Sakura No Aware
SPOILER ALERT: Plot details for Five Centimeters Per Second and Voices of a Distant Star follow.
“Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, at the moon only when it is cloudless?”
- Yoshida Kenou, Essays In Idleness
“Real encounters carry with them the possibility of rejection, of humiliation, of being deceived, exploited, of being impotent. They are adventures. Sex is a bloodsport.”
Nothing lasts in our lives, not even the universe. Some moments or feelings we would like to crystallize and keep eternal. I think now of what Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the Moon, said of his time there, “It’s like you would want to freeze that moment and take it home with you. But you can’t.” Yet it is the fleeting nature of life that affords it value. What would we care for something that can never be lost? It is in this context that we can appreciate the love that many Japanese people have for the cherry blossoms, or sakura. To them, the pink blossoms that float away with the spring breeze almost as soon as they bloom best represent the quality of mono no aware. The term has a range of meanings, and is difficult to translate into a singular phrase, but it usually relates in one way or another to the sentiment or contemplation of change, particularly transient change.
The Japan Times noted that in the Heian Period (794 AD — 1185 AD) implied “the transience of carnal and material life,” while during the Edo Period (1615 AD–1868 AD), Neo-Confucian scholar Mootori Norinaga reinterpreted the phrase to mean, “sensitive, exquisite feelings experienced when encountering the subtle workings of human life or the changing seasons.” The concept is to be found all over Japanese art, The Times pointed to “Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer” one of the sixfold screens of Kano Eino, while The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pointed to Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring and Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji. Great works, all of them, but for today, I will point to Makoto Shinkai’s Five Centimeters Per Second, which stands alongside Garden of Words and Your Name as one of his finest ventures into Japanese animation. It opens with one of the characters noting that a cherry blossom petal falls away from its tree at five centimeters per second, and just as that blossom falls, so too does love.
Fragile Love: 桜花抄
Why do you suppose people get legally married? I mean, aside from the obvious tax benefits. From a purely romantic perspective, it makes little sense. If two people really love each other, then why the need to put a government stamp on it. Why do you need to offer an overpriced ring to show the depth of your affection? It is because of an unspoken truth, that love, for all its pronouncements, is terribly fragile. Any number of occurrences could sour a relationship. Many of which are out of our control. Lovers may move away for different schools or different jobs. We are nomadic creatures and difficult to tie down. Some occurrences, however, are well within our control. The human heart is not an organ of steel, but as malleable as liquid. It is as weak as it is powerful. Our hearts are just as swayed by the tempests as the grasses by the seashore. Feelings between lovers are no less subject to change than they. Sometimes, after getting to know someone, after living with them a while, you realize that your affection is not quite what you thought it to be. It is due to these variances that people try to trap their feelings, stay them from movement. So we place these artificial symbols on our love, in the hope that by making it “official”, we may keep it alive, just as it was, eternally. This illusion is often shattered through divorce, but humans being creatures of habit, we often recede into legal marriage once more.
The first segment of Five Centimeters Per Second is not about marriage, but youthful love. The first crush in elementary school, or the first arousal in middle school. Our two lovers are Takaki and Akari, who quickly find common interests. Amor vincit omnia (“love conquers all”) is a phrase commonly recited but little is it tested. Early on, the film establishes distance, no matter how close Takaki and Akari try to get, something or another always gets in the way. In the very first scene, when they are children, they are running through the streets when a speeding train comes inbetween them. Takaki perhaps, takes it for granted that Akari is on the other side, waiting to rejoin him. Then she moves away, with letters and telephones being their only means of communication. Shinkai was clever to set this segment up before cellphones became commonplace. Both letters and telephones are restrictive tools. As letters take time, often days, to reach, while telephones can only be used in certain places. This denies them immediate gratification. Further, Takaki’s train is delayed by snow, throwing doubt into whether or not she’d wait for him. Even though she is there, their reunion hardly devolves into grand romantic cliche. They speak spontaneously, and neither gives the letter with all the words they had intended to say. Takaki is made a little awkward by her kiss. Its brief. For all that they went, that moment seems so small a reward, but even the little moments count, indeed, he feels the very weight of the universe. Things didn’t occur the way they were supposed to, but then that just might be the point.
Much of the groundwork for this segment, I imagine, was built by one of Shinkai’s earlier works, Voices of a Distant Star, in which the two friends are separated by the vastness of space. The girl is drafted into the far reaches of the galaxy to fight a war, while the boy remains on Earth awaiting her texts. Space travel adds a unique aspect to the separation, as the further she goes away from the Sun, the longer it’ll take for her texts to reach. Also, due to time dilation, he ages while she stays the same age. It’s a good film, but Shinkai clearly wants to do something more relatable here. Five Centimeters Per Second is the inverse of Voices of a Distant Star. It takes the premise of the earlier film and makes it absurd. Instead of separation as a result of galactic warfare, separation is now the result of circumstance.
Unrequited Love: コスモナウト
The next segment is about unrequited love, a feeling that we’ve all felt and have had felt about us. The earlier segment portrayed physical distance, but this one portrays emotional distance. Set from the viewpoint of Kanae, who makes Takaki, now a new student at her high school, the object of affection. She’s never far from him at school, and even gets to say the occasional word, but he hardly notices her. It’s a contradiction. These are two people who are close by any literal definition, and yet, by any honest definition, they might as well be miles apart.
Takaki also suffers from unrequited love, but in a different way. Now that cellphones have come about, he spends his free time typing texts to Akari, but of course, he doesn’t know her number. In Voices of a Distant Star, the texts took years to reach, but they still reached. Takaki’s texts will never reach, nor will he get a reply, but still he sends them. One of the finer scenes in this segment is when Kanae rises with the determination to confess her love to Akari. It all seems to so right when she goes out to surf that day, but when at last confronted by him, she chokes. Just as Takaki’s meeting with Akari didn’t go as he wished, so too doesn’t Kanae’s planned confession. Love isn’t something to be controlled or maneuvered. It moves of its own accord.
What ultimately convinces Kanae not to reveal her feelings in the sight of satellite rocketed into space. This is the distance between her and Takaki. She is much like Distant Star’s forlorn pilot, whose vessel only goes farther and farther from Earth. We need not be so literal here to realize that she’s a cosmonaut. It when she sees this that she sees the futility of returned love. Accepting this fact won’t make her feel better, indeed, it’ll haunt her all her life. Takaki, too, is a cosmonaut, hurtling towards the darkest reaches of the galaxy, in the hope that he’ll find the secrets of universe, what he tasted in that kiss. Yet what if, at the end of his journey, he finds nothing but the occasional hydrogen atom?
Love Sickness: 秒速5センチメートル
In the final segment, and the shortest, we see Takaki now as an adult, still unable to get over his feelings for Akari. He drinks and his obsession keeps him out of work. People who don’t understand how a grown man can still ache for his childhood sweetheart don’t understand love. To Akari, however, now happily married, he is a distant, if not pleasant, memory. We are offered a montage of all the events thus far, an emotional weaving together of these disparate stories into a single theme: one more time, one more chance.
Takaki and Akari run into each other, but are split by a train. Were this one of those cliched romance films, Takaki would’ve chased after her, and Akari would’ve left her husband for him. Shinkai has the sincerity to be more honest than those pictures. This ending is leagues above any emotional highs in Breakfast At Tiffany’s or An Affair To Remember. It leaves us not with a fantasy, but a reminder of our own failures. Yet when the trains passed, and Takaki saw that she was no longer there, he accepted it. So should we. Why don’t know exactly why he does this, but then, maybe we don’t have to.
Five Centimeters Per Second has no gruesome violence, graphic sex, or obscene language, but it’s a film more for adults than it is for children. It’s a film that requires you bring your own experiences with love to the table, experiences that only grow with age. Germaine Greer has called sex “a bloodsport.” Love, too, is a bloodsport. No one comes out unscathed. Yet there is a unstated beauty in that loss, a loss that proves our hearts still function. A loss that makes us human.
“The Next Miyazaki?”
Shinkai is often called “the New Miyazaki” by film critics and commentators. This is a lazy comparison that examines only the fact that both are successful anime movie directors. Indeed, the prospective role of “The Next Miyazaki” has been used to describe Hideaki Anno and Mamoru Hosoda, even though both of these people tell very different stories from Miyazaki. That laziness even extends to comparisons between Miyazaki and Disney, even though Disney is more comparable to anime’s godfather, Osamu Tezuka. If there is a spiritual successor to Miyazaki out there, the title should probably be shared by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Di Martino.
The reason I am so adamant on this point, is because while Miyazaki and Shinkai are similar insofar that they can portray Japan’s beauty, they perceive it in different ways. Miyazaki’s films carry an air of nostalgia for a more traditional Japan, with Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away, all drawing their creative energies from Shinto spiritualism and pre-Meiji Japan. He has little interest in modern Japan, as he seems to consider our advances in technology to be an abomination to both nature and creativity. If you think I’m exaggerating here, consider that he once said this: “Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.” As such, his films share a degree of distance from some areas of modern life. I’m not saying that Miyazaki’s films aren’t relatable, far from it, but we also need stories that deal with cell phones, computers, and sex. That is the space between Miyazaki and Shinkai.
If there is a better comparison to Shinkai, it’s with the novelist Haruki Murakami. His stories often deal with failed love and quirky circumstances, not unlike those in Shinkai films. Shinkai himself has admitted to Murakami as an influence, and it shows. Out of all of Murakami’s writings, Five Centimeters Per Second is most easily compared to “On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” in The Elephant Vanishes collection. The short story is about a boy who sees a girl that he thinks is 100% perfect. He imagines telling this girl a story where a boy and a girl who are supposedly meant for each other meet, and decide to test their love by parting, and, if they be truly soulmates, meet each other again and marry. Years pass, and the two do meet again, but it’s been far too long for them to make any good of it, as Murakami writes,
“They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in the chest. And they knew:
‘She is the 100% perfect girl for me.
‘He is the 100% perfect boy for me.
‘But the glow of their memories far was too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fourteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever,” (72).
In his own way, Shinkai may have wanted to expand on this little story through Five Centimeters Per Second. He must’ve said to himself, we’ve all seen that “perfect girl” or “perfect boy”, but why? What made one “perfect”? What made these memories so lovely that they “glimmered for the briefest moment”? Why did those memories fade? What if one held to their memories and refused to let go? How does one let go? Can one even let go? This is all speculation, of course, but I can’t but think that Shinkai read this story and said, “It’s all a delusion. There is no ‘perfect boy’ or ‘perfect girl’. There never was. There doesn’t have to be.”
Shinkai’s Your Name has quickly become one of Japan’s most popular films, and that’s not just because of the animation. To say that Shinkai’s popularity lies only in his animation would be akin to saying Murakami’s popularity lies only in his writing style. The two are popular because they tap into a generational reality that resonates with the modern Japanese people. When you see Japan in Shinkai’s films, you see Japan as it is, not as one wishes it to be. His films are masterful in “wabi-sabi”, or the aesthetics of imperfection, as Utne Reader described it, “It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.”
In Shinkai, You see the turnstiles of the railways, the bustle of the city, and the cat on the sidewalk. He validates these. He sets them against the splendor of purple skies and star clusters. He captures the bright interior of each lonely train and the glow of every convenience store. He says our modern world is okay, and there’s beauty enough in the flaws if we’re willing to see them. Modern society isn’t perfect, and neither is love, but there is beauty in each missed kiss, beauty at every railroad crossing, just as the cherry blossoms fall.
Bibliography
Murakami, Haruki. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. The Elephant Vanishes. Vintage Books: New York. 1993. 72. Print.
Originally published at http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com on June 12, 2017.
