and having to be” reveals its thrownness. Faced with a mood that “assails” it from being-in-the-world itself, Dasein can only turn toward it or away from it. (“State-of-mind discloses Dasein in its thrownness, proximally and for the most part through an evasive turning-away.”) Unless being-in-the-world in a state-of-mind already meant being involved with entities within the world in a way marked out in advance by mood, no amount of pressure or obstruction could give rise to anything like being affected. Mood thus existentially constitutes Dasein’s “being-in-the-world.”
Of course, expecting readers to understand by forcing fragments of quotation upon them would be irresponsible. We must return these insights to the concrete lifeworld. If we follow traditional epistemology and understand weather’s influence on feeling through the opposition between human subject and worldly object, there ought to be no difference between country and city under the same sky. Yet this is not the case. Heidegger writes: “Nature must not be understood as something present-at-hand, nor as a force of nature. The forest is a timber reserve, the mountain a quarry, the river waterpower, the wind wind for sailing. They meet us in the surrounding world.” Nature and weather alike are always disclosed as they meet a gaze shaped by what matters to us. This is not to say that they “do not exist” before responding to those concerns, but that they exist in a corner of the world as an indifferent background. The world changes as the center of people’s concerns changes. A baby has eyes only for the breast; only later does the world acquire two beings who sometimes care for the child and sometimes get in the way. We always explore the world in pursuit of vague desires and concerns, incorporating all kinds of things into the gradual unfolding of those desires and concerns—and thereby making the latter more “clearly visible” too. On this basis, the world becomes a “place where choices can be made,” partly concealed and partly open. Its boundaries are extended little by little in just this way.
Take the same object, “the forest.” To the hungry, thirsty eyes of a primitive tribe, the forest is simply their “canteen” and “dining table.” The tribespeople attend only to “prey” and “flowers and fruit,” knowing exactly “which foods belong where.” Drawing their bows and beginning the hunt is as effortless for them as wielding our cutlery is for us. For a general pursuing victory, however, the forest becomes a “strategic hinterland.” Tunnels, traps, and hiding places suddenly appear at the center of vision with extraordinary importance. Another side of the forest is disclosed, bound up with sinister ambushes, danger, and slaughter. It becomes a “dark forest” demanding constant vigilance. In today’s peaceful times, meanwhile, the forest has been demoted to a mere “tourist destination” and “object of appreciation.” All danger has been swept away. Severed from primal impulses, the forest becomes a flat painting incapable of touching human beings. Human hands have castrated it, leaving only its aesthetic significance. Which, then, is the real forest: the “dining table,” the “strategic hinterland,” or the “tourist destination”? The answer is a little slippery. They are all the forest itself—but “not all at the same time,” because the concerns within which they meet us are incompatible. The forest can enter the gaze of concern only from a particular perspective. As that perspective opens one aspect of the forest, it necessarily conceals others. As for concern itself, which discloses the world and is disclosed by it, it originates in our lives and continually changes amid countless everyday absurdities and miracles. The forest’s appearance changes with it, taking on endless forms: now a shelter, now a punching bag or a hollow tree to whisper secrets into, now a lovers’ nest, now a biologist’s specimen, now a sacred place of prayer, now a home for daydreams. All these are the forest’s “essence,” except that this essence always gives itself over to “our existence itself.” Now, if we replace “forest” with “weather” in the passage above, we obtain an ontological explanation of weather. Weather’s essence likewise unfolds in countless forms along with our existence itself. In the farmer’s eyes, weather is a divine gift; in the herder’s, a gardener hurrying here and there. Poets and philosophers elevate the sky as their mother. Ecologists see the “cycle between heaven and earth” that runs through all things, while believers read sacred intentions in the sky’s inconstancy. At the same time, our existence stamps the weather’s changes with its own imprint. Those who have parted suffer from the shared wetness of rain and tears; they offer pitying prayers for shadows scattered at noon with no one to gather them up. Wind becomes a symbol of what is destined to pass away, dusk a foretelling of the long night to come. But dawn awaits at the end of that night. So the melting snow also harbors a humble hope of reunion with spring, when the swallows, returning south with April in their beaks, will surely bring good news.
Yet we have always already forgotten the weather to some degree, grown distant from it. Concern for the weather often comes to mind through a lack. Only on an afternoon of unending rain do we begin to miss yesterday’s bright sunshine; only on land parched by a long drought does the longing for a downpour become especially intense. It is in these modes of longing and desire that we truly begin to look directly at the sky and ask something of it, rather than remain absorbed in our concerns upon a comfortable, congenial earth. When a piece of equipment becomes entirely suited to its use, it ceases to draw attention, as though it had vanished from the world—just as we often feel around for our glasses while wearing them, or hunt for our phone while talking on it. Weather is, of course, different from equipment, but in this respect they are no different. Suitable weather retreats to the world’s margins as mere scenery, clearing the stage for more pressing matters. This absolutely does not mean that these things are unimportant. Quite the contrary: it is precisely the entities that have long since disappeared into the world’s background that sustain our peaceful lives. Air, “free yet priceless”; the “animal corpses” awaiting decay upon our dining tables; parents and relatives who ask nothing in return; peaceful years in which we “can laugh and talk about war”—at every moment, they quietly guard our everyday lives by remaining “inconspicuous,” yet they have never received enough respect. Precisely because they are important, they become “unimportant.” What an immense irony.
For city dwellers who have given themselves over to high-rises, the sky may be within reach. But how many of us think to look up at it amid the busyness of work or pleasure? Freed from hours spent looking down, we habitually cast our eyes “upward” when we occasionally stretch. Yet “looking at” the sky is different from “seeing” it. The city dweller’s looking is always inattentive. There is no “concern” in this gaze, only a “passing glance” in search of novelty and a bored “whatever.” Rain or shine, whatever: the sky above the city dweller is just such an inconsequential backdrop, like a fixed oil painting. However earth-shattering the changes within it, the person outside the painting is unaffected. Standing safely beyond the white line, they appreciate it without disturbance. The sky seems close but is in fact very, very far away—as far away as the war in Syria. We watch the news, feel something for a while, then turn back to our own business. In this sense, the city dweller’s sky exists in life only as a “weather forecast.” We care more about the forecast than about the weather overhead.
If weather is forgotten in urban life because it is inconsequential, in rural life it is forgotten because it has been completely absorbed into the everyday. The sun feeds the planet, the sky nourishes the earth, and the countryside’s broad soil is an altar welcoming the gods’ descent. Farmers and herders have been chosen by Apollo as priests, responsible for passing heaven’s oracles on to the city to guide its life. In Language and Myth, Cassirer writes that certain Native American tribes regard farming as “dancing”: “For them, the growth and harvest of crops depend on dancing correctly—that is, on correctly performing magical and religious rituals—rather than on tending the soil appropriately and at the right time.”7 This quotation is certainly not intended to revive an ancient superstition. I want only to emphasize the “regularities and rituals” of agricultural and pastoral life. These regularities and rituals “constrain” farmers’ and herders’ daily lives, “commanding” them to sow at the spring equinox and harvest at the autumn equinox, or “calling” them to pursue the rich pastures along the rain clouds’ route, dodging the pursuit of bitter winter. An incautious observer might conclude that the long accommodation between humanity and nature “forged” this whole set of regularities and rituals, which have now been “imposed upon” farmers and herders. But these descriptions are nothing more than the arrogance of outsiders. The sky’s regularities and rituals differ from shackles or laws, because shackles and laws can always be “broken” or “transgressed”: they remain an alien presence that rubs against the subject. Genuine laws, by contrast, are “constitutive,” like the laws of nature. These cannot be broken or transgressed because the subject has always already acted within them and is part of them. Yes, weather has tamed human beings. But the highest achievement of this taming is to “remove the reins” and “let them go their own way.” The sky’s regularities and rituals are how the subject spontaneously becomes tamed. No one can “command” farmers and herders to do or not do something: they are always free. Yet this freedom must not be mistaken for a thug’s unbridled license. Freedom means living “naturally,” yet “just right”; and “just right” means responding to the weather’s call at every moment of life. Ways of dealing with the seasons, wind, and rain have long since been inscribed in farmers’ and herders’ bones, becoming part of their lives. For these people, weather is not something to resist, because they have always already lived within it. Just as fish do not resist water but “roam freely through it,” farmers and herders roam through the weather’s endless changes. The boundless fields are their living room, and the lofty sky is both its ceiling and part of their home. In the countryside, weather’s existence disappears into the familiarity of home.
Our analysis of the countryside now turns back to illuminate the urban sky. We wrote earlier that, in “forgetting” and “paying no mind,” we shut the urban sky outside our homes, as though it were an unwelcome visitor from another land. But is that really so? Can a mere difference in the height of our houses sever our blood ties with nature? Absolutely not. Rural inhabitants freely “dwell with the weather” through “regularities” and “rituals.” The city itself has not abolished this basic pattern of living with weather; it has only made those regularities and rituals more complex and fragmented. Changes in the weather can now scarcely shake the city dweller’s unshakeable daily routines. But weather has not thereby “drifted outside the world.” On the contrary, weather itself helped constitute those routines, and so inhabits the countless details of our surroundings as a “designer.” These “designs,” dispersed throughout the world, constantly meet us in everyday concern, reminding us of our birth like birthmarks. Heidegger writes: “In paths, streets, bridges, and buildings, nature is disclosed to concern in a particular direction. A covered platform takes account of wind and rain; public lighting takes account of darkness. Clocks take account of particular positions of the stars within the cosmic system. In using clock equipment that is conspicuously ready-to-hand, the nature of the surrounding world becomes ready-to-hand along with it.”8 In this sense, weather exists not only above our heads. It meets us in every corner of everyday life: in our habit of casually taking an umbrella along; in the ways glass shuts out and opens up; in manhole covers that occasionally trip us; in “British-style” conversation starters; in the traditional customs of admiring lanterns and setting off fireworks; in the urban version of rising with the sun and resting at sunset; in the stillness of the whole city at daybreak. We casually gather up fragments of the sky and ride the wind of imagination back to ancient times. Seen this way, whether in country or city, weather has always already helped shape people’s ways of living. Its disappearance is merely a “retirement after work accomplished.” Together with the countless martyrs who fell, others following in their wake, weather has left us the peaceful life before our eyes. In this sense, “forgetting” them is the finest “tribute” we can pay. “Until the sages die, the great thieves will never cease.”9
Yet just as death makes way for new life, weather’s “disappearance” gathers strength for its “epiphany.” (As a name for religious experience, epiphany preserves the sky’s sacredness for us.) In country and city alike, it is precisely because weather has always already existed in every corner of life in the mode of “disappearing into the world” that it becomes something we can “encounter anew” and “reconsider.” And in the sudden brightening that announces this reunion, we look with new eyes at the familiar yet unfamiliar sky before us—as one must look anew at a person after even a few days apart. An “encounter” with weather is an “encounter anew.” This proposition deserves to be taken seriously, because it points to a transition from “estrangement” to “closeness.” Estrangement differs from unfamiliarity: it is itself rooted in a “primordial closeness,” a “blood relationship.” We have already clarified the mode in which weather disappears. But how is that mode broken, and what “gift” do we receive through the breaking? These questions require careful thought. If we have long been freely “dwelling with the weather” in everyday life, honoring it through forgetfulness, why should it suddenly appear within that life as an “epiphany,” like a miracle? It is here that we rediscover the profound relationship between weather and feeling.
IV. The Miracle of Sunlight Breaking Through: Five Modes of Emotional Mapping
In Section II, we defined expressing feeling through scenery as “a mapping from the domain of weather to the domain of emotion.” In Section III, we sketched five modes of living in which we encounter weather: “taming,” “dwelling with the weather in forgetfulness,” “indifference,” “encountering anew,” and “miraculous epiphany.” They form a complete sequence of development, each corresponding to a mode of emotional mapping. (Recall Heidegger’s third insight: mood existentially constitutes Dasein’s “being-in-the-world.”)
“Taming” is the starting point of humanity’s relationship with nature. It means craving a state of comfort while constantly having to compromise with torment. In this mode of living, then, the basic mood directed toward weather is a complex mix: it includes “discontent” and “endurance,” while remaining ready at any moment to “welcome” and “enjoy.” Weather has tamed us. That is to say, we understand when we can enjoy it and when we must endure it. Enjoyment’s basic mood is languor, though troubled by faint anxieties; endurance’s basic mood is pain, though encouraged by vague expectations.
