Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema: Framing Sacred Spaces [1 ed.] 9780429276057, 9780367226282, 9781032361833

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Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema

This book explores significant representations of Shinto and Buddhist sacred space, spiritual symbols, and religious concepts that are embedded in the secular framework of Japanese films aimed at general audiences in Japan and globally. These cinematic masterpieces by directors Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Makoto Shinkai operate as expressions of and, potentially, catalysts for transcendence of various kinds, particularly during the Heisei era (1989–2019), when Japan experienced severe economic hardship and devastating natural disasters. The book’s approach to aesthetics and religion employs the multifaceted concepts of ma (structuring intervals, liminal space-time), kū (emptiness, sky), mono no aware (compassionate sensibility, resigned sadness), and musubi (generative interconnection), examining the dynamic, evolving nature of these ancient principles that are at once spiritual, aesthetic, and philosophical. Scholars and enthusiasts of Japanese cinema (live action and anime), religion and film, cinematic aesthetics, and the relationship between East Asian religions and the arts will find fresh perspectives on these in this book, which moves beyond conventional notions of transcendental style and essentialized approaches to the multivalent richness of Japanese aesthetics. Melissa Croteau is Professor of Film Studies and Literature and Director of the Film Program at California Baptist University, United States.

Routledge Studies in Religion and Film Series editors: Robert K. Johnston and Jolyon Mitchell

Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick Edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston Noah as Antihero Darren Aronofsky’s Cinematic Deluge Edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch and Jon Morgan Transcendence and Spirituality in Chinese Cinema A Theological Exploration Kris H.K. Chong New Approaches to Islam in Film Edited by Kristian Petersen Lars von Trier’s Cinema Excess, Evil, and the Prophetic Voice Rebecca Ver Straten-McSparran Film and Redemption From Brokenness to Wholeness David Rankin The Dardenne Brothers’ Cinematic Parables Integrating Theology, Philosophy, and Film Joel Mayward Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema Framing Sacred Spaces Melissa Croteau For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/religion/ series/RSIRAF

Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema Framing Sacred Spaces Melissa Croteau

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Melissa Croteau The right of Melissa Croteau to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367226282 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032361833 (pbk) ISBN: 9780429276057 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my mother, Diane, who always cared deeply about people and places around the globe. Her thirst for knowledge was insatiable. She loved to write, to teach, to speak other tongues, and to make music and passed those passions on to me. Her brilliant mind and compassionate, free spirit have led me down paths I never could have imagined. In every way, this book is a result of her capacious, generous love.

Contents

List of Figures A Note on Japanese Name Order Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Transcendent Japan: Japanese Cinema, Sacred Space, and Gateways to Transcendence

viii x xi

1

2 Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away: Pilgrimage as Homecoming and Seeing Anew

62

3 Makoto Shinkai’s your name: Celestial Destiny and Transcendent Love in the Space-Time of Disaster

95

4 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran: Downward Transcendence and Nō Boundaries in a Wicked World

134

5 Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life and I Wish: Creating Space for Everyday Transcendence

171

Concluding Science-Fiction Postscript: Cinema as 間

237

Index

242

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2

3.3 3.4 3.5

3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2

Torii gates at Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, Japan. Chihiro is frightened by Jizō before following her parents into the tunnel in Spirited Away. Yubaba, the intimidating bathhouse manager, is a powerful and complex yamauba figure in Spirited Away. Chihiro, No Face, the mouse (baby Bō), and the fly on the Seaplain Electric Train in Spirited Away. A kū shot of the train bisecting the frame, marking the edge between sky and water, during twilight in Spirited Away. During the opening sequence in your name. (dir. Makoto Shinkai 2016), Taki watches the comet and meteor streaking across the sky from atop his building in Tokyo. Marking the end of your name.’s opening sequence, Mitsuha (right corner) gazes upward at the beautiful spectacle of the comet streaking across the night sky with the meteor having broken off, headed straight for her town of Itomori. Sacred trees with shimenawa framing Mitsuha, who is carrying her grandmother, and her little sister, dwarfed by the natural world in your name. The “god’s body” in the center of the crater with Grandma in your name. Taki (possessed by Mitsuha) on the crater’s edge seeking Mitsuha (possessed by Taki), his body smearing as he slips through time, with the double lake of 2016 below him in your name. Mitsuha inhabited by Taki calling out for Mitsuha in Taki’s body with the single lake of 2013 below in your name. Taki and Mitsuha finally meet in their own bodies, across time, during twilight at the crater’s edge in your name. The sacred space demarcated in the opening of Throne of Blood. In Throne of Blood, Samurai Washizu (Toshirō Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki) face the Yamauba (Chieko Naniwa) in her spindly hut in Spider’s Web Forest.

17 71 78 85 86 100

100 113 114

118 118 119 144 149

Figures 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

5.6 5.7

In Ran (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1985), the great warrior Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) survives the battle and conflagration at Third Castle and departs in madness. Hidetora grieves over his dead son Saburo (Daisuke Ryū) on the volcanic plain, with the fool Kyoami (Peter) and loyal samurai Tango (Masayuki Yui) looking on in horror in Ran. The blind Tsurumaru (Takeshi Nomura) stumbling on the edge of doom at the end of Ran. During Ran’s last moments, a close-up of the impotent Amida Buddha scroll dropped by Tsurumaru as he teeters on the precipice. In Madadayo (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1993), Kurosawa directly references the Hōjōki in this montage of Sensei (Tatsuo Matsumura) and his wife (Kyōko Kagawa) peacefully experiencing four seasons in their tiny hut, with ruins of a wall and fence in the foreground. The clients in After Life (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda 1998) enter the waystation as the bells toll on Monday morning. Mochizuki (Arata) takes a ma moment to appreciate the fake moon shining from above as Shiori (Erika Oda) makes fun of him in After Life. After Life’s clients in the waystation’s screening room, on Saturday, waiting for their memory-films to transport them into the next world. The final tableau of Mochizuki’s memory-film, a still shot of those he made films with in order to facilitate the transcendence of others in After Life. In I Wish (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda 2011), Kōichi (Kōki Maeda) anxiously contemplates the massive Sakurajima volcano spewing ash as his two friends mock him on their walk to school. At the beginning of the montage of Kōichi’s epiphany, his painting of Sakurajima erupts with red lava, ushering in quiet images of his everyday pleasures in I Wish. Kōichi, no longer intimidated by Sakurajima’s ash, assesses the way the wind is blowing and confirms it will be a good day in I Wish.

ix

153 154 155 161

165 192 203 205 209

214 226 229

A Note on Japanese Name Order

This book focuses on four prominent Japanese directors—Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, Akira Kurosawa, and Hirokazu Kore-eda—who are well known in Europe and North America, where their names most often appear in the Western style of personal name first followed by family name, as opposed to the East Asian practice of putting the family name first. For the sake of consistency and clarity, as this book is written in English and these directors are known predominantly in the Anglophone world by their names in the Western order, I have regularized the order of all Japanese and Chinese names in the book to personal name followed by family name.

Acknowledgments

There are many people to thank for their support over the years this book project has been germinating and in process. I am grateful for the encouragement I received as well as specific feedback in regard to the ideas and arguments along the way. Encounters with people who showed keen interest in the subjects discussed in this book inspired me in numerous significant ways, and there are too many individuals to list here, but I appreciate each conversation. Listening ears, words of encouragement, and constructive criticism provided needed stimuli to persist in the work. Colleagues and friends who have been fellow travelers with me on this journey, providing help and motivation, are Rebecca Ver StratenMcSparran, Kenya Davis-Hayes, Lisa Starks, Sophia Nicholson, Victoria Bladen, Alexa Alice Joubin, Kendra Leonard, Zahra Tavassoli Zea, Remedios Perni, Isabel Guerrero, Deborah Cartmell, Evelyn Gajowski, Laura Veltman, Xin Zhang, Katie Papineau, and Jen McLendon. I owe each of these brilliant women a debt of gratitude. I also must thank filmmaker Maxim Jago for granting me a long interview, in which he generously shared his perspectives on transcendence and cinema. Robert K. Johnston’s feedback and support, as well as his work on theology and film, have been invaluable as well. The global Shakespeare on film scholarly community deserves special mention, as it has supported my work on global cinema for many years, providing crucial feedback that has shaped me as a scholar and a person. The honing of the chapter on Kurosawa owes much to their input and encouragement. Some of those folks have been named already, but I also would like to thank Douglas Lanier, Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Amy Scott-Douglass, Courtney Lehmann, Maurizio Calbi, Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Michael Jensen, Stephen Buhler, and the late David Bevington. Over the past six years, the Shakespeare Association of America annual conferences and the two World Shakespeare Congresses during that time have provided opportunities that paved the way for this book’s delivery into the world. A deep gratitude is due to those who put those events together and who pivoted to make them happen during the pandemic. I have an indelible memory from one pre-pandemic SAA conference at which one of my seminar members told me that my work on downward transcendence in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood had moved her to tears. As close as our work as scholars is to our own hearts, it is always gratifying to hear that one’s work has touched others. The

xii

Acknowledgments

2021 World Shakespeare Congress fortuitously connected me to Yuko Sugiura, Associate Professor of English Literature at Konan University in Kobe, Japan, who very graciously provided commentary on the Kore-eda chapter and shared insight regarding recent history on the island of Kyushu, from which she hails. I was fortunate to be selected as a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute Fellow for the four-week seminar “Buddhist East Asia: The Interplay of Religion, the Arts, and Politics,” at the East-West Center, in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 2018. I am extremely grateful for the wealth of knowledge I gained during the institute from the renowned scholars who gave superb, extensive lectures, as well as from the exceptional academics who were my colleagues there. Thomas P. Kasulis, whose work on Shinto is central to this book, was one of the eminent speakers during that seminar. Fellow scholars James McRae, Robert H. Scott, Sarah Mattice, and Lara Mitias especially have impacted my approach to East Asian religions in ways that have greatly benefitted this project. I want to express my particular gratitude to Peter Hershock, Director of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center, who put this institute together and whose influential work on Chan/Zen Buddhism is at the kokoro (heart-mind) of the Buddhist perspectives in this study. Even (and especially) in our digital age, great librarians are essential resources. Keri Murcray at California Baptist University has been able to procure rare materials in libraries thousands of miles away that have made this book possible. Her encouragement as a friend and acumen as a librarian have been indispensable. Writing a book during a pandemic is challenging, but I had both university and public librarians come to my rescue. Marc Chery, Manager at the Central Branch of San Diego Public Library, went above and beyond by giving me access to encyclopedia resources that were sitting a few miles from where I live but had been inaccessible to the public for over a year. He made special arrangements for me to spend quality time alone in a room with crucial research, for which I am especially grateful. I must give thanks to the many students in the Film Program that I have been leading at California Baptist University for the past decade, who have participated in my interactive lectures on Japanese cinema and culture. They have asked probing questions, shared their favorite films and anime series, and displayed keen interest in the topic, all of which inspired me to persevere. Over the years, the San Diego Asian Film Festival, which is masterfully curated, has introduced me to many fantastic films, including some that were never distributed in US theaters. SDAFF has provided early access to new Japanese films every year and introduced me to cinema that has significantly shaped my understanding of East Asian visual arts. An earlier version of parts of Chapter 4 appeared as the chapter “Wicked Humans and Weeping Buddhas: (Post)Humanism and Hell in Kurosawa’s Ran,” in the volume Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear (2019), published by Cambridge University Press, and I thank them for granting permission to include this material here.

Acknowledgments xiii Finally, this book could not have existed without the love and support of my family, including those no longer with us. The book is dedicated to my mother, Diane Sutton, who brought the world to our dinner table every night with her voracious reading and love of arts from every part of the globe. Without her love, inspiration, and intelligence, this book would not be. She transcended this world a few months before this book went to press, but her presence is on every page. My late grandmother, Betty Sutton, was deeply curious about and consumed myriad books on spirituality and philosophy. It was probably she who planted the seed that became my passion for East and Southeast Asian religion and aesthetics. She did not finish high school but worked as a secretary in educational settings most of her life, including Stanford University. She was over the moon when I pursued a doctorate. My father, Joseph Croteau—who loved education and travel and whose incredible perseverance after a traumatic brain injury inspires me every day—was a font of encouragement throughout my graduate work. Though we lost him before this book was born, his support led to its existence. I also thank my stepmother, Barb, for her unending kindness and, during the writing of this book, for giving me the large box of slides containing my mother and father’s first trip to Japan. In my daily life, my sister, Kristi Townrow, has been my constant interlocutor about all aspects of this book; she has listened patiently to every idea and watched countless Japanese films with me. Her own love of Japan and Japanese culture has been energizing and spurred me on to adventures in my research and in Japan itself. During the pandemic, she was my “bubble” and kept me sane while I sheltered in place and finished this book. I am profoundly grateful to all of those named here, but it is my sister who helped me keep life and soul together over the last two years. Her love and support allowed the book in my kokoro to transcend its boundaries and flow into the space-time ma of the page.

1

Introduction Transcendent Japan: Japanese Cinema, Sacred Space, and Gateways to Transcendence

On March 11, 2011, Japan’s northern region of Tōhoku was struck by the cataclysmic, magnitude 9.0 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, triggering a devastating thirty-foot (9.3 meter) tsunami, which caused a meltdown at Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear power plant. Nearly twenty-thousand people lost their lives in what is now called the “3.11 triple disaster” (Tamaki 1). This was the most destructive natural disaster in Japan since the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. In 2013, two large beams with Japanese writing on them were found washed up on the Oregon coast, which began a two-year quest to find their provenance. Representatives of Portland’s Japanese Garden were able to identify these artifacts as crossbeams from torii gates, the famed Shinto thresholds, often painted red, marking an entrance to sacred space. However, over 4,000 Shinto shrines were damaged in the 3.11 disaster, and each had lost at least one torii gate (Ebara). Nevertheless, the Portlanders persisted, and, in 2015, the torii crossbeams were returned to their home, the small fishing village of Okuki in the upper Tōhoku prefecture of Aomori. These crossbeams were a part of torii that had stood for centuries in a shrine dedicated to the sea goddess, right on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The return of these torii beams was celebrated on both sides of the Pacific and was commemorated with a large public placard entitled “Miraculous Journey of the Torii Gate,” which tells a story of renewal and connection that continues to this day through the lasting relationships formed between the Japanese and Americans involved in the “miracle.” Particularly striking are the accounts from Okuki’s children, who wrote letters of thanks to the American group who returned the torii. These children observed, in 2015, that there was a shift toward happiness and hope when the sacred markers arrived back home, and, in 2021, these same children, now teenagers, noted that the torii’s return had ushered in a type of awakening that has shaped their daily lives as well as their futures (Ebara). A young man explained that this event had “made him aware of the preciousness of everything that surrounds him,” and one young woman was inspired to travel to the United States and now wants to study English and explore the connections between cultures, rare for a young Japanese from a rural area (Ebara). This true story demonstrates the power of symbols more generally, but, specifically, it communicates the great power of sacred space and its markers, which possess significance far surpassing their spiritual uses. Although determining which functions of sacred symbols can be considered “secular” can be difficult in any culture, it is especially so in Japan, DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057-1

2

Introduction

where sacred space abounds, ancient trees and rocks might be deities (kami), and the Shinto goddess of the rising sun, Amaterasu, is the progenitor of its people. Thus, arguably, every inch of the land of the kami is sacred, an idea that has been used for good and for ill purposes throughout Japan’s history. What is clear is that sacred space and the concepts attendant with it can bind humans together both intra- and internationally in such a way that inspires types of transcendence both spiritual and human. This book explores sacred space, symbols, and concepts embedded in the secular framework of Japanese films aimed at general audiences within the country and globally. These cinematic masterpieces by Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Makoto Shinkai operate as expressions of and, potentially, catalysts for transcendence of various kinds. This book is not an aesthetic treasure hunt for Japanese religious discourses, though these discourses are very rich, indeed, but rather an investigation of how religioaesthetic principles are used in these films to speak to their current moments and historical contexts in Japan and the world. Some excellent work has been done on this in regard to anime, as Shinto’s prolific world of kami and yokai (roughly, but not exactly, gods and monsters) and its belief that all things are alive with spiritual power are well suited to the fantastical explosion of creativity seen in Japanese animation.1 For live-action films, the work on religion and the transcendent in Japanese cinema, for the most part, has been rooted in the writing of a few American scholars, particularly Donald Richie, Paul Schrader, and David Desser. However, Keiko I. MacDonald and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto have offered different approaches from Japanese perspectives, and Yoshimoto has registered strong disagreement with Schrader et al. (Yoshimoto 12–16). This book takes all these views into account and models diverse ways religio-aesthetics and notions of transcendence can be applied to Japanese film, using the multidimensional Japanese concept of ma as a central touchstone. As Elizabeth Debold reminds us, “Religio, the root of the word religion, means to bind—to the Absolute, and also to each other, in a shared cultural understanding of who we are and why we are here” (56). The films explored in this book use religio-aesthetics to express and bring about this sort of binding, a sense of interconnectedness, which leads the denizens of these diegetic worlds to transcend a singular focus on and understanding of the self. Films made all over the world use visual and aural elements of sacred space and rituals from sundry traditions to communicate with audiences, so the model is not limited to Japan. However, Japan is the focus of this book because of its extraordinary history of religio-aesthetics, its influential cinema, and its tumultuous journey as a nation over the past century. Of course, the notion of “national cinema” can be problematic. National identity is never monolithic, and essentializing erases the always multivalent, intersecting, and ever-evolving identities at play in any country, especially in our globalized world. The films investigated in this book are not “uniquely Japanese”; each one bears the marks of Western and Eastern influences that always have been present in Japanese media. American and European arts, ideas, and media have inundated Japan since the Meiji period (1868–1912), following the nation’s re-opening to extensive trade and diplomacy with the West in the 1850s. The impact of American comics and Disney animation

Introduction 3 on manga and anime, for instance, is well known. Moreover, Japanese religion and arts have been impacted greatly by those of China and Korea for fifteen hundred years. Scholars also recognize Japan’s self-exoticization via particular genres, such as samurai films, to appeal to viewers both in Japan and overseas (cf. Dorman 211–12). Because this book focuses on films displaying aesthetic principles that are connected to religious and philosophical discourses, its analyses are centered primarily on Japanese cultural concepts, but more universal ideas, such as pilgrimage, and notions specific to other traditions, such as Germany’s Sehnsucht (deep yearning), are woven into these investigations, where there are illuminating interconnections of ideas and images. The surge of books in the subfield of religion and film over the past two decades evidences the growing interest in examining the ways in which film represents the numinous and the spiritual. However, the majority of these studies focus predominantly on story and theme and are most interested in how specific religious doctrine or theology is represented. In the United States and Europe, writing on religion and film has focused primarily on cinema from the “Western” world, whether Hollywood, indie, or art films. In our globalized environment, films from all over the world have a great deal to teach us about what connects and divides people both within and between nations. Many North Americans encountered this meaningfully after South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) became the first non-Anglophone film ever to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (formerly called Best Foreign Language Film) and for Best Picture. This compelled people who usually eschew subtitles to see this powerful film, and, surely, no one could deny the film’s force and message about poverty, wealth, and humanity in a globalized world. It is my hope that people in what is called the “West” will continue to seek out films from elsewhere, to look at the world through different lenses. It is notable that Japan’s anime industry, which uses dubbing instead of subtitles, has been an international juggernaut for over two decades, and, before that, it drew crowds of specific fans who were interested in manga, video games, and other types of Japanese popular culture. This book begins by looking at two of the highest-grossing Japanese films of all time, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) and Makoto Shinkai’s your name. (2016), both anime blockbusters inside and outside of Japan. These films are replete with overtly Shinto imagery and plot elements, which is not unusual for anime. Nonetheless, as proved by these films’ worldwide success, viewers do not need to have any knowledge of Japanese religions to enjoy these movies. This also applies to the films of Akira Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-eda, two globally renowned Japanese filmmakers, discussed in the fourth and fifth chapters of the book. These four filmmakers choose to use vivid depictions of sacred space and spiritual symbols to communicate messaging regarding transcendence, which indicates that there is a type of power in these aesthetic archetypes, at least for the filmmakers, and, potentially, for the viewers. Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema takes a holistic approach, examining the ways in which filmic elements— including cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound—powerfully and eloquently work in tandem with a film’s narrative and thematic concerns to communicate the supernatural and ineffable in order to inspire viewers to see beyond

4

Introduction

the phenomenal and glimpse their own world from a different, expanded perspective. The films examined here, through their distinct and multidimensional portrayals of transcendence, brilliantly render a range of ways in which encountering or experiencing a numinous force is complexly and inextricably intertwined with both spiritual and human transcendence. Cinema is an art that represents and orchestrates space and time. One could say that film viewing itself is transcendent, from a human perspective, in that it takes viewers into a different space-time, moving them into new worlds, be they paradisal, infernal, or quotidian. It is for this reason that the multifaceted Japanese concept of ma, basically meaning an interval or break in space-time, is exceptionally well suited to the study of cinema, and it is at the core of the aesthetic philosophies used in this study, as will be elaborated on later and demonstrated in the chapters that follow. The closest concept to ma that has been used in much previous work on religion and film is religious historian Mircea Eliade’s foundational concept of hierophany, meaning an experience of the sacred or numinous or “anything which manifests the sacred” (Patterns xviii). This book examines the varying ways that films instantiate a break, rupture, or bridge in space and time to depict thresholds between the known and unknown, liminal spaces in which characters, and by extension viewers, are invited to perceive what is beyond the phenomenal world and, thereby, are moved to see differently. While hierophany has been applied to studies of spiritual transcendence in film, this study connects those moments to human transcendence as well. Religion and film scholars who follow in Paul Schrader’s footsteps, discussed later, as well as those approaching film through the lenses of ritual and other religious praxis or epistemology, such as S. Brent Plate, John Lyden, and Sheila Nayar, have used hierophany effectively to delineate transcendent moments or episodes in film texts.2 These encounters with the numinous may represent, and inspire in film characters, either upward or downward transcendence, enlightenment or degeneration. The purpose of portraying transcendence in film, of opening up a window onto the ineffable, is to evoke consideration of larger questions concerning the meaning and nature of life, humanity, and the divine or supernatural. The transcendent in film serves as a bridge, or a mediation, between the phenomenal, everyday world and that which lies beyond the senses, those ideas that form our worldview and identity. This study is not exclusively about religion and film but rather explores how religious structures—such as sacred space, symbolic objects, and evocations of ritual—are expressed by narratives in concert with technical cinematic elements which point toward supernatural forces, be they divine, demonic, or otherwise metaphysical, such as the Shinto-inspired spirits populating Miyazaki’s work. Several different modalities of hierophany will be explored, but this will be done primarily through the fecund lens of ma. Eliade, as a twentieth-century scholar of comparative religion, has been criticized for overgeneralizing and universalizing religious ideas and structures, so I will be using his work only when his concepts can be directly related to Japanese religions. Making these connections between Japan’s religious landscapes and Eliade’s “comparative” claims underscores the fact that some religions across the world do share various characteristics, a notion that does not collapse all religions into one homogeneous mass. Furthermore, the fact that

Introduction 5 Japan’s multifaceted idea of ma shares some key properties with hierophany may help negate essentializing assumptions about Japan and its religions.

What Is Transcendence?—Multivalence, Process, and Perspective This book contends that the transcendent can be effectively communicated through both filmic elements and story in diverse ways and for manifold purposes. This is significant because one of the most powerful aspects of cinema is its capacity to make us contemplate and be inspired by something larger than and outside of our discrete selves, whether that be a motivating idea, an entity immanent or divine, or a model of how to, or not to, operate meaningfully in the world. Just as the concept can be depicted in infinite ways, transcendence, and its offshoot transcendental, can mean many things, inhabiting a protean and liminal space inclusive of the sacred and the immanent. This section provides definitions and distinctions regarding the transcendent that are germane to this book’s study. These definitions are not meant to be comprehensive, of course, but provide guiding ideas for the analyses of the films. Japan’s approaches to the transcendent and spiritual are the subject of this study, and these will be explored in depth throughout the book. Though Japan currently has a largely non-religious population, they commonly perform many rituals of Shinto and Buddhist origin, making their relationship to transcendence and related ideas, such as sacred space, complex. This section lays out general approaches to transcendence that will illuminate aspects of this complexity in the chapters to come. Transcendence often is thought of primarily in its spiritual sense, and this is a crucial understanding of the term in this volume. By spiritual transcendence, I am referring to signs of the supernatural and metaphysical that point toward a rising above the limits of the known material and temporal world, also referred to as the immanent. Robert K. Johnston helpfully distinguishes between spiritual transcendence, which he designates as “The Holy,” and immanent transcendence, dubbed “The Human,” envisioning these two as poles on a continuum while acknowledging they are often overlapping phenomena (Reel 240–50). This book utilizes Johnston’s concept of “human transcendence,” referring to a rising above that which threatens human life, literally and figuratively. Johnston describes this type of transcendence “in terms of the human possibility of exceeding our limitations, of experiencing wholeness within brokenness, of glimpsing how life was meant to be but is not” (243). Similarly, Herbert W. Richardson asserts that transcendence is “an intuition of man’s essential wholeness” (x). Thus, human transcendence involves survival, healing, evolution and growth, and integration on a personal and communal level. Nevertheless, as will be seen in the films covered in this book, this progression toward wholeness is characterized by a growing recognition of profound connectedness in a spiritual sense, which “requires a vision of self that is not limited to the body and its boundary of skin” (King 7). Mike King avers that this “self” that connects is most closely related to philosophical or religious concepts such as “soul,” “being,” and “spirit”; moreover, he contends, “Profound connectedness also carries connotations of the sacred. One could say that the apprehension of the universe in terms of wholes rather than parts is the key indicator of the sacred”

6

Introduction

(7). This perspective significantly aligns with this book’s focus on sacred space, symbols, and rituals as key catalysts of awakening to one’s interconnection and interdependence with others of the human, creaturely, and environmental kinds. Of course, human and spiritual transcendence are also connected because, as King reminds us, “[a] crisis of any kind may also be a spiritual crisis for those involved. This means that either the crisis is prompted by a spiritual question, or that it raises a spiritual question, or at least existential questions, that is questions pertaining to the true nature of our existence” (110). In addition, the etymology of transcendence, as it indicates movement in any direction (e.g., transit), also can refer to “descending” or downward transcendence, an experience of disintegration, chaos, corruption or pollution, and destruction. Plus, as spiritual transcendence and human transcendence are often interpenetrating, upward transcendence and downward transcendence are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. For instance, a descent into the infernal—such as “hitting rock bottom” or being confronted by demons of the mind or spirit—might inspire one to seek human or spiritual transcendence in the ascending direction. This is discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to two outstanding films by Akira Kurosawa depicting downward transcendence. The notion that transcendence is characterized by movement is crucial to this study. Richardson argues that transcendence, whether spiritual or human, is “a reality intrinsically bound up with” the “historical-cosmic process” (xi). Experiencing spiritual transcendence is still an experience in and of this ever-changing, immanent world of becoming. Thus, this book approaches transcendence as processual. It is so because it is experienced within the space-time of the phenomenal world, even if the transcendent experience temporarily seems to lift one out of earthly time and space. Human experience and understanding of the numinous, the spiritual, happens and develops in the here and now. The religions of Shinto and Buddhism, as they have evolved in Japan, are founded upon an understanding that the world is processual, characterized by impermanence (mujō), although the religions’ eschatological concepts differ significantly. John Macquarrie argues that in “relocating transcendence” to the human, transcendence becomes a dynamic process of moving across boundaries: [T]ranscendence is the continuing process of creativity and development which flows from . . . freedom. . . . [Human beings] are always on the move and always crossing boundaries which at any given time circumscribe a human existence. Just as in the physical world, as we move through space towards the horizon, that horizon turns out not to be an impassable barrier but opens out to new horizons. . . . We could say that transcendence is the “becoming more,” and when we speak of this “more,” clearly we do not mean a quantitative more, but a qualitative more, a deepening, enhancing and enriching of life, or . . . a fuller, truer humanizing of life. Transcendence means pushing back the horizons of humanity itself. (25–26) In this description of “humanly” transcendence, it is easy to identify the spiritual potential of metaphysical “boundaries” and “horizons,” of one type of world, or view

Introduction 7 of the world, opening out onto another that may or may not have divine or spiritual implications. There are echoes here of the Shinto boundaries that mark sacred space within the physical world, which are openings into which the divine can descend, abide, and then depart. Divine movement is key to this ritual, and spiritual and human transcendence is the hoped-for result of this crossing of boundaries by the gods. Macquarrie extends his observations about human transcendence to include Christian understandings of it, asserting that we can take “the active transcendence that we know in our own human experience as the analogical clue to the transcendence of God” (36). This notion that human transcendence and spiritual transcendence through (and of) the divine are processual and dynamic in nature, rather than a static destination, is more easily applied to Shinto and Buddhist philosophies and religio-aesthetics. As film scholar Donald Richie rightly contends, “Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product” (Tractate 15). This aesthetic and thematic focus on the processual and its connection to the transcendent will be demonstrated in the chapters to come. Another important consideration is the human motivations for seeking transcendence in the first place. At the foundation of this question lies what it is humans are attempting to transcend when they seek to “rise above.” Huston Smith points to Gautama Buddha’s pithy list of human struggles: suffering (dukkha), “transitoriness” (anicca), and the infinitesimal and inconsequential nature of a single person, aligned with anatta (no-self) (3). Smith asserts, “Thus, transcendence is a state of actual or potential being, the discernment of which counters categorically, paradoxically, and noetically the disvalues of suffering, transience, and insignificance or futility” (3). The function of transcendence is at the core of its meaning and importance. The protagonists in the cinematic texts explored in this book experience transcendence as a part of a process of development. In keeping with the rules of scriptwriting and of story arcs in general, the plots of these films feature characters who face obstacles and conflicts they attempt to overcome. In this sense, most films are about a generalized type of transcendence. However, the Japanese films examined in this book specifically foreground characters actively pursuing transcendence in various forms of sacred space. The imagery and rituals of Shinto and Buddhism, often in syncretic forms, appear in diverse guises in these films, creating narratives that interweave human and spiritual transcendence. Intersections between these two categories of transcendence also can be found in Huston Smith’s list of three means by which people often seek and sometimes achieve “this-worldly” transcendence: love, in all its forms; hope, personal and collective; and “commitment to a cause,” or finding a purpose in life, what the Japanese call ikigai (6–8).3 This list could be compared to the biblical passage exhorting “faith, hope, and love” (I Cor. 13:13), with “commitment” aligning with faith, reminding us that “earthly” qualities or virtues that help us “rise above” often are connected to spiritual beliefs. These three “humanly” transcendental means can be found in various forms in all of the films discussed in this book, but they often appear in sacralized spaces or are connected to religious symbols. Thus, these films also overtly portray spiritual transcendence, whereby characters experience or encounter the numinous, the mystery that “lies beyond the natural but . . . gives meaning to it”; this transcendent “is disclosed through the material

8

Introduction

of reality, but in such a way as to manifest a reality that does not only belong to this world” (Johnston, Reel 242, 249). Smith’s differentiation between immanent and “ontological” (spiritual) transcendence is similar to Johnston’s; Smith posits that “ontological Transcendence . . . deriv[es] from the possibility that reality houses reservoirs of value qualitatively different from what we normally perceive or assume” (9). Furthermore, “Ontological Transcendence . . . accepts the permanence of psychological tensions that cannot be resolved within reality as normally conceived, and so presses the possibility that reality includes surprising corridors of worth that elude ordinary eyes” (Smith 16). Film as a medium speaks to this idea, in that it shows viewers what might usually “elude” their attention; indeed, cinema itself can function as a “surprising corridor,” a framed interstitial space, or ma, inviting viewers to see beyond the phenomenal surface. The strikingly divergent diegetic worlds of Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastical Spirited Away (2001) and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s quiet After Life (1998) accomplish precisely this feat, as will be examined in later chapters. Additionally, Smith points out that “Transcendence” usually is not perceived as a need or sought out until a person’s immanent world starts to disintegrate, and “the guise in which Transcendence appears varies with the mode of life’s deficiency” (4–6). In other words, experiences and perceptions of transcendence are myriad and based on all the intersecting contexts of people’s lives. This book’s focus on Japanese films made between the 1980s and 2010s constitutes an attempt to look at diverse responses to problems, disasters, and conflicts in particular places and times, acknowledging that Japan is in no way monolithic but has been impacted by ideas, cultures, and nations from all over the globe, just as it has impacted other countries. Of course, Japan and its people are not and never have been homogeneous. Nevertheless, focusing on a particular nation and time span makes the monumental project of examining the transcendent in film in the crucial contexts of history and culture less unwieldy. Throughout the book, I will often use the word spiritual rather than religious to open up the range of reference. Jeffrey Pence explains this well when he contends that the term spiritual is more apt than religious because “the spiritual, as the discourse for exploring experiences of the ineffable and orienting them toward consequence in the world of agency and action, mediates between these otherwise opposed realms of transcendence and everydayness” (40). Although this book does not adhere to Pence’s sole focus on films displaying realism of the sort Paul Schrader extolls in his 1972 study of “transcendental style,” I agree that it is important to examine “spiritual films” that are not overtly “religious” but evocatively explore “questions of being and the limits of knowledge” (29). Pence calls for analyses that pay attention to the ways that spiritual films “produce experiences, and call for responses, at the edge of the knowable” (29). Of course, judging whether or not a film is spiritual and/or transcendent, to a large degree, is in the eye (or heart-mind) of the beholder. Johnston’s work observes this effectively, particularly in a case study he conducted with his students wherein he asked which, if any, of the various films viewed during one semester prompted their “most significant spiritual experience” (God’s 50). Johnston explains that “if some movies that opened out into a transcendent experience were explicitly theological, an equal number were not” (God’s 59). Martin Scorsese’s The Last

Introduction 9 Temptation of Christ (1988) was just as likely to prompt a “spiritual experience,” to be perceived as transcendent, as Disney-Pixar’s animated classic Up (2009). None of the films covered in this book are purposely promoting religion, and their directors all have made statements to the effect that they are not adherents of any particular religion themselves. However, they do use religious aesthetics to communicate philosophical and ethical messaging that is reflected in the doctrine and practice of Shinto and Buddhism. The power of the thematic lessons in these films can be found in their aesthetics, both visual and aural, as well as their narratives. Regardless of whether or not a viewer experiences any of the films explored in this book as transcendent, they are works that use the structures and multivalent meanings of religio-aesthetics to express higher truths about what it means to be human, in worldviews both spiritual and secular. Cinema has the capacity to be a potent communicator of the transcendent. This project explores the ways in which different types of transcendence dialogically interact with, enhance, and intensify one another as the films explored attempt to move the minds and spirits of viewers to new or forgotten spaces in order to deepen and enlarge their perspectives.

Why Japan?—Aesthetics, Religion, and History Motivations for writing a book on transcendence in Japanese cinema of the past four decades are sketched broadly earlier but call for closer scrutiny. These reasons, of course, include the author’s passion for Japanese culture and cinema. However, underlying all of these motives are three preeminent and interconnected elements: Japanese aesthetics, religions, and history. Aesthetics, here, refers not to a philosophy of the beautiful or principles defining what comprises beauty in art. Japanese philosopher of aesthetics Yuriko Saito, siding with several other philosophers, argues that while “ ‘aesthetic’ is generally understood in an honorific sense identified with [the] beautiful, aesthetically positive, or artistically good,” it is more efficacious and accurate to apply to term in a “classificatory sense,” which is “value-neutral” (Aesthetics 27–28). She advocates for a definition of aesthetic that adheres to the Greek source word aesthesis, referring to “the perception of the external world by the senses” (“Aesthesis”). Thus, aesthetics is about sensory perception of not just “art” but anything in one’s environment, whether it is beautiful or banal, perceived positively or negatively. Saito notes that there was a shift toward an honorific, fine arts focus in “Western aesthetics” starting in the nineteenth century; however, in other traditions, such as Japanese and Chinese, with distinctive art-making practices of paintings, literature, theater, and the like, aesthetic practices permeate people’s daily life. One of the findings of comparative aesthetics is that a greater emphasis is placed on the aesthetics of everyday life in many non-Western cultures than in the West. (“Aesthetics” Intro.) “Everyday aesthetics,” for instance, can be applied to everything from the appearance of a piece of furniture to the sensation of washing the dishes. This approach to aesthetics is inclusive of fine arts, natural phenomena, popular culture, quotidian

10

Introduction

objects and experiences, and everything in between. Film scholars and critics participate in this type of aesthetics discourse when they examine the significance of cinematic language: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, dialogue, and music, all of which are experienced with sight and hearing. Film may be an art, but it is generally experienced in everyday spaces, including in our homes and in movie theaters. In addition, the diegetic worlds we enter when watching films very often depict elements of our mundane lives that we experience through identification with characters. This broader view of aesthetics has long been applied to a variety of Japanese arts by Japanese artists and thinkers, including experiences such as the tea ceremony, and the last half of the twentieth century brought Western scholars who applied the design principles of traditional Japanese aesthetics to their readings of film. Japan’s aesthetic sensibilities are not a product of an isolated, hermetically sealed island nation because that view is a misconception of Japan. Clear evidence of this can be seen, for instance, in the nation’s writing system, which includes hiragana, katakana, and Chinese-based kanji ideograms. From the sixth century CE to the early tenth century, Japan was extensively engaged with its Asian neighbors and imported a great many ideas and products from China and Korea, including the powerful, culture-shaping philosophies of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. What we call “Japanese aesthetics,” then, has always included a mix of influences, but it is possible to identify salient properties of Japanese design and choreographed movement, nonetheless, keeping in mind that what is “Japanese” is always multiple and hybridized. This claim is supported by eminent Japanese and Japanese-American scholars, philosophers, and artists. Within the last half century, several of these figures have contended that Japanese aesthetics are distinctive: particularly notable are prolific scholar of literature and the arts Makoto Ueda, architect Arata Isozaki, art critic and editor Seigow Matsuoka, aesthetics scholars Yuriko Saito and Ken-ichi Sasaki, and painter and culture writer Makoto Fujimura. These luminaries of their fields have written much about Japan’s approaches to aesthetics in such disparate arenas as poetry and prose, theater, fine arts, product packaging, landscape design, calligraphy, and domestic and commercial built environments. While the extraordinary films discussed in this book are its immediate inspiration, it is the superlative work of these individuals that provides a solid foundation for this study’s use of aesthetics based in conceptions of sacred space and spirituality, in a word, religio-aesthetics. The Western studies of Japanese cinema that used religio-aesthetics in the last half of the twentieth century tend to focus on what they call “Zen” aesthetics, the properties of which will be discussed later. Inken Prohl traces the rapid shift in and expansion of “Zen” that took place in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, explaining how a “traditional, conservative, local Japanese religion—Zen Buddhism—transformed into a global, consumer-oriented religious brand: ‘Zen’” (194). Renowned Japanese Buddhism ambassador and scholar D. T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950s, tailored his teaching to American culture. His Westernized version of Zen Buddhism “was a highly individualistic and interiorized form of Zen Buddhism, where the individual seeks their own path to a salvation that must be directly experienced and cannot be expressed in words”

Introduction 11 (Prohl 195). This type of Zen “had little in common with contemporary Japanese Zen Buddhism,” scholars argue, and greatly influenced Alan Watts, whose bestselling 1957 book The Way of Zen turned “Zen” into a “popular buzzword” connected to discourses of personal cultivation and psychotherapy (Prohl 195–97). Most pertinent to this study is the strong influence of Watts’s chapter on “Zen in the Arts,” which had a potent affect on the work of prominent film scholars, such as Paul Schrader and Donald Richie (Watts 174–201). These writers credit “Zen,” for instance, with being the guiding principle for the Japanese tea ceremony, the rock garden (kare-sansui), Nō theater, and flower arranging (ikebana). They do not look beyond their version of “Zen,” or even traditional Zen Buddhism, to earlier Shinto aesthetics that exerted significant influence on both esoteric and Zen Buddhism. Thomas P. Kasulis points out that Japanese aesthetic values, such as simplicity and naturalness, “were part of Japanese culture and represented in Shinto practices centuries before Zen’s emergence in the thirteenth century” (45). Kasulis also points out that Nō theater’s arising in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a product of the prevailing Buddhist-Shinto syncretism of the period, noting that Nō “storylines often deal with kami, with the transformation between animal spirits and humans, and with the interaction between ghosts and events in this world. These themes antedate not only the introduction of Zen Buddhism into Japan but probably even the formal introduction of any other form of Buddhism as well” (46). Royall Tyler has dedicated an entire article, “Buddhism in Noh,” to arguing that Nō’s Buddhist influences were not “Zen” but a generalized Buddhism, a syncretic mix of the eight major sects predominant in medieval Japan, sometimes referred to as kenmitsu or exoteric-esoteric Buddhism (Tyler; Kuroda 11–12). The West’s captivation by and fetishization of “Zen” has impacted both Western and Eastern scholars of traditional Japanese arts and of Japanese cinema. Sometimes “Zen” is a useful shorthand for “Buddhist” or “Buddh-ish,” and in other cases it is primarily a marketing or branding mechanism. A recent book title serves as a case in point. Jonathan Clements’s excellent volume A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen mentions Zen Buddhism on only eight of its nearly 260 pages, yet it gets top billing in the title. Globally, Zen continues to be a popular way to convey exotic mystique. However, Zen Buddhism has promulgated important philosophical and aesthetic concepts that have been embodied in diverse artworks, and many of those scholars using Zen as their aesthetic rubric have written insightful analyses of various types of artistic texts. The problem lies in narrowing Japanese aesthetic lenses to the perspective of one Buddhist sect, as rhetorically convenient as that might be. Moreover, Zen Buddhism is derived from Chinese Chan Buddhism, which was influenced by Korean Son Buddhism before arriving in Japan. Furthermore, Zen Buddhism’s flourishing in pre-modern Japan, as a “small, rather conservative Japanese religion,” can be attributed to the fact that it shared commonalities with earlier esoteric Japanese Buddhist sects as well as Shinto (Prohl 193). It is important to note that the majority of Japanese people today do not consider themselves to be adherents of any religion. Jolyon Baraka Thomas explains that “Japanese people’s professions of religious belief and affiliation are exceptionally

12

Introduction

low, hovering around 30 percent of the population for the past thirty years” (Drawing 9). On the other hand, a great many Japanese people perform rituals and participate in activities associated with Shinto and Buddhism, such as attending festivals (matsuri) associated with particular kami; visiting shrines and temples, including pilgrimages; purchasing wish plaques (ema) and paper fortune-telling lots (omikuji); and performing rituals, often daily, at small altars (kamidana, butsudan, or tamaya) in people’s homes to honor ancestral spirits, kami, or Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Thus, it is not surprising that “a significant percentage” of the largely “non-religious” Japanese population “professes belief in kami, buddhas or bodhisattvas, or ancestral spirits” (Thomas, “Religion” 195). Indeed, polls reveal that “almost all Japanese (over 90 percent) identify with Shinto” (Kasulis 4). Thomas clarifies the reason for what seem to be conflicting statistics: “Although Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism have informed Japanese conceptions of life and death, morality, and cosmology, these ideas are often described as ‘common sense’ (jōshiki) or ‘Japaneseness’ rather than anything explicitly religious” (Drawing 9). Kasulis explains, “Because its basic values and patterns of behavior have filtered into Japanese culture as part of tradition, most Japanese seldom reflect on Shinto as a ‘religion’ in which they consciously participate” (1). It is proverbial at this point that Japanese are born Shinto and die Buddhists. This maxim reveals that most Japanese do participate in religious rituals and use religious markers to commemorate life’s major milestones; however, mixing these religious traditions over the course of one’s life is not only perfectly acceptable but expected. Shinto celebrates the continuation of life and the natural world’s cyclical processes, so births and weddings are frequently Shinto-oriented, while Buddhism sees life itself as illusory and leading to another life in the cycle of samsara (reincarnation), until one reaches enlightenment. This prospect is considerably more appealing than the Shinto concept of the underworld, Yomi, where the dead go to rot in darkness. Thus, Buddhist funerals have been preferred. This mix of religious practices was characteristic of Buddhist-Shinto practitioners from the eighth century through the nationalistic suppression of Buddhism and promotion of Shinto that began during the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japan’s governmental and military powers were pushing to create a “unique” and commanding Japanese identity on the world stage. From the time Buddhism arrived on Japan’s shores, widely accepted to be in the sixth century, though possibly earlier, Buddhism and Shinto have existed in dialectical relationship to each other. Toshio Kuroda’s research shows that “when Buddhism was introduced into Japan there was a controversy over whether or not to accept it, but there is no indication that these popular [Shinto] beliefs were extolled as an indigenous tradition. Hence, Shinto need not imply a formal religion, per se” (7; cf. Hardacre 4–5). The implication is that Shinto is a name given to a collection of disparate, localized religious traditions, not a coherent “religion,” and this may be the case. Nevertheless, scholars of Shinto have identified practices and concepts, such as folk rituals, symbolic structures of imagery and thought, and worldview principles that existed in multiple locations throughout ancient Japan. Helen Hardacre’s and Thomas Kasulis’s recent work attests to this. Some scholars have chosen to frame Shinto as surpassing the category of religion.

Introduction 13 Writing a few decades before Kuroda’s more revisionist article quoted earlier, and in the wake of World War II, scholar Sokyō Ono contends, Shinto is more than a religious faith. It is an amalgam of attitudes, ideas, and ways of doing things that through two millenniums and more have become an integral part of the way of the Japanese people. Thus, Shinto is both a personal faith in the kami and a communal way of life according to the mind of the kami, which emerged in the course of the centuries as various ethnic and cultural influences, both indigenous and foreign, were fused, and the country attained unity under the Imperial Family. (3–4) In the early 1960s, when this was written, Japan was renovating its identity, partially by force of the American government’s hard and soft power and partly by choice of the weary and wary Japanese people who had been dragged into over a decade of brutal, imperialistic wars (1931–1945) by an ultranationalist government and military-industrial complex. They were well on their way to the “Economic Miracle” at this point. Ono declares that Shinto is a worldview and “way of life,” a way of being Japanese, but he avoids the pre-war propagandistic notion that Shinto renders the Japanese people unique and superior to others, as they are directly descended from the kami. Furthermore, as Hardacre avers, Ono follows suit with other Japanese scholars in bypassing the recent history of State Shinto by referring back to the Imperial Family of the ancient Yamato period, presenting Shinto as a unifying force stretching back over more than a millennium. Hardacre contends that Ono’s approach was “part of the aestheticization of Japanese culture typical of that time” (4), which involved a recognition that Shinto, as a cultural product, had been instrumentalized as propaganda but could be redesigned as aesthetic promotion for Japan as an international brand and economic power. This “rebranding” of Shinto could be used to paper over its historical “sins.” As the Shinto-infused popular arts of manga and anime grew in importance during the last half of the twentieth century, they tended to look toward “ancient” Shinto as well, avoiding its political and historical role. However, as the twentieth century drew to a close, it became more difficult to avoid the role Shinto played in Japanese imperialism, and scholars and artists writing about anime and other Japanese media have started to grapple with its legacy in relation to Japanese arts. For instance, Hayao Miyazaki, as will be discussed in the next chapter, has stated openly that his use of Shinto-inspired creatures in several of his anime films does not indicate his support for any religion but rather indicates a respect for the natural world that is found in ancient Shinto. This type of Shinto had been in Japan long before the country’s official history began to be recorded, and it was not until the eighteenth century that Native Studies (kokugaku) scholars looked back at ancient Japan’s literature and artifacts in an effort to identify what was “authentically” or “originally” Shinto, meaning Japanese, rather than “foreign,” such as Buddhism. Most important for this study is the work of prominent kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), whose ideas will be explored throughout the book. The task of distinguishing between

14

Introduction

“native” and “foreign” was extremely challenging (some might say impossible), particularly because when the first texts dealing with Japanese mythology and history were written, the Kojiki and Nihonshoki (both early eighth century), Buddhism had been spreading in Japan for a few hundred years, so the syncretizing of these two belief systems had already begun. By the ninth century, new forms of Buddhism, the esoteric schools of Shingon and Tendai, founded in Japan by Kūkai (774–835) and Saicho (766–822), respectively, began to dominate Japanese Buddhism. It is crucial to note that the rise of esoteric Buddhism in Japan has been attributed, in large part, to the fact that these schools share central beliefs with Shinto: 1) “the world is alive with spirituality, as there is no sharp divide between spirit and matter”; 2) the importance of “the purely mindful heart,” which Shinto calls the makoto no kokoro [literally, the pure/sincere heart-mind] and Buddhism describes as “awakening”; and 3) the idea that “the sacred can be in the form of celestial deities (in Shinto, the kami deities; in esoteric Buddhism, the celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas)” (Kasulis 95–97). Regarding this third point of connection, Shinto beliefs establish that “the natural world and human beings are equally offspring of the divine [kami],” as presented in the Kojiki and Nihonshoki, and thus are potential kami; while certain groups of Japanese Buddhists, such as esoteric Buddhists and Dōgen’s later Soto Zen school, affirmed that all things have “Buddha nature” (busshō) and the potential for enlightenment (Parkes 66–67). The resonance between these concepts is evident. Moreover, these “radicalized Mahayana” forms of Buddhism believe there is “no need to transcend the world of samsara [death and rebirth] to the other shore [transcendent ultimate reality], since we’ve been standing on it right here all along, but without realizing it. The shift focuses our attention on this present existence as the only one, and on affirming and working to improve it” (Parkes 66, my emphasis). These schools of Buddhism and Shinto traditions also are all firmly rooted in practice, taking physical action, both ritualistic and quotidian, to ameliorate this world, one’s community, and one’s self. This syncretic, mutually sustaining intertwining of Shinto and Buddhism was predominant in Japan for a millennium, ceasing by governmental force in the Meiji era with the official “Separation of Buddhism from Shinto” (cf. Hardacre 5). Kasulis asserts that Buddhism’s focus on “existential” praxis and “the inner life and personal cultivation” kept the Shinto-supported doctrine of “essentialist” nationalism largely at bay during this time (90–91). Furthermore, he explains, Buddhism introduced to Japanese culture an appreciation for the function of states of mind, behavioral habits, and deep-rooted psychological motivations. The Buddhist system of self-cultivation involved the practitioners’ recognition of egocentric impulses and their removal through the extirpation of the habits—physical and mental—nurturing them. (87) This focus on personal psychology and progression from egocentrism to compassion appears in all the films examined in this book, with the exception of

Introduction 15 Kurosawa’s dark jidai-geki, and it is expressed through both Shinto- and Buddhistoriented aesthetics, the line between which is sometimes thin as gossamer or missing altogether. It is clear that Buddhism has had profound effects on Shinto, and core aspects of Shinto have shaped Japanese Buddhism. Thomas points out that while Shinto is generally considered, by lay people and many scholars, to be Japan’s “indigenous” religion, aspects of several foreign religions and philosophies were incorporated into what is now known as Shinto, “including Daoism, geomancy, and Yin-Yang divination and theories of the Five Elements” (“Religion” 197). Thus, like Buddhism, Shinto is heterogeneous, regardless of the efforts of the Native Studies scholars to delineate Shinto’s unique properties and of the governmental powers assigning exceptional, nationalistic “Japaneseness” to the religion following the Meiji restoration of Imperial rule in 1868. Previous to this, the syncretism between Shinto and Buddhism was thoroughly established in both official and unofficial ways. It is significant that this process took place in Japan between the late eighth century and the eleventh century, spanning much of the Heian period (794–1185), known for its sophistication and efflorescence of art, architecture, and aesthetic concepts, establishing what would come to be known as “traditional Japanese aesthetics.” As Kuroda notes, the gradual but extensive syncretizing of Buddhism and Shinto during this time was facilitated by four major “doctrinal explanations” of the role of kami in Buddhist ideology: 1) the kami realize that they themselves are trapped in this world of samsara and transmigration and they also seek liberation through Buddhist teachings; 2) the kami are benevolent deities who protect Buddhism; 3) the kami are transformations of the Buddhas manifested in Japan to save all sentient beings ([called] honji suijaku); and 4) the kami are the pure spirits of the Buddhas (hongaku). (9) These conceptions were inculcated through various artistic means, including shrine mandalas, literary tales, and illustrated scrolls, which “portrayed the Kami as compassionately leading humanity to salvation, blessing, protecting, and ultimately guiding them to the Pure Land” of Amida Buddha, the celestial paradise where one might attain enlightenment more swiftly by Amida’s grace (Hardacre 8). Hardacre further explains, “Shrines were pictured as Pure Lands on earth, and the idea of Kami and Buddhas as ultimately the same was given pictorial form” (8). Various incarnations of this aesthetic superimposition of kami onto Buddhas (or vice-versa) appear in Japanese anime and other cinema, reflecting the doctrinal mix of ideas that also can be found in many of these films. The late maestro of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, for instance, uses distinct imagery of Amida Buddha in his Shinto folktale-based anime films Pompoko (1994) and the stunning Princess Kaguya (2013). Another vivid example, discussed in detail in Chapter 4, is Kurosawa’s use of the Shinto-based yamauba figure, a mountain crone from folklore. In Throne of Blood (1958), Kurosawa

16

Introduction

uses a yamauba character that is inspired by her appearances in two classic Nō plays, Black Mound and Yamamba, both presumed to be written by Nō master Zeami in the fifteenth century. However, these plays portray yamauba very differently: in Black Mound, she appears from an overtly Buddhist perspective as a symbol of monstrous attachment, and in Yamamba, she is an embodiment of natural processes, of the movement of the seasons, which is one of her prominent Shinto personae. Kurosawa uses these disparate types in his film to communicate his own messages about downward transcendence and the futility of human violence, which are not affiliated with any particular religion. The point here is not that these are two views of one symbolic figure existing in mutually exclusive categories labeled “Shinto” and “Buddhist.” Rather, Throne of Blood displays the dialogical relationship between religious discourses surrounding yamauba, playing with the multifaceted quality of Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. Indeed, for quite different reasons, Miyazaki performs a similarly syncretic move in Spirited Away with his portrayal of the yamauba twins Yubaba and Zeniba, who are neither purely evil nor good, despite first impressions. The kaleidoscopic figure of yamauba—as she has developed over time and incorporated multiple influences—provides an excellent example of the fecundity and protean efficacy of syncretic signifiers. This book explores the expression of transcendence, via filmic language and storytelling, through the aesthetics of sacred space in Japanese cinema, and Shinto concepts and practice are at the foundation of this approach. In his book Shinto: The Way Home, Kasulis describes the religion’s view of natural phenomena, including human creations, as having the capacity to be wondrous, mysterious, and awe-inspiring: that is, sacred or imbued with spiritual power. Although encountering mystifying and awesome things may not be comfortable, “Shinto spirituality is about learning to feel at home with them—feeling we belong with them and them with us—even if we do not fully understand why. . . . Shinto is about connectedness, the intimate kind of relation in which each related item is part of the other” (11, 13). It is just this type of connection to nature and “others” that we see in Miyazaki’s spiritual and ecological fables My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001), the latter being the subject of the next chapter. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish (2011), investigated in Chapter 5, also portrays a child who must learn to accept a new home by expanding his understanding of family to include a massive volcano, surely a kami. In physical space, Shinto also provides prolific markers of sacred boundaries, such as the iconic torii gates and the shimenawa ropes, often with paper zig-zag shide hanging from them, tied around sacred trees and designating holy places inside and outside of shrines. This marking of sacred space reminds the Japanese of the central value of purity, both of heart-mind and body, as can be seen in the ablution stations at the entrance to any sizable shrine in Japan, at which worshippers are expected to wash their hands in ritual fashion before entering. Simultaneously, the entirety of Japan is seen as sacred space, as its human inhabitants are descended from the kami. Thus, sacred spaces reside within sacred spaces, liminalities within liminalities, as evidenced by a visit to any grand shrine,

Introduction 17 especially one such as Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Taisha, where there are myriad torii gates in even small sections of the sprawling grounds. The wondrous walkways there, flanked by tightly lined up red torii, are so dizzying that one can only accept that she is in the “holy of holies” and an inextricable part of that sacred world.

Figure 1.1 Torii gates at Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, Japan. Source: Photo by Kristin Townrow (2019).

18

Introduction

Nevertheless, this connection always already existed: the hallowed place and its symbols simply inspire our realization that we exist in sacred space. Kasulis writes, With an undefiled kokoro . . . the human can pass through the gate to connectedness and experience the interlaced relation between kami and humans that has been there all along. This Shinto gateway leads, not to somewhere else . . . , but to where one has really been all along—in the spiritual whole as reflected in each of us. (85) This interdependence with all things, accompanied by the willingness to act compassionately on behalf of others, is at the core of all the films this book focuses on, including the negative example of this in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran (1985). These two films are cautionary tales wherein ruthless characters violently pursue power, heedless of the human cost, resulting in downward transcendence for the guilty and innocent alike. Destruction begets destruction, compassion begets compassion, and we are all tied to each other. The Buddhist notion of karma is recognizable here, but it becomes collective rather than individual. A syncretic Shinto-Buddhist worldview perceives everything as sacred, connected, and processual, though Buddhist doctrine sees the impermanence as a symptom of the world’s illusory nature. Nonetheless, a Shinto-Buddhist understanding of ephemerality leaves the door open for potential growth and transformation during the course of our physical and spiritual journeys in this world and perhaps the next, as depicted in Kore-eda’s After Life (1998). One might call this the process of transcendence.

Japan, Rings of Fire, and Twentieth-Century Turbulence: The Book’s Space-Time Looking at Japan from a widescreen, bird’s-eye perspective, it is imperative to consider how the region’s striking and perilous geography has shaped its culture and history. Revered Japanese author Haruki Murakami, in a speech given upon winning the prestigious International Catalunya Prize, eloquently underlined this point: To be Japanese means, in a certain sense, to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes. Much of Japan lies on the route of typhoons from the summer through the fall. Every year, inevitably, those typhoons cause terrible tragedy and many lives are lost. There are active volcanoes scattered across the archipelago, and then there are the earthquakes. The Japanese archipelago finds itself situated in a corner to the East of the Asian continent, riding atop four enormous tectonic plates. The location is precarious. We pass our days, as it were, atop a nest of earthquakes. (“Speaking” 1)

Introduction 19 This speech was given just four months after March 11, 2011, when Japan had barely begun its recovery from the unconscionable loss and destruction of the “triple disaster.” In this speech, Murakami goes on to explain that the Japanese people have overcome so many dire natural disasters by accepting them as “ ‘unavoidable things’ (shigata ga nai mono),” a survival strategy he attributes to a pervasive belief that the world itself is “fleeting and insubstantial,” that is, characterized by “mujō,” a foundational doctrine of both Buddhism and Shinto that has been “seared deeply into the Japanese spirit” (“Speaking” 2). However, Murakami asserts that despite this understanding of mujō, the Japanese maintain “a positive mind, a respect for things that have passed away and a quiet determination to go on living with vigor in this fragile world filled with dangers” (“Speaking” 7). Tokyo-based writer Richard Lloyd Parry discusses the darker side of “acceptance” in the wake of these sorts of events: Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics. . . . Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nantai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience or perseverance. . . . Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after [the 3.11 disaster]; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight. (195–96) This type of “acceptance” can be a type of impotent resignation that impedes or prevents progressive improvements that could help build a better and safer future. Parry suggests that gaman based in mujō is a vital strategy for coping in the now but not of looking forward positively. It is possible, of course, to read the fundamental Buddhist doctrine of nonattachment as this type of placid resignation. Arata Isozaki aligns this view with the concept of ma and Shinto, arguing that the ephemerality of life “is the basis of Japanese eschatology. Aware of the inevitable conclusion, lacking all hope of escape from this fate, man has but one choice—to live from moment to moment” (16). These resigned perspectives on survival and dealing with trauma would seem to conflict with Murakami’s idea of “living with vigor.” Herein lies the dialectical tension between stoical acceptance and active pursuance of processual transcendence, both human and spiritual. Obviously, individuals have their own preferred coping mechanisms, but it does seem that the Japanese people have tread a middle path between these approaches, skewing toward one side or the other of the continuum depending on immediate circumstances. The films explored in this book look at sundry forms of and vehicles for overcoming loss and trauma, but every one of them portrays active efforts toward moving beyond, even if those attempts are misguided, like Kōichi’s in Kore-eda’s I Wish, or evil, as in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran. For these protagonists, transcending trauma requires movement, and upward transcendence cannot be attained without compassionately investing the heart-mind in a community of

20

Introduction

others. From ancient Japan to the present, the country’s artists and authors, along with its people, have found myriad ways of coping, surviving, and healing. Thus far, pertinent periods of Japanese history have been introduced from the perspective of religion, but it is important to provide a brief account of the last hundred years to sketch the historical landscape underpinning the films and directors to be discussed. Each chapter following will look more closely at the history specifically significant in regard to the film or films covered therein. Most of the films were released between 1985 and 2017, stretching from the tail end of the Economic Miracle through the Heisei period. One exception to this is Throne of Blood, made in 1958, which is used to demonstrate the contrast between Kurosawa’s post-World War II samurai cautionary tale and the chaotic fever-pitch of his late masterpiece Ran, wherein sacred spaces are all exploded. The four directors—Kurosawa, Miyazaki, Kore-eda, and Shinkai—are products of Japan’s turbulent twentieth century, so that is where we begin. The rise of nationalism during the Meiji period, during which Japan conquered Taiwan (1895) and won the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), marked and furthered the ascendency of Japan’s military power and colonial ambitions. In 1910, following years of war with Korea, Japan annexed that nation as well. The rapid modernization and growing military might of Japan were interrupted in 1923 by the Great Kantō Earthquake, which killed a shocking 140,000 people in and around the Tokyo region (Parry 166). However, Japan was soon back in its imperialist stride, and, in 1931, the Japanese army conquered much of the northeastern Chinese province of Manchuria, renaming it Manchuko and running the region as a puppet state. This ushered in brutal Japanese colonial campaigns further down into China. Japan was embroiled in continuous war for nearly fifteen years, ending with their surrender to Allied Forces after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, killing over 140,000 people almost immediately, with 60,000 more victims perishing within a year (Parry 167). During this period of war, aesthetics and religion (and religio-aesthetics) were used for propaganda, as they are in most countries. One notable example is cherry blossom imagery, a symbol of both Japan and mujō, which was used by the military and government to promote nationalism in the decades leading up to and during the wars of the twentieth century (Everyday 194).4 State Shinto was instrumentalized to recruit soldiers and to justify both Japan’s imperialist ambitions and the intense suffering of its populace during this time. After the war, many Japanese felt betrayed by their government: some of their painful sacrifices and harrowing tribulations, including the extensive carpet bombing of their cities and the atomic bombings, were preventable had the government and military leaders not pursued these endless wars or at least had surrendered when they realized Japan could not win World War II. However, it was decades before mainstream Japanese media would address this directly, which can be seen in the powerful anime features Barefoot Gen (1983), directed by hibakusha (bombaffected person) Mori Masaki, and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Akira Kurosawa’s monumental 1980s films, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985),

Introduction 21 both funded by Western investors, also condemn the patriotic feudalism that led to Japan’s ultra-nationalistic fervor during the first half of the twentieth century (D. Davis 227–49). After Japan’s defeat, the American Occupation of Japan, from 1945 to 1952, brought profound changes, including the new 1947 Constitution, which established a democratic system that stripped the Emperor of his political power, instituted new civil liberties, and forbade Japan from rebuilding its military forces and waging war (in Article 9, the “peace clause”) (Kingston 53–55). Many Japanese welcomed this new pacifist stance and turned toward reconstructing their lives and their country. The Japanese people who had experienced such severe deprivation and destruction on their own soil as World War II dragged on were now prepared to work hard and make different kinds of sacrifices to build a new peaceful and prosperous future for their families and Japan. Jonathan Clements explains that Japan’s meteoric rise in economic power during this period was caused by “a handful of unique factors—the postwar acquisition of the most up-to-date plants and machinery, the industrial boom brought by the Korean War, and the willingness of the generation of Japanese raised in wartime austerity to put their all into working for a better tomorrow” (242). The Japanese “Economic Miracle” redefined Japan as an economic rather than military superpower, and the nation became the second-largest economy on the planet from the late 1960s to 2010, when China’s economy surpassed it. The distinctive financial and corporate structures put in place during this time, and the social contract they entailed for workers in this system, came to be called “Japan, Inc.,” wherein productivity defined success. This worked well for those who were able to participate in the neoliberal structures of corporate culture, with a male head of household working constantly, essentially married to his company, supported by the mother figure (i.e., kyōiku [education] mama), whose job it was to raise the children and ensure their successful education, often with little support (outside of financial) from the largely absent father (Allison 16). It was a fairly rigid system that brought financial success and stability for some but shut out a great many others. During the era of Japan, Inc., while many were becoming wealthy, others found it difficult to survive outside of the “salaryman” structure, and the gap between the wealthy and poor grew. Director Jūzō Itami’s feel-good comedy Tampopo (1985), made at the peak of the “Economic Bubble,” satirizes the wealth gap and Japanese pretensions regarding Western ways and luxuries. The film jumps between various character groups within the multiverse that is Tokyo, and one strand of the narrative focuses on a community of homeless men living in one of the large parks. Surprisingly, and quite poignantly, this filthy, ragtag gang breaks into a beautiful song in perfect harmony at one point, creating a humanizing moment that is both humorous in its incongruity and heartbreaking in its portrayal of those Japan, Inc. has left behind. A few short years later, this system began to disintegrate. Japan’s Heisei period, spanning from the ascension of Emperor Akihito in 1989 to his abdication in 2019, has been dubbed the “Lost Era” (ushinawareta jidai), “characterized by three decades of economic stagnation, social malaise, and natural disaster” (Yamada, Locating Heisei [LH] 3). In his book on film and

22

Introduction

literature during this period, Marc Yamada sums up the defining factors of the Heisei decades: Foremost among the things that were “lost” during this era is the momentum of the high-growth economy of the 1970s and 1980s. . . . Also lost during this time was the social bedrock that provided the foundation for Japan’s rapid growth. The bursting of the bubble resulted in the transformation of the job market and the family structure. Deregulated labor markets during the 1980s and 1990s helped grow the economy, but these policies also increased the number of underpaid workers in dead-end jobs. (3–4) Widespread deregulation of labor resulted in the sharp rise of two demographic groups: furita (a katakana neologism for “freeter”), people who are underemployed and often move from one “flexible,” short-term contract to another; and NEET (not in education, employment, or training), which could be extended to include the now well-known phenomenon of hikikomori (socially withdrawn individuals) (Yamada, LH 4; Allison 30). These groups of people stand in stark contrast to the super-stable “salaryman,” bound in fealty to his corporation for life, who became the idealized icon of the successful, industrious Japanese during the peak years of the “Economic Miracle.” The shift to less secure labor structures also has resulted in a decline in marriage and birth rates and a rise in divorces, a loosening or weakening of familial bonds as well as employment connections (Yamada, LH 4). In addition to these hardships, the first decade of the Heisei period was greatly impacted by two harrowing events: the massive Kobe earthquake (also called the Great Hanshin Earthquake) in January of 1995, which killed over 6,000 people, and the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system perpetrated by the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult just two months later, which killed twelve and poisoned over five thousand commuters (Allison 30; Kingston 88).5 As the scaffolding that sustained Japan’s “miracle” was dismantled to maximize corporate survival and profits at the expense of workers, the system of “Japan Inc. remain[ed] resilient, finding inspiration in adversity while advocating neoliberal reforms to awaken the animal spirits of capitalism by paring back regulations and taxes on business, reducing civil liberties, welfare and workers’ legal protections, and making people more self-reliant (jiko sekinin)” (Kingston 12). The result has been a significant increase in the gap between the wealthy and the rest of Japanese society, called kakusa shakai (gap-widening society). Jeff Kingston notes that “the power of the egalitarian myth” in Japanese society ensured that inequality remained off the mainstream radar until the twentyfirst century because it was a social taboo and the government did not release relevant reports until . . . 2009. By 2000, the relative poverty rate, defined as less than one half the median household income, exceeded 15 percent, well above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development . . . average of 10 percent. (99)

Introduction 23 The notion of “self-responsibility” was heavily promoted as an ethical principle by Japan’s government in the 2000s. It appeared to be an attempt to justify anemic social safety nets and defend laws and policies that bolster corporations instead of citizens. In her study Precarious Japan, cultural anthropologist Anne Allison explains that jiko sekinin means “everyone needs to take care of, and make do for, themselves[;] the credo could also be read as a refusal to extend sympathy and support to anyone else” (146). This sort of competitive self-sufficiency, or “rugged individualism,” can be a powerful and potentially destructive notion sold to the public as a moral virtue. The concept of jiko sekinin is significant to this book in that every film examined is pushing back against this “value,” on some level. The protagonists in these films can transcend their obstacles only when they recognize their connectedness and interdependence with others; those who serve only their own interests, as in Kurosawa’s films, meet their demise. The characters in these films must actively choose to extend generosity and compassion to others while learning to receive support and comfort from them in return. Yamada observes that the Heisei period ushered in a crisis of Japanese identity: “Japan could no longer call upon the narrative of progress that it used [both] to give meaning to its experience” and to envision the trajectory of its future (LH 6–7). Many films during this period deal with a sense of being lost and struggling to break free from the past. An extreme example is Noriko’s Dinner Table (dir. Sion Sono 2005), which features characters who have “dropped out” of their normative lives and now perform as family members for hire, promulgating the idea that families are not the bedrock of a stable society but are confined cages wherein members are expected to play circumscribed roles. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterful Tokyo Sonata (2008) portrays the disintegration of the lackluster life of a contemporary salaryman and his family after the dutiful patriarch is suddenly fired and hides it from his family. He finds himself standing in long lines to procure free lunches beside other be-suited salarymen similarly unmoored from what was supposed to be a respectable, modestly successful, and permanent middle-class career. The homeless men sharing the line with the ex-salarymen speak to the problem of kakusa shakai. Having been unceremoniously excommunicated from Japan, Inc., these men have no hope of returning to the delusion of the “ideal,” which always was far from it. Satoshi Kon’s moving anime feature Tokyo Godfathers (2003) actually features three homeless protagonists who believe they have been thrown away by society; one even declares himself “human trash.” Their story of redemption begins when they find a newborn baby in a pile of garbage on Christmas Eve. The film follows the three as they embark on a quest to find the baby’s parents, but, along the way, each of them encounters loved ones from the past who express unexpected care and compassion. Tokyo Godfathers is replete with Christian symbolism marking the sacred nature of the healing, redemptive love they are learning how to give and receive. These three exemplary films have some hard edges, but, ultimately, there is hope in their messaging: they are very much a part of the large group of Heisei films that “visualize a future that is open to change and transformation, one that is not a continuation of the grand narrative of high growth” (Yamada, LH 20). Japan is in the process of finding its way forward through this period of multiple levels of precarity, which has been further exacerbated by the unconscionable cataclysm

24

Introduction

of the 3.11 triple disaster in Tōhoku and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic, a catastrophe it shares with the rest of the world. Japan spent much of the first half of the twentieth century establishing itself as a military juggernaut, presenting itself to the world as an imperialist force, and the second half of the century witnessed Japan’s miraculous transformation into the second-largest global economy. Where Japan proceeds from here is a story still very much in the making. Some Japanese are pushing for the revocation of Article 9 so that Japan once again can dominate militarily; others advocate for further reforms that might spawn another economic miracle. However, there are a great many who are looking to transcend those pasts and move into a future in which Japan is a model of flourishing creative media, proactive and innovative sustainability, and compassionate resilience. The directors and films covered in this book are exploring ways to move forward, how to deal with the past, and what transcendence means for the Japanese in the present.

Transcending Transcendental Style: Schrader Redux As this book concerns transcendence and transcendental style from the perspective of religio-aesthetics, the godfather of the subject must be addressed, particularly inasmuch as he focused on Japanese aesthetics. Only one book focusing entirely on transcendental visual choreography in cinema was written before the twenty-first century, Paul Schrader’s 1972 Transcendental Style in Film, which is the seminal text in the field and, thus, has been a critical touchstone for the majority of scholarly writing on the relationship between religion/spirituality and cinema since its publication. The fact that the University of California Press published a reprint of the book with a new introduction in 2018 attests to its enduring influence in film studies. Undoubtedly, Schrader’s long and successful career as a screenwriter and director also was part of the impetus to republish the book.6 However, it is undeniable that, during the growth in prominence of religion and film studies, many scholars have shaped their own approaches to the subject in reference to Schrader.7 Notable examples can be found in the work of Michael Bird (1979), Peter Fraser (1998), and Nathaniel Dorsky (2003), who co-opt or build directly upon Schrader’s theory. Other scholars cogently reject Schrader’s conclusions and offer alternative approaches to the sacred, religion, and transcendental style in film, some of the most significant being Terry Lindvall et al. (1996), Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor (2003), Melanie J. Wright (2007), and Sheila Nayar (2012).8 The outstanding book-length studies of Wright, who uses a thoroughgoing cultural studies methodology, and Nayar, who posits an innovative epistemological approach, offer highly efficacious alternatives to Schrader’s theory. Mike King’s impressive and wide-ranging 2018 book Luminous: The Spiritual Life on Film, references Schrader but uses a broad, theme-driven approach and discusses nearly four hundred films from all over the world. My study also engages but departs from Schrader’s widely used definition of “transcendental style” in film studies, which has been criticized for universalizing the aesthetics of transcendence. Like Schrader’s book, this study examines transcendence in several films that are

Introduction 25 not primarily concerned with religion, nor are any of them aimed at a specifically religious audience. Unlike Schrader, however, my cultural studies methodology utilizing religio-aesthetics examines the rich contexts—historical, intra- and international, religious, auteurial—of each film in concert with their particular stylistic evocations of the ineffable rather than positing an essentialized transcendental style in which one set of semiotic structures applies equally to Zen Buddhism, Protestant Christianity, and Catholicism. For instance, while my chapter on Miyazaki’s Spirited Away uses Japanese notions of sacred space and perspectives on pilgrimage found in religious studies, the chapter on Kore-eda’s work applies recent philosophy of everyday aesthetics to analyze the transcendent stylistically and thematically. Whereas Schrader, and many film scholars following him, have claimed that the “truly transcendent” film must, or should, display a stark realism, this book examines sundry types of films, including animation and live action, and both period and contemporary films, which employ a combination of static and kinetic modes. The topic of Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema and the critical proclivity to compare Hirokazu Kore-eda’s work to that of Yasujirō Ozu bring us inevitably to look more closely at Schrader’s discussion of Ozu and Zen Buddhism in Transcendental Style in Film. As noted, Schrader’s concept of “transcendental style” has been remarkably influential, particularly in the realm of theology and film. Since the early 1970s, Schrader has had a long career in screenwriting and film directing, and, not surprisingly, his concept of transcendental style has expanded and developed in light of film theory and more recent cinematic trends. In his new introduction to the 2018 republication of his book, “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” he lays out a more flexible and inclusive conceptual grid for his take on transcendental style that relies more on film theory than religious doctrine. Schrader’s 1972 book, however, has been taken to task for essentializing Japanese culture and aesthetics by aligning them reductively with Zen Buddhism. He argues, “In Ozu’s films it seems that his personality was enveloped by Zen culture, and that Zen culture was enveloped by a transcending reality” (Transcendental 24), then makes the bold generalization that “any study of the ‘individual’ Yasujiro Ozu apart from traditional Zen values is meaningless” (Transc. 25).9 Schrader concludes, “Zen is the quintessence of traditional Japanese art”—listing Nō theater, painting, gardening, and the tea ceremony—and avers that “the basic principle of Zen art is . . . mu, the concept of negation, emptiness, and void” (Transc. 27). He gives special attention to Ozu’s pillow shots, which he calls “codas,” as moments of meditative emptiness (Transc. 29). What he is positing is a style of filmmaking characterized by stark realism, a static camera, long takes, and a preponderance of silent moments; it is in these blank spaces that the film invites the viewer to perceive the presence of the sacred behind phenomenal reality. Films using transcendental style, he contends, move through three steps to arrive at conclusions that “transcend” any particularities of religion or culture: 1. The everyday: a meticulous representation of the dull, banal commonplaces of everyday living. . . . 2. Disparity: an actual or potential disunity between

26

Introduction man and his environment which culminates in a decisive action. . . . 3. Stasis: a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it. (Transc. 39, 42, 49)

Regarding the static culmination, Schrader claims, “Complete stasis, or frozen motion, is the trademark of religious art in every culture. It establishes an image of a second reality which can stand beside ordinary reality” (Transc. 49).10 Therefore, films that follow this trajectory are “spiritual,” regardless of their religious content or lack thereof (Schrader, “Rethinking” 2). Consequently, he attributes Ozu’s filmic style entirely to Zen Buddhism, yet the concluding “stasis” Schrader posits transcends all individual religions, as this style is a “transcultural form” (Transc. 107–08). Yoshimoto criticizes this position particularly for using the Zen concept of nondualism and “the transcendental nature of Oriental art in general” to reconcile Ozu’s (and Japan’s) specific Zen character and the “universality” of the transcendental style (13). Considering Schrader’s sweeping generalizations and reliance upon D. T. Suzuki’s and Alan Watts’s Americanized versions of Zen Buddhism, Yoshimoto’s conclusions hold weight: Schrader’s argument on Ozu’s transcendental style is dependent on his deliberately ambivalent construction of Zen as the particular to be transcended and as the universal that makes transcendence of the particular possible. Whenever the logical impossibility of his formulation comes to the fore, Schrader tries to resolve the contradiction in the name of the ahistorical, holistic “Japaneseness.” (23) It is a tricky maneuver and one Schrader wisely abandons in his 2018 introduction, though the contents of Transcendental Style in Film itself are unchanged. In “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” Schrader’s new introduction, instead of resting his theory on the foundations of Christian and Zen doctrine and aesthetics, he expands into the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, Schrader uses Deleuze’s notion of movement-image versus time-image, which posits that, after World War II, there arose a new type of film more interested in manipulating time in such a way as to “communicate with the unconscious” (e.g., memories, dreams, fantasies) and “create introspection” (“Rethinking” 3–6). Schrader considers the work of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky to be the “fulcrum” of this paradigm shift because of its documentary-style attention to details of everyday life and its “meditative” long takes, which demand “viewer involvement” (6–9). Long takes, he contends, “withhold the expected,” creating “a dissonance between time and narrative” (11–12). This is a technique that Hirokazu Kore-eda has used throughout his work, although in a much more pronounced way in his first three fiction films. Schrader connects the trend of “slow cinema” directly to transcendental style, arguing that it is “one of several precursors to slow cinema,” though he states the two are not coterminous (21). Helpfully, he provides a clear definition of slow cinema that highlights the characteristics it frequently shares

Introduction 27 with transcendental style (10–16). The following listed techniques can be found in much of Kore-eda’s oeuvre: static frame, few camera angles per scene (“minimal coverage”), images preferred over dialogue, very little and quite simple nondiegetic music, heightened sound effects that “emphasize the quotidian,” and repeated shot compositions, often in identical locations (12–14). In fact, Schrader names Kore-eda as a “prominent practitioner” of “slow film,” which forces spectators to contemplate and empathize with the diegetic world and its inhabitants (16–17). This fostering of empathy is a hallmark of Kore-eda’s work, and this quality can render the viewing of his films a transcendent experience, as spectators are transported out of their own sphere of experience and into that of an-other. This is one way all films can function, ideally, but, as shall be argued, Kore-eda’s work provides space, or ma, that meaningfully cultivates these encounters and identifications with others. The first two body chapters in this book look closely at Shinto and Buddhist aesthetics and concepts in two anime films, Spirited Away (dir. Hayao Miyazaki 2001) and your name. (dir. Makoto Shinkai 2016), which directly engage with these religions by overtly depicting kami, sacred space, and a multitude of religious symbols to express messages of transcendence and hope. The following chapter looks at two Akira Kurosawa films, Throne of Blood (1958) and Ran (1985), that use the spectacular genre of the samurai film and overt references to Nō theater to confront cycles of violence leading to negative transcendence, the total destruction of the world and desolation of the soul. In these films, Buddhist and Shinto imagery represent ethical imperatives that go entirely unheeded, thereby demonstrating a need for positive change that no Buddha or kami can manifest. The transcendence must derive from humans making better choices, even if humanity is not predisposed to compassion. Thus, Kore-eda’s films are the only ones dealt with in this book that potentially could adhere to Paul Schrader’s much-discussed criteria for “transcendental style” and its descendent, “slow cinema.” Indeed, as noted, Schrader names Kore-eda as a maker of “slow films,” but he also places Kore-eda in a very helpful diagram, wherein Schrader maps “three anti-narrative directions” for films that move away from the “nucleus of narrative,” at the diagram’s center (“Rethinking” 25–33). He aptly dubs the “Tarkovsky ring” the circular boundary-line marking the difference between “theatrical cinema” and films that are screened exclusively at film festivals and art museums, and he explains, “Transcendental style occupies a bit of space just inside the ring” (32–33). Kore-eda’s name appears precisely here, just inside the ring, placed between “The Surveillance Camera” direction, which focuses on “quotidian, day-to-day reality,” and “The Mandala” direction, a meditative “cinema of inaction” (25, 31–32). Schrader rightly positions Kore-eda’s work closer to the “surveillance” side, though his earlier fiction films are closer to the “mandala” style. Organizing these “directions” or tendencies into a chart that reflects flexible continuums is much more productive and inclusive than the strict categorization in the 1972 book. Not only does this approach allow for a diverse array of filmmakers to be included in the “transcendental style” fold, but it also places these artists in meaningful proximity to each other, such that Kore-eda’s

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Introduction

name appears close to those of his declared influences, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Theo Angelopoulos; although Ozu, who is more firmly on the “mandala” side, is not too far off (32). This book’s extensive chapter on Kore-eda aims at a via media (pun intended) between Schrader’s earlier perspectives and his fruitful 2018 revisions. While some of Schrader’s theoretical arguments are built on here, such as the illuminating potential of a “contemplative” gaze on the quotidian, this study does not make any claims that Zen is primarily responsible, consciously or not, for the filmmaker’s choices or that there is a concluding “stasis” in these films that is “universal” (Schrader, Transc. 51–52). That being said, something several of Schrader’s critics seem to miss is his openness, expressed in the book, to there being “several transcendental styles in film” (Transc. 9, 152), a point that he expands on greatly in 2018. As Schrader has noted, the idea that certain types of realism in film can be considered transcendental because they have the potential to lead viewers to see their world more clearly stretches back into film history. A few of the major figures who have argued that film has this sort of revelatory power are avant-garde film “Impressionist” Jean Epstein in the 1920s and 1930s; Marxist cultural theorist Walter Benjamin in the 1930s; German thinker Siegfried Kracauer in the 1940s through 1960s; the “priest” of cinematic realism, Andre Bazin, in the 1950s; and his protégés, the phenomenologists, Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre, who published Le Cinéma et le sacré (Cinema and the sacred) in 1953. These thinkers, especially the latter three, significantly influenced Schrader’s ideas regarding transcendental style in 1972. In earlier work on the topic, Jean Epstein asserted that cinema is a way to see the world differently, a type of “profane revelation” that is “essentially supernatural” because “[e]verything is transformed” on screen (Epstein, “Senses” 246). As Leo Charney explains, Epstein believed that in the mechanically reproduced image, we re-see something familiar, [and] the reproduction allows us to focus on new qualities, eliciting something that our habituated perceptions could not discover. . . . The viewer appropriates as a supernatural defamiliarization the breach opened up between the object and its photogenic reproduction. (153) Epstein considers this capacity of film to be spiritual and transcendent insomuch as cinema pushes human perception beyond its ordinary boundaries: “One of the fundamental characteristics of cinematography is to make up for this [human limitation in time and space], to prepare syntheses for us, to reconstruct a form of continuity whose extent and elasticity in space-time is beyond the bounds of our physiology” (Epstein, “Photogénie” 191). Similarly, Benjamin saw great potential for film to “bring about a . . . deepening of apperception”: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the

Introduction 29 necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. (680) Film can provide viewers with a penetrating look at life’s familiar, everyday “details”; at the same time, it opens up larger visions of the world. Cinema’s ability to help us simultaneously see more precisely and more capaciously, to perceive an “immense and unexpected field of action,” recalls the core concept of prominent Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani, his refiguring of Zen “emptiness” as not a void space but a “field of sūnyata” (kū no ba): “[I]t is an open clearing wherein beings are neither nullified nor reified but rather let be in the mutual freedom of their coming to be and passing away” (Davis, “Kyoto” sec. 3.5). The screen, regardless of its size, opens up an ever-shifting, centrifugal world that provides a view of others elsewhere while, paradoxically, bringing familiar things closer. The shadows and light that pass on a screen can represent the things in our everyday lives and also render them uncanny, via our physical, historical, and cultural distance from them. In addition, the kinetic images may help us comprehend the reality that our lives always are in process, moving toward an inevitable denouement that may (or may not) be a bridge to another place. This, of course, is the metaphor and theme at the heart of Kore-eda’s film After Life, examined in Chapter 5. Extending Schrader’s ideas, Michael Bird, in his notable 1979 essay “Film as Hierophany,” argues adamantly that “everyday” realism in cinema communicates the sacred. Although his dogmatism is problematic, his research is helpful here. Bird looks back at French phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne’s work from the 1950s, which focuses on sense-experience (aesthesis) and affect, contending that emotions demand a “new attitude” or way of seeing (Bird 85–6). Dufrenne concludes, “To feel is in a sense to transcend” (qtd. in Bird 86). This explains one way that film can be “transcendent,” by moving our emotions toward empathy, thereby prompting us to emerge from solipsism, transcending the self. Of course, feeling can also refer to physical sensation. Phenomenological film scholar Vivian Sobchack argues that spectators experience film viewing synaesthetically (or “cinesthetically”), enhanced by their “transcendent” identification with onscreen characters (196). As a result, she contends, the paradoxical play of our immanence and transcendence, and the doublings, intensifications, and diffusions of an ongoing structure of mimetic exchange with cinema’s own sensuously enabled figuration, both our sense of bodily transcendence and the sensuality of our bodily existence are often amplified at the movies. (198) The growing field of everyday aesthetics, as explored in the chapter on Kore-eda, also is concerned with sense-experience and affect in regard to how individuals do (and do not) pay attention and respond to mundane things and activities. This

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kind of mindfulness can lead to new feelings about, and thus new views on or of, the elements of our daily life. Bird connects Dufrenne’s insights to theories regarding realism in film, particularly those of Bazin, Agel, Ayfre, and Kracauer, averring that “cinematic realism . . . explores the real by means of the real. It transcends the everyday precisely through the everyday” (91). In other words, images of quotidian reality invite the viewer to look past the surface and ponder what is beyond. Taking his cues from Ayfre and Agel, Bird declares that “a realism which is poetic (sensitive to beauty) is simultaneously a realism which is spiritual,” explaining “the sacred is sought as the depth in reality itself” (92). Bird echoes Benjamin but with a more numinous bent: “Cinema can heighten our perception of things pointing beyond themselves by means of a realism which is sensitive to the paradoxical character of reality, to be aware of a ‘distance in the heart of things,’ to see a thing ‘present in its very absence, graspable in its ingraspability, appearing in its disappearing’” (Bird 92; internal qts. from Agel 50). These may be profound observations, but, of course, there are many forms of “realism,” and even films that generally would be considered “realistic” might not inspire viewers to see into “the heart of things.” Nonetheless, the notion that cinema allows us to see our everyday lives in new ways, thus shifting our worldviews, is credible because most of us have experienced it. Likewise, it is evident that some filmmakers are able to communicate the spiritual through the quotidian. Furthermore, as Schrader confirms, some artists, such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, do this more powerfully than others largely due to their formal techniques. While Schrader and Bird are focused on a blank, “documentary realism” shot with a static camera and frequent long takes—both using the films of Ozu and Bresson as exemplars—this “slow” style is not the only aesthetic mode that can reveal the spiritