Please tell me Your Name
2018-Mar-29, Thursday 12:38![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I asked a few people if they wanted to watch 君の名は/Your Name with me and no one could come, but I had heard such good things about it (much like Black Panther) that I wasn't willing to wait, so I watched it myself.
What an amazing movie.
Spoilers:
One thing I was very curious about is how much an audience not familiar with Japan and Japanese picked up on. It was immediately obvious to me whenever Mitsuha was in Taki's body, and vice versa. It wasn't supposed to be a secret and the movie made no attempt to hide it, but even so. The way Taki sat, the way he talked ("Tokyo ya!" instead of the more standard "Tokyo da!" made me laugh--I lived in a place where people would have said "Tokyo ja!"), and the way he behaved were all like neon signs. Japanese doesn't have explicit gender markers in speech the way something like Hebrew or French does, but it's still trivially obvious to determine the gender, and usually age, of a speaker from the way they talk.
The most telling example of this is the pronoun scene, where Mitsu!Taki is chatting with his friends:
The plot completely caught me by surprise. I've seen two other Makoto Shinkai movies, 星の声/Voices of a Distant Star and 秒速5センチメートル/Five Centimeters per Second (which I loved and wrote a bit about here!), both of which are much more melancholy. When Taki found out that Itomori (糸守, "Guardian of the Thread," about which more later) had been destroyed, I wasn't surprised, and when it turned out that the reason Mitsuha and Taki couldn't contact each other was because of a time displacement I wasn't surprised either. Both of the other movies I saw dealt with someone being stuck in the past. What I was surprised at was the happy ending! I figured that Taki would learn the fate of Mitsuha and Itomori and have to move on with his life, leaving his memories of Mitsuha as a dream of happiness that he had to awake from. 物の哀れ is a huge theme in Shinkai's other movies, after all.
But I shouldn't have discounted the red string. The Red String of Fate/赤い糸 is basically soulmates, with the idea that destined couples are tied together with a red string at birth and will develop a connection later in life. That's why Itomori is called Itomori, why cord-weaving features so prominently in its rituals, and most obviously, why there are constant red threads connecting Mitsuha and Taki. Of course they would end up together at the end. Whether they have a happy ending, well, who knows, but they at least have a chance.
That's counteracted by the urban vs. rural theme, where rural areas are constantly losing to the pull of Tokyo and Osaka. It's not just that Taki can eat delicious hotcakes at a cafe and Mitsuha has to drink pop out of a vending machine. It's how Mitsuha's father walked away from his position at the shrine and no one took his place, and how no one remembers the reason for Miyamizu Shrine's rituals. And then when the comet hits, even in the revised timeline where all the people live, the village is still abandoned. Miyamizu shrine is destroyed and the rituals are never performed again, and Katsuhiko, Sayaka, Mitsuha, and Yotsuha all move to Tokyo. The children move into the city where the jobs are and the festivals die out. Taki can save the people, but he can't save Itomori. It's a problem that's common elsewhere in Japan too:
I did love how they didn't know the meaning behind the rituals, though. In Yaenishi, in Chiyoda, there's a summer festival where they make giant boat floats and hand-carry them through the streets, making them rock back and forth like they were sailing. Chiyoda is a mountain village fifty miles from the sea, and no one could explain why they did this when we asked. The festival is just called the 管絃祭 (kangensai, "Music Festival"), which isn't helpful. The meaning is lost to time. Even on Japanese webpages about it, there's just a short technical description of the event.
I also loved the use of kataware-doki. It's an archaic word for twilight or dawn--the modern Japanese is 日暮れ (tasogare) or 夕暮れ (yūgure)--written 彼は誰時. This is one of those words that justifies how complicated kanji are, because it literally means "Time of Who Is That?"
It's dawn or dusk, when it's dark enough that you can't identify someone approaching you. They still use that word in Itomori because it's so rural, but there they write it 片割れ時. It's pronounced the same, but the Itomori meaning is "Time of Fragments" or "Time of One Part of a Whole." That's why Taki and Mitsuha can see each other at twilight, because the red string connects them and twilight brings them together. Or the musubi (結び、"joining, connection"), as grandma explains.
That was part of why I ended up crying when the meteor split, especially since the falling fragment was red. Based on previous experience with Shinkai's movies, I read it as the breaking of the red string between Mitsuha and Taki. I should have had faith. A red string cannot be broken.
君の名は was amazing and deserves every bit of the praise it's gotten. I'm sad now that I missed the chance to see it in a theater, but glad that I saw it at all.
What an amazing movie.
Spoilers:
One thing I was very curious about is how much an audience not familiar with Japan and Japanese picked up on. It was immediately obvious to me whenever Mitsuha was in Taki's body, and vice versa. It wasn't supposed to be a secret and the movie made no attempt to hide it, but even so. The way Taki sat, the way he talked ("Tokyo ya!" instead of the more standard "Tokyo da!" made me laugh--I lived in a place where people would have said "Tokyo ja!"), and the way he behaved were all like neon signs. Japanese doesn't have explicit gender markers in speech the way something like Hebrew or French does, but it's still trivially obvious to determine the gender, and usually age, of a speaker from the way they talk.
The most telling example of this is the pronoun scene, where Mitsu!Taki is chatting with his friends:
Friend: お前さ、どうやたら通学で道に迷いんだよ。("How could you possibly have gotten lost on the way to school?")If you translated that straight to English, it loses all of the nuance. Both 私s, 僕, and 俺 all mean "I," but Mitsu!Taki starts in a formal register, appropriate for women and men talking to coworkers or equals that they don't know well, gets more formal, then switches to a male register, but not male enough for teenage boys. It's only at the end with 俺 that Mitsu!Taki finally gets it right, and even then the following sentence is still a bit feminine.
Taki: あ、えっと。私。("Well, um... I [watashi]")
Friend: 私? ([Watashi]?)
Taki: 私。("I [Watakushi].")
Friend: え？ ("Huh?")
Taki: 僕。("I [Boku].")
Friend: ...
Taki: 俺。("I [Ore].")
Friends: うん。("Mmhmm.")
Taki: は。俺楽しかったよ。なんか毎日お祭りみたい、東京って! ("I was having such a good time. In Tokyo, every day is like some kind of celebration!")
The plot completely caught me by surprise. I've seen two other Makoto Shinkai movies, 星の声/Voices of a Distant Star and 秒速5センチメートル/Five Centimeters per Second (which I loved and wrote a bit about here!), both of which are much more melancholy. When Taki found out that Itomori (糸守, "Guardian of the Thread," about which more later) had been destroyed, I wasn't surprised, and when it turned out that the reason Mitsuha and Taki couldn't contact each other was because of a time displacement I wasn't surprised either. Both of the other movies I saw dealt with someone being stuck in the past. What I was surprised at was the happy ending! I figured that Taki would learn the fate of Mitsuha and Itomori and have to move on with his life, leaving his memories of Mitsuha as a dream of happiness that he had to awake from. 物の哀れ is a huge theme in Shinkai's other movies, after all.
But I shouldn't have discounted the red string. The Red String of Fate/赤い糸 is basically soulmates, with the idea that destined couples are tied together with a red string at birth and will develop a connection later in life. That's why Itomori is called Itomori, why cord-weaving features so prominently in its rituals, and most obviously, why there are constant red threads connecting Mitsuha and Taki. Of course they would end up together at the end. Whether they have a happy ending, well, who knows, but they at least have a chance.
That's counteracted by the urban vs. rural theme, where rural areas are constantly losing to the pull of Tokyo and Osaka. It's not just that Taki can eat delicious hotcakes at a cafe and Mitsuha has to drink pop out of a vending machine. It's how Mitsuha's father walked away from his position at the shrine and no one took his place, and how no one remembers the reason for Miyamizu Shrine's rituals. And then when the comet hits, even in the revised timeline where all the people live, the village is still abandoned. Miyamizu shrine is destroyed and the rituals are never performed again, and Katsuhiko, Sayaka, Mitsuha, and Yotsuha all move to Tokyo. The children move into the city where the jobs are and the festivals die out. Taki can save the people, but he can't save Itomori. It's a problem that's common elsewhere in Japan too:
This year Kanegasaki, in Iwate Prefecture, will have to forgo the centuries-old “deer dance,” a prayer for a bountiful harvest and an homage to the townspeople’s ancestors.物の哀れ is why we find the cherry blossoms beautiful. If cherry trees bloomed year-round, no one would care. But does it really apply if it's the death of centuries-old traditions? Can we see the beauty in the transience of something that was supposed to be eternal? I have a much harder time with that.
The lead dancer, aged 61, has back pain, and there is no one in the town to replace him.
I did love how they didn't know the meaning behind the rituals, though. In Yaenishi, in Chiyoda, there's a summer festival where they make giant boat floats and hand-carry them through the streets, making them rock back and forth like they were sailing. Chiyoda is a mountain village fifty miles from the sea, and no one could explain why they did this when we asked. The festival is just called the 管絃祭 (kangensai, "Music Festival"), which isn't helpful. The meaning is lost to time. Even on Japanese webpages about it, there's just a short technical description of the event.
I also loved the use of kataware-doki. It's an archaic word for twilight or dawn--the modern Japanese is 日暮れ (tasogare) or 夕暮れ (yūgure)--written 彼は誰時. This is one of those words that justifies how complicated kanji are, because it literally means "Time of Who Is That?"
It's dawn or dusk, when it's dark enough that you can't identify someone approaching you. They still use that word in Itomori because it's so rural, but there they write it 片割れ時. It's pronounced the same, but the Itomori meaning is "Time of Fragments" or "Time of One Part of a Whole." That's why Taki and Mitsuha can see each other at twilight, because the red string connects them and twilight brings them together. Or the musubi (結び、"joining, connection"), as grandma explains.That was part of why I ended up crying when the meteor split, especially since the falling fragment was red. Based on previous experience with Shinkai's movies, I read it as the breaking of the red string between Mitsuha and Taki. I should have had faith. A red string cannot be broken.
君の名は was amazing and deserves every bit of the praise it's gotten. I'm sad now that I missed the chance to see it in a theater, but glad that I saw it at all.