As the result of taming, “dwelling with the weather in forgetfulness” points toward an “unruffled ease in coping” and “calm.” For when we understand that an enjoyment is nothing precious, that it is readily available, we lose that enjoyment; and when we understand that a pain cannot be escaped but only endured, it ceases to be pain. Our relationship with weather thus develops from that of newlyweds into that of an old married couple. The “mutual torment” of quarreling at one end of the bed and making up at the other becomes the “mutual acceptance” of one hand holding the other. Acceptance means treating strengths and weaknesses alike. In our eyes, our partner is no longer divided into “good” and “bad”: he or she is simply himself or herself, always the same. This “equal treatment” rests on the “familiarity” of having “come to know the other’s temperament inside out.” The basic mood of “dwelling with the weather in forgetfulness” is therefore “warm familiarity”—“as though at home.” The warm familiarity of home has always already been accompanied by “freedom of movement,” and that freedom itself means “knowing every detail” of the household’s arrangement. It is precisely because we know it so well that we can “confidently” leave certain things “forgotten where they are.” We know they will always be “within reach,” ready-to-hand again whenever we wish. Such is the weather that has “disappeared into the world”: we have “confidently forgotten it at home.”
Yet just as a long silence between people makes them feel less familiar to one another, prolonged forgetting finally makes weather insignificant, and we become “indifferent” to it. It is like a young couple living apart who gradually acquire lives of their own. They throw themselves into the demands of the moment, form new relationships, and sometimes even start second families. What follows, of course, is “estrangement” from home and wife. Estrangement differs from forgetting because it is not merely forgetting, but forgetting that one has forgotten. The heartless one “deliberately” suppresses thoughts of his wife and persists in the glittering nightlife. Indifference’s basic mood is therefore “weariness” and “estrangement,” but it is also accompanied by the “pleasure” and “busyness” of “throwing oneself into another life.” Only when we are “too happy elsewhere to think of home” do we become “indifferent” to something.
Of course, this dissipated life cannot go on forever. The ghosts of the past will always come knocking. No one can forget the past completely. Memories always arrive when we are “not paying attention.” They like to seep quietly through insignificant “cracks,” until our clothes are soaked. A tiny bud in the depths of winter can place us in the midst of an entire spring. Leaves covering the courtyard at dawn whisper of last night’s ravaging wind and rain. A geologist carefully feels out millions of years of climate change in sedimentary rock. Countless memories, bitter and sweet, overlap in the dappled shadows of trees. These memories that precede reunion always arrive with a mood of “sudden understanding” and “everything opening up.” Like the flash that solves a detective’s case, we suddenly connect the scattered clues of the past, cutting the same unassuming figure out of countless old photographs. So it was this person who shared our joy when we were happy and sat quietly beside us when we were down. She—or he—wrote the anonymous love letters in our shoe locker. While we watched the sky full of fireworks, she—or he—was watching our face. In this “chance encounter that reveals the truth,” weather becomes a shy girl or boy, full of feelings they dare not speak. Through a long, inseparable companionship, they have only hinted cautiously at their heart, brushing our hair with love’s olive branch and quietly waiting to be discovered. Of course, other memories arrive when emotion bursts its banks, always bringing the sudden sensation of missing a step and falling. It is like waking alone in an inn far from home, instinctively turning to embrace the lover beside us, only for our outstretched hand to find nothing. When children pull back the curtains with a cheer on Christmas morning, only to find that the world is not white as they had hoped, this is their disappointment. When travelers waiting at an airport to go home suddenly hear that their flight has been delayed by the weather, this is their disappointment. When lovers long separated arrange to meet in a square, only to miss each other in a sudden downpour, this is their disappointment. Our former composure shatters. A husband, his mouth still full of complaints, suddenly realizes that the chopping in the kitchen stopped a long, long time ago. A little uneasy, he goes to see what has happened, only to find his wife already broken down in a lake of tears. In this instant, weather has betrayed our trust, like the wife who can no longer pretend that everything is calm. Only now do we discover that weather is by no means something we can manipulate as we please. It has its own dignity and its own life, countless surging feelings it keeps inside and does not want anyone to notice. It too can break down; it too can regret. It is always alive. We are forced to break with the weather, but that break is also destined to yield reconciliation through another round of “reconsideration” and “mutual taming.” We have now analyzed two modes of “encountering anew”: in the first, we “happen upon the truth”; in the second, we “reflect upon ourselves when our expectations come to nothing.”
“Encountering anew” and “miraculous epiphany” both break the mode of “forgetting.” But “reunion” is a renewal that proceeds from within outward. Whether remembering the past or reflecting, we retain the initiative. “Epiphany,” by contrast, unfolds from outside inward: a life is shattered by something alien to it, then wins rebirth through its own reconfiguration. At some moment in our lives, we look up at the sky as though summoned. In those heights where there is neither wind and rain nor clear weather, something suddenly plucks our heartstrings.10 It begins to play a song both strange and familiar. Only when its lingering notes have faded into utter silence, and we return to ourselves, do we discover that tears are streaming down our faces. Perhaps this is the miracle drifting down from the sky. Miracles are revelations that shake an “entire life” at its foundations: a flash of lightning without width that, in one fleeting instant, projects the world’s totality of involvements onto every blade of grass and every tree before us. These things begin to bear a weight out of keeping with their station. History’s rise and fall flickers in the birds’ ascent and descent; the breathing of all things echoes in the wind. At this moment, the universe no longer spreads out flat, because metaphor gathers it around us and places the ends of the world within our sight. Suddenly, “I” seem to be everywhere. Every corner of the world softly murmurs the answer to that eternal question—“Who am I?” My representation accompanies all representations.11 The world folds into a Möbius strip, finite yet infinite, and the place where it joins back onto itself is the many-colored sky overhead. The wind howls briefly, sweeping in a patter of light rain. The world begins to weep. It is our weeping.
V. An Unimportant Afterword: Absurdity, Miracles, and Love
Like Hodaka lost in Tokyo’s streets, the film gives off a faint hostility. It seems ready at any moment to flee our gaze, yet reluctantly waves a greeting and tells us how it feels through voice-over. The sensation is like happening upon a couple in the street. They politely strike up a conversation with us, but look only at each other. We become acutely aware of how superfluous we are to this relationship and want only to leave them alone together. This is the source of the hostility. It mingles envy with a wish to leave them to each other, yet inevitably reflects our own loneliness. We are crowded out of that world because Hodaka and Hina belong only to each other—to Makoto Shinkai’s inner world. Clearly, Shinkai is not speaking to us. But what of it? When Hodaka races along the railway tracks, he thinks of no one else. ただあの人に会いたい—“I just want to see her.” Because he is a boy, and only a boy.
Boys and girls simply are what they are: arrogant, stubborn, unrealistic, shortsighted.… Just as complaining about the weather is useless, when expectation conflicts with reality, we cannot blame reality. It merely exists; it issues no orders and seeks no explanation. Precisely for that reason, reality often has no reason at all, and something without a reason is what we call absurd. So, you see, reality is always absurd and mad: like the bandages on Hodaka’s face, like Hina’s prayer, like the rain that falls for three whole years. Here we are forced to confront another hostility. We are mercilessly thrown into that world without being given any explanation, and finally leave the cinema utterly bewildered. It rains. It stops. It starts raining again. Then the story ends. Should Shinkai be held responsible for this absurdity? But—isn’t reality itself mad?
We always think reality has been explained. In fact, we have merely grown accustomed to its continual occurrence. (Think of Hume: causality is nothing but a habitual association of the mind.) Snow in July would astonish us, but perhaps on another planet it would be perfectly commonplace. Why aren’t we astonished by the roses beside the road? After all, Angelus Silesius once wrote, “The rose is without why.”12 And reality is precisely the sum of this series of things “without a reason.” If you resent it, everything without a reason sinks into absurdity. But if you are grateful for it, perhaps everything without a reason becomes a miracle. “Perhaps every ordinary day we live is a succession of miracles.” If submerged Tokyo symbolizes reality’s absurdity, then perhaps Hodaka and Hina’s meeting symbolizes the miracle that pierces the clouds. Arrogant, stubborn, unrealistic, shortsighted: this is the same as saying confident, persistent, romantic, unafraid of the future.
The absurd consists of things before which we are helpless: the family that forces Hodaka to run away, the city that compels Hina to work, the capricious sky. These agents of fate compress life into a narrow space. Inside this transparent box, we must learn to live with ourselves and face loneliness, because we have lost the firm backing called “the they.” Hodaka’s flight and Hina’s prayer symbolize their banishment from the they’s dictatorial kingdom. When Heidegger attributes Dasein’s “average everydayness” to “being-with others,” he seems to have overlooked precisely these “people at the margins” who do not fit into society. They have not even won an opportunity to rescue themselves from falling, because the “anonymous” they excluded them from the outset. Hodaka and Hina’s meeting is better described as the meeting of two homeless people. From meeting, to sustaining one another through hardship, to depending on one another to live. Only those who have lived on the streets understand the warmth of home and lamplight.
The terror of wandering homeless lies not only in the biting wind, but still more in the heart’s displacement, its lack of anywhere to rest. It is as though the long night might bury us in some unknown corner and the rain wash away even the proof that we existed. Amid this torrent of steel and concrete, we cannot help praying for an anchor, for a gaze that will remember us. Perhaps only in this humbled condition can we understand the depth of Hodaka and Hina’s love. They are not merely shoulders for each other to lean on; each is the dwelling place of the other’s heart. Only two people who depend on each other to live will run toward each other heedless of their own safety. Fortunately, the city lowers the cost of depending on one another to live, because that ever-swelling, resource-rich beast can always feed the fleas clinging to its body. Now this decision points toward a more fundamental desire: “I don’t want to disappear”—from people’s eyes, from memory, from the clamor of the crowd, from the receding tide of the universe.… Hodaka longs to be alive in Hina, and Hina longs for the same in him, because it is love that gives life meaning. 愛にできることはまだあるよ—“There is still something love can do.”
The foregoing is really a set of impressions after a second viewing. I do seem rather too moved by my own feelings. But that is all right: being moved by ourselves in our chūnibyō years often establishes the shape of our world, becoming the capital our adult selves will squander.13 As the years accumulate, the world in our eyes will only gather dust and fade. The sharp edges of feeling wear smooth until they can no longer leave even a scar. So I am willing to go mad at fifteen or sixteen, to plant an “I was here” flag at the world’s end. Then, even when I am old, huddled on some little street in some city, merely getting through the days, I will still be able to remember clearly how boundless the world once was. Because: “Back then, I—we two—really did change the shape of the world. I chose her, chose this world, chose to go on living here!”
Roof Comments
Hongcha: The author uses dialogue from Weathering with You to introduce his ontological interpretation of the connection between weather and mood. That interpretation deserves consideration. But I must point out that, in developing his argument, he comes close to confusing the literary problem of representing interiority through landscape with the psychological problem of linking landscape and feeling in actual life. As Kōjin Karatani explains in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, using landscape to express interiority is something we do without a second thought, but it is in fact a characteristic inversion of perspective. For landscape to become an externalization of the modern self’s interiority, the concept of the “subject” must first be imported. The discovery of landscape is actually a discovery of the subject. My second question is this: if Weathering with You’s “weather theory” is universal, as the author interprets it, wouldn’t that make Weathering with You seem mediocre? Perhaps this is why he admits that being moved by Weathering with You is a matter of being moved by his own feelings.
Chailairen: Chuangzi’s essayistic prose really does have flair. For me, his use of Heidegger on nature clearly risks romanticizing agricultural and pastoral life and the natural milieu. Analysis of the film is missing from Sections III and IV; he could certainly try bringing it into the discussion. Sections I and II are a little long as an introduction, but as part of the main argument they are somewhat disconnected from what follows. Taken together, this leaves too little discussion of Weathering with You itself. Clearly, there is something of chūnibyō in the way he is moved by his own feelings about Hodaka and Hina’s experiences, with a danger of slipping into unreflectiveness. Well, the author recognizes this himself, so I won’t say much more here; I’ll try to discuss it in a later comment. As for using landscape to express interiority, my view is that expressing feeling through scenery, broadly understood as expressing an author’s inward feelings, has obviously existed since ancient times. At the same time, one cannot deny the distinctiveness of the subject in modern philosophies of the subject, or of the inward self represented in modern literature. But I don’t think this essay intends to challenge or discuss that issue. Sections I and II concern expressing feeling through scenery and metaphor in the broader sense.