Makoto Shinkai Retrospective: The Garden of Words
For some reason, up until now, this was the only Makoto Shinkai film I hadn’t seen. Maybe it was due to the bad taste that his earlier 5 Centimetres per Second left in my mouth, when his subsequent films came out I probably felt I’d had enough of his navel-gazing, introspective adolescent romantic angst and avoided them. It was only after Your Name and Weathering With You rehabilitated his reputation in my eyes that I went back to look at Children Who Chase Lost Voices and now, finally, The Garden of Words.
Some films’ reputations precede them, and that’s definitely the case with The Garden of Words. I’d heard it referred to as “that feet anime”, and that it featured a “problematic” age-gap romance. Those descriptions didn’t exactly sell the film to me, and even when it turned up streaming on Netflix, and when I picked up a random secondhand DVD copy on the cheap, I never bothered to watch it. Until I set my mind on completing this retrospective.
I’ll put this out there now, I absolutely loved this short movie. At only 46 minutes duration, it fits alongside Shinkai’s other shorter runtime works, like Voices of a Distant Star (at 25 minutes) and 5 Centimeters per Second (at 60 minutes). Everything else he’s made since has sat closer to the two-hour mark, so I wonder if we’re done with the era of the bite-sized, emotionally intense Shinkai portions? No matter, in this case, the truncated duration seems perfect for the story it intends to tell.
Much like 5cm and Voices, there’s prominent narration from the main characters that illuminate their emotional states while Shinkai’s trademark almost photorealistic landscapes swoop by. Thankfully the narration doesn’t overexplain and overwhelm to the same level it arguably did in 5cm, and there’s a bigger focus on naturalistic dialogue that sometimes flows, sometimes sputters in fits and starts, much like in real life.
Set largely in the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, unusual 15-year-old first year high school student Takao Akizuki skips school on rainy mornings to sit under a gazebo drawing in his notepad. While there he meets a mysterious, beautiful but fragile adult woman (Yukari Yukino) who explains she, too, is skipping her responsibility of attending work, instead drinking cans of beer and eating chocolate at the park in the mornings. With the onset of the Kanto region rainy season in June and July, Takao and Ms. Yukino meet daily and strike up a gradually deepening friendship.
Takao’s life is difficult — the teenage son of a single mother who disappears for weeks at a time to stay with her younger boyfriend, his elder brother announces he’s moving in with his girlfriend, leaving Takao alone in the family apartment. He’s disengaged from school, has no close friends other than school acquaintances, and dreams of becoming a professional shoemaker, with a particular interest in designing and producing women’s shoes. This is not portrayed fetishistically, but as an artistic pursuit. He works many hours at his part-time restaurant job in order to afford both materials for practice shoemaking, and to save up for university fees. Until he meets Ms. Yukino, he has never told anyone of his dreams for the future, and in her he sees a gateway to the mysterious world of adulthood and its secrets.
Their interactions gradually becoming more intimate, Ms Yukino eventually volunteers her own foot for Takao to measure, and it’s clear this development both delights and takes him aback. He vows to make her a pair of shoes that will allow her to get up and start walking again, as he realises that this woman who never talks about herself is full of unspoken pain, and her life has stalled. Together they become emotional supports for the other, providing deep companionship and understanding, and each prays at night and in the morning for rain so that they have a chance once more to meet.
Partway through, we switch to Ms. Yukino’s perspective, and it’s clear she’s depressed, anxious and suffering from somatic symptoms such as loss of taste (hence the beer-drinking and chocolate-eating, they’re the only things that taste of anything to her.) When the rainy season ends, she struggles through the hot, dry summer without her regular meetings with Takao. She calls whom appears to be her ex-boyfriend, and presumed co-worker, who says he’ll assist her to fully quit her job. He notes that she’s improved since she met “an old woman” in the park whom she has been sharing lunches with. Of course this is a lie, and Ms Yukino lays in a pool of misery, lamenting that she herself is “nothing but lies”. Her apartment is messy, she can barely cook for herself, lays brooding on her bed or sofa, and despite getting up and leaving for work every morning can never muster the courage to attend. Despite being a 27-year-old adult, she barely functions.
Takao meanwhile spends his entire summer vacation working, and on return to school is shocked to discover that Ms Yukino is actually a disgraced literature teacher, bullied to the point of severe mental illness by a group of bitchy final-year students. Learning this, he takes justice into his own hands and slaps the ringleader, resulting only in being beaten up. Until this point, Takao hadn’t even known Ms Yukino’s name, let alone her profession, but he does what she could not — tries to fight back.
Like many of Shinkai’s characters, Yukari Yukino is passive to a fault. We aren’t privy to many of her thoughts about her work situation, but unlike with the characters in 5cm, I find myself empathising with her plight and her development of a severe affective disorder. It’s clear she received minimal support from the teaching faculty, and her ex-boyfriend was similarly unsupportive — she asks him on the phone why he was so quick to believe the lies spread about her by her pupil bullies. Even adults can be victims of bullying by cruel adolescents, and without the backup of fellow colleagues and friends they can become isolated and dysfunctional. Takao’s friends surmise that the head teacher prioritised the school’s reputation over the wellbeing of his staff.
A faint clap of thunder
Clouded skies
Perhaps rain comes
If so, will you stay here with me? — Ms Yukino,
(Man’yōshū, Book 11, verse 2,513)A faint clap of thunder
Even if rain comes not
I will stay here
Together with you — Takao,
(Man’yōshū, Book 11, verse 2,514)
Takao and Ms. Yukino’s final meeting in the park is poignant and meaningful — it’s not initially a rainy day, but of course unbeknownst to Takao, she’d been sitting in the park waiting for him every day throughout summer, whether it rained or not. He recites to her the second part of the “call and answer” Tanka poem she’d recited to him on their first meeting, and it is a beautifully romantic verse. When they’re caught in a rainstorm, they head back to Ms Yukino’s apartment, and in a different show this might be the time for alarm sirens to loudly blare.
Ms. Yukino is no predator, however. She diligently dries his clothes and gives him replacements to wear, while he cooks a simple meal for them to share. They both think that this has been the happiest moment of their lives… Only for the very sincere, very honest, very naive Takao to drop the bomb that he loves her. Suddenly the atmosphere changes, and what else can a responsible adult like Ms. Yukino do but remind him of their difference in ages, roles and power dynamics? She’s a teacher, he’s a pupil — and besides, she’s already decided to move away and that this is a goodbye. Understandably shaken, Takao leaves, with a desperately conflicted Ms Yukino trembling with anxiety and regret.
Set to the evocative theme song “Rain” sung by Motohiro Hata (evoking similar emotions to the identical musical montage at the end of 5cm), Ms Yukino runs after Takao to find he’s only gone as far as the stairs on the floor beneath, and finally he’s able to call her out on the inequalities in their relationship. He tearfully confesses that in a way he hates her, for always asking questions but never volunteering anything about herself, for withholding her identity while knowing full well he was a pupil at her school. In turn she admits that she had been unable to walk forwards but he “saved” her.
The climactic embrace where she breaks down in his arms is both cathartic and beautiful, and also thankfully restrained. There is no more physical aspect to this relationship than between friends who have emotionally bonded over difficult times. Yes, it’s very clear they love one another despite the age difference, but it’s also very clear that they both realise that relationship can never progress further than it has done.
In this case, I am completely fine with the two central characters not getting together. Both are at transitional points in their lives where they need to learn, or re-learn who they are, to make decisions, to work hard, and to grow up. That they keep in touch with letters afterwards is a nice touch, and Takao uses their relationship to make a realistic goal for himself — to make her a pair of shoes that she can confidently walk forwards in, though the ending remains ambiguous as to whether he will ever be able to give them to her.
Shinkai is particularly adept at evoking the emotions associated with intense adolescent love, especially when there is some kind of barrier to its progression. In Voices, the barrier was increasing distance in both time and space, in Place Promised it was illness and parallel universes, in 5cm it was again time and space (but in more grounded fashion than in Voices), while in Lost Voices it was the ultimate barrier, death. This time the barrier is the obvious age gap, and the rules made by both the individual characters (somewhat arbitrarily) and society (less arbitrarily). One wonders how many more variations on this theme Shinkai can come up with. (At least three more, considering the themes of his next three films.)
Age-gap romances always carry the risk of squickiness, and thankfully this is probably the least squicky of every one I’ve seen. Both characters are remarkably rounded for the limited time we spend with them, and the audience is fully aware of what each of them mean to each other — an escape, a validation, a companion who sees them for the person they are, without judgement. Such values can transcend mere age gaps, though of course when relationships with such marked power imbalances become romantic, the potential for abuse is high. I don’t think either Takao or Ms. Yukino are harmed by their intense yet chaste friendship — conversely, Takao finds confidence and drive to fulfil his dreams, while Ms Yukino finds the resolution to finally move forwards. Any criticism of the inappropriateness of their relationship rather misses the point, in my opinion.
It’s a special movie that elevates that most dreary and unpleasant of weather — the purgatorial downpour of the Japanese rainy season. I can definitely empathise, I live in Scotland, where the word “damp” is not just a descriptor, it’s a way of life, a state of perpetual being. Rain sucks. Yet Shinkai makes it an almost magical thing, through the sound of water coruscating across roofs and walkways, the intricately animated splashes of every drop, the way the characters are relected in the sodden wooden floor-gratings as they walk by.
His repeated motifs of tree branches dangling lightly in lake water, of the relentlessness of the commuter trains as they pass back and forth unceasingly, the multitudes of tiny birds, murmurating through the watercolour skies, all come together to make a truly beautiful production, where every still looks like a classical painting. Every frame is packed with such intensely-observed detail, with hidden emotional meaning, that a second watch is very much recommended if only to appreciate Shinkai’s sheer mastery of visual scene-setting, of the evocation of a nostalgic sense of time and place.
The Garden of Words marks Shinkai’s first commercial work without his compser friend Tenmon. Instead the gently understated score is provided by Daisuke Kashiwa, which does much to aid the gorgeous visuals’ conjuration of melancholy yet hopeful tone. This would be the last time (so far) that Shinkai would rely on a single composer — his follow-up movies all feature music by Japanese group Radwimps.
As with previous articles in this retrospective, I also read the accompanying printed material. First — the manga, published in English by Vertical almost nine years ago — remains in print. The art is by Midori Motohashi, who I can’t see has produced any other manga of note. It’s a perfectly serviceable adaptation with unremarkable, functional artwork that retells the anime’s story with little in the way of extra frills, other than a sweet little epilogue that is contradicted by the more authoritative novel. Shinkai himself was not involved with the production of the manga. At only a single volume, it’s a quick read, though is hardly essential if you’ve seen the film.
What makes the novel authoritative? Well it was written by Makoto Shinkai himself, in the months following the release of the movie as he toured, promoting it at film festivals. He writes in the afterword that he scribbled chapters in hotels across the world (including in Scotland, presumably after attending the Scotland Loves Anime film festival for the European premiere in October 2013!) Originally published in monthly instalments as a “serial novel” (shades of Charles Dickens there…), it was collected, translated and published in English by Yen Press in 2020, as a very nice hardback.
Of all the novelisations of Shinkai’s works I’ve read, this is so far the most expanded. Everything that happens in the film also happens in the book, but it forms the backdrop to a more complex, interlinked story featuring multiple narrators, not merely the central two characters. Even characters who only briefly feature in the movie get entire chapters to themselves, and their viewpoints really flesh out the plot, adding a lot of meat that had the whole thing been a movie, it would probably have been over two hours long (by Shinkai’s own estimation.)
We get a chapter each from Takao’s mother, his brother, his homeroom teacher (Ms Yukino’s ex) and even the girl who spread rumours about Ms Yukino. You would think that such diversions would only detract from the purity of the central relationship, but instead they add wonderful colour and context to the world, really bringing home Takao’s loneliness due to his family dynamics, and fully exploring Ms. Yukino’s troubled character and emotional suffering. It’s an absolutely fantastic novel that I devoured in one sitting straight after watching the film.
Most importantly of all, we get a lot of detail about what happens to the characters following the (perhaps too swift) conclusion of the film, and it’s wonderful, hopeful, and positive. If you are at all a fan of Shinkai, or this film, you owe it to yourself to track down the author’s own expanded take on his already beautiful and emotionally rewarding The Garden of Words. It’s very worthwhile.
Thanks very much for reading to the end of this installment of my Makoto Shinkai retrospective. If I can, I’ll try and squeeze in a detailed take on Your Name before I go to see (and then review) his latest film Suzume this coming weekend.
The Garden of Words
Written and directed by: Makoto Shinkai
Produced by: Noritaka Kawaguchi
Music by: Daisuke Kashiwa
Studio: CoMix Wave Films
Japanese cinematic release: 31st May 2013
UK blu-ray/DVD release: 10th Feb 2014 (Anime Limited)
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English audio
Runtime: 46 minutes
BBFC rating: 12
The Garden of Words (manga)
Written by: Makoto Shinkai
Art by: Midori Motohashi
Japanese publisher: Kodansha
Serialised in: Monthly Afternoon (April — October 2013)
US publisher: Vertical (30th Oct 2014)
Page count: 220
Translated by: Maya Rosewood
ISBN: 978–1–939130–83–9
The Garden of Words (serial novel)
Written by: Makoto Shinkai
Japanese publisher: Kadokawa Shoten
Serialised in: Da Vinci (Sept 2013 — April 2014)
US Publisher: Yen Press (1st Sept 2020)
Page count: 264
Translated by: Taylor Engel
ISBN: 978–1–9753–1567–2
