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ABSTRACT
This essay argues that by deploying the mind-game tropes of body swap and time travel, the Japanese animated film Your Name poses questions of time, memory, and mediation that must be considered in light of the 2011 national disaster. To take up these questions, I juxtapose three lines of interrogation that situate the film at varying timescales. The first analyzes the film’s use of myth to construct a unified timeline that ensures the continuation of national history. This national time, however, is warped into a cosmic scheme. Expounding on the trope of musubi or weaving, the second, mind-game inquiry thus philosophizes time beyond the national framework to better account for the protagonists’ task of historical rescue through radical experiments with fate and contingency. Inspired by the film’s portrayal of skies and clouds, the final inquiry foregrounds the naturalized environment of new media technologies that engages time and memory beyond and beneath the human perceptual frame. To conclude, I provide some critical notes that ask how an ecologically attuned mind-game paradigm anticipates alternative modes of social imagination.
Acknowledgements
This essay benefits from conversations with Alex Zahlten and Susan Napier, whose knowledge of Japanese cinema and culture proved invaluable in the final stages of revision. The two anonymous readers offered me the most insightful advice I could ask for, and discussions with Lilian Tsay strengthened my grasp of the topic. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Thomas Elsaesser, under whose guidance I embarked on the project. It is hoped that the result presented here embodies his teaching and intellectual inspiration more than it citationally displays them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ozu’s passing, Yamada Yōji remade Tokyo Story into Tōkyō Kazoku (Tokyo Family, 2013), set partially in the affected region of the nuclear disaster. Released in 2016, Shin Gojila (Shin Godzilla, Anno Hideaki and Higuchi Shinji) rehearses the trope of the nuclear catastrophe, though instead of the nuclear bomb it features radioactive contamination.
2. That is, surpassed only by Miyazaki Hayao’s Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001) and Kimetsu no Yaiba: Mugen Ressha-hen (Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, Sotozaki Haruo, 2020).
3. As will become clear, I refrain from categorizing Your Name in terms of these alternative terms as I think the film falls best under the umbrella concept of the mind-game film. I don’t see Your Name, for example, as fitting well with “loop narrative” or “network narrative”. On the one hand, loop narrative often assumes the form of anime television series fit for episodically repeated time loops, which might be too “Japanese” for Your Name’s feature-length treatment of a more generic theme (notable examples of loop narratives include Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu [The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ishihara Tatsuya, 2006] and Yojōhan Shinwa Taikei [The Tatami Galaxy, Yuasa Massaki, 2004]). On the other hand, network narrative is too Hollywood with its transnational and multi-sited scope as well as its international crew and financing (e.g. Babel [Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006], Burn after Reading [Coen brothers, 2007]). Your Name, as this essay maintains, is more elusive in both theme and style as it inherits Japan’s screen legacies but also makes significant departures from it. Similarly, although it has an unmistakably Hollywood flair not so salient in Shinkai’s previous works, its narrative relies on Japan-specific tropes and remains geographically bound in Japan proper.
4. For more case studies of mind-game storytelling in contemporary Hollywood and East Asian cinema, see Buckland (Citation2009).
5. As I revise this essay in the unprecedented times of COVID-19’s global transmission, when cities are locked down and businesses and classes alike have moved online, I received the latest issue of my university’s daily gazette, where the headline simply reads, “Our New Normal”.
6. A theme that consistently appears in Elsaesser’s work on Hollywood blockbusters and European arthouse films, the groundlessness of being is defined by him as “a situation where the conditions of possibility, or more prosaically, the rules of the game, have to be established in the absence of ontological certitude or transcendental validation” (Citation2009a, 55).
7. For a study of the making of a radiation monitoring map as civic engagement in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, see Morita, Blok, and Kimura (Citation2013).
8. Based on her several volunteer trips following the March 11 disaster, Allison provides a first-hand account of radioactive contamination in Fukushima. See Chapter Seven of Allison (Citation2013). For an analysis of the affective makeup underlying the socioeconomic sense of precarity in the work of Shinkai Makoto, see Grajdian (Citation2015).
9. To illustrate this point, Bordwell (Citation2008) draws on such examples as Przypadek (Blind Chance, Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1987), Yige zitou de dansheng (Too Many Ways to Be No.1, Wai Ka Fai, 1997) and Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998). For a critical response to Bordwell’s essay, see Young (Citation2002).
10. This tripartite structure was first discussed by avant-garde playwright Betsuyaku Minoru in his 1986 essay “Chūkei no sōshitsu” (“The Loss of the Middle Ground”). Azuma Hiroki famously came up with a Lacanian reading, aligning the foreground, middle ground, and background respectively with the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. See Motoko Tanaka’s discussion (Citation2014, 54). For a collection of excellent essays on sekai-kei, see Shakai wa sonzai shinai (Citation2009), especially Kasai Kiyoshi’s chapter on sekai-kei and the state of exception. See also Paul Roquet’s essay (Citation2014), which traces the sekai-kei motif to Japanese anime work of the 1980s.
11. See also Walker’s (Citation2009) discussion of the sekai-kei narrative and the politics of colonial time in Shinkai’s Kumo no Mukō, Yakusoku no Basho (The Place Promised in Our Early Days, 2004). Jonathan (Citation2011) discusses how Samā Wōzu (Summer Wars, Mamoru Hosoda, 2009), a pre-March 11 animation film featuring nuclear catastrophe, a female teenage rescuer, and gamification of reality, complicates the sekai-kei narrative by introducing other social types such as the nampa (womanizer or playboy) and the hikikomori (antisocial recluses).
12. Steinberg (Citation2012) theorizes the peculiar construction of parallel universes in Tatami Galaxy via Leibniz’s philosophy of the monad, which introduces notions of the “compossible” and “incompossible” worlds.
13. Ōbayashi’s I Are You, You Am Me was based on the novel by renowned children’s literature author Yamanaka Hisashi, titled Ore ga aitsu de aitsu ga ore de (I Are You, You Am Me) and serialized between 1979 and 1980. Ōbayashi would go on to direct a sequel in 2007 – Tenkōsei: Sayonara Anata (Switching: Goodbye Me) – in which he once again reverses the two protagonists’ genders. Both The Little Girl Who Conquered Time and I Are You, You Am Me were produced by Kadokawa’s Film Office, then helmed by legendary founder and magnate Kadokawa Haruki. For a discussion of the temporal politics of early-1980s Kadokawa films, see Chapter Four of Zahlten (Citation2017).
14. I’m thinking here of the cross-dressing and sex scenes in Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999). Other Hollywood body-swap classics include Freaky Friday (Mark Waters, 2003) and All of Me (Carl Reiner, 1984). More recently in Japan, body swap is seen employed in the yakuza comedy-drama Back Street Girls (Bakku Sutorīto Gāruzu), first appearing as manga series (2015–18), then as anime television series (2018) and live-action feature film (2019).
15. To cite just one instance from Kampmark’s (Citation2016) article: “Shunichi Yamashita, a proclaimed expert on the effects of radioactivity, was invited by the Fukushima prefecture in the aftermath of the meltdown to reassure rather than investigate. ‘The effects of radiation’, he claimed, ‘do not come to people who are happy and laughing, they come to people who are weak-minded’”.
16. While Segawa (Citation2012) argues that amnesia took place when the disaster retreated altogether from media coverage a year after its occurrence, Jacobs (Citation2016) and Kampmark (Citation2016), subscribing to the notion that mass media construct and frame reality, point out that even the disaster’s continuous presence on media can equally lead to a state of forgetfulness.
17. Japanese philosopher and literary critic Karatani Kōjin touches on this aspect in his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature: “The Japanese emperor system itself has roots in a matrilineal system. The dominance of the Fujiwara clan during the Heian period hinged on the position of the emperor’s matrilineal grandfather. It should be noted that, unlike the Chinese emperor, in whose person all authority was concentrated, the Japanese emperor always existed as a ‘symbol’ or null sign” (Karatani Citation1993, 169–70).
18. Further connection can be drawn between the film’s central trope of Musubi and the March 11 catastrophe. This is evidenced, for instance, in the character han 絆 (bonds), which was chosen as the character of the year in 2011. The character denotes the entanglement of interpersonal relations and contains the radical 糸 that signifies thread and textural intricacy.
19. For a lucid discussion of Nietzsche’s thought experiment, see Anderson (Citation2009).
20. See Jollimore (Citation2009) for an illuminating discussion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind through Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return.
21. This individuation, Deleuze notes, operates through a self-willed selective mechanism that casts aside the negative and the reactionary. As his famous analogy goes, “If eternal return is a wheel, then it must be endowed with a violent centrifugal movement which expels […] everything which cannot pass the test” (Citation1994, 55). Here, one might want to ask: What is the relation between the repetition of difference and cinema? Giorgio Agamben, in one of his rare discussions of cinema, helps elucidate this point: “What returns returns as possible. Hence the proximity of repetition to memory: a memory is the return of what was, qua possible. Repetition, for its part, is the memory of that which was not. This is also a definition of the cinema: the memory of that which was not” (Citation2014, 26).
22. For an analysis of the narrative strategy in Sliding Doors, see Bordwell (Citation2008).
23. I borrow this term from the title of Huyssen’s (Citation1995) monograph Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia.
24. See online news page at https://www.animatetimes.com/news/details.php?id=1501043635.
25. For an account of time travel films and algorithmic computation embraced by China’s net-born generation, see Liu (Citation2016).
26. Besides animation films, one cannot underestimate film camera’s commitment to the recording of real-time meteorological changes. One recent example is found in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), in which the characters visit Sils Maria in the Alps for its renowned meteorological phenomenon, the Maloja Snake. Attesting to cinema’s perennial fascination with the clouds, Assayas’ film includes extracts from Arnold Fanck’s 1924 documentary Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja (The Cloud Phenomenon of Maloja). Propitiously echoing an earlier point in the essay, Sils Maria is also said to be the place where the concept of eternal occurrence first occurred to Nietzsche.
27. For related concepts of medium as spatially extended field of sensorium, see Antonio Somaini’s recent discussions of Walter Benjamin and J.M.W. Turner (Citation2016, Citation2019).
28. For an in-depth discussion of why so-called post-cinematic filmmaking shows great interest in the apocalypse and species extinction, see Chapter Six of Denson (Citation2020).
29. See Fenlon (Citation2012) for an early interview with Shinkai, in which he addresses the relation between Japan’s digital generation of animated filmmakers, of which Shinkai is a vanguard member, and the Ghibli cel tradition of the 1980s and 1990s. See also the interview (ColorEdge Monitors Citation2019) with the color designer and cinematographer of Shinkai’s latest work Weathering with You. Though coming across as a publicity piece for the ColorEdge monitor, the interview offers some insights into the use of digital coloring technologies during the film’s production.
30. To provide an example of what he means by strange loop, Morton resorts to the narrative convention of film noir, in which the detective often finds himself structurally implicated as a criminal. Elsewhere Jennifer Fay has studied film noir as the exemplary genre of the Anthropocene, where “noir’s characters are Hollywood’s most ecological figures not despite but because they inhabit and are conditioned by the most unnatural of human-made worlds. They subsist in explicitly artificial environments that imprint them negatively on all ecological levels” (Fay Citation2018, 99). In his Dark Ecology, Morton also plays upon the word “weird”, which originates from the Norse urth and whose rich meanings range from winding, twisting, and looping to the spinning of the spool of fate (Morton Citation2016, 5–6). Here one naturally thinks of the musubi trope I have discussed in relation to Your Name.
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Tim Shao-Hung Teng
Tim Shao-Hung Teng is a doctoral candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is currently at work writing a dissertation that documents a history of Chinese film and media from the perspective of geological elements including salt, oil, and coal. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming with positions: asia critique, Screen, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and Taiwan Insight.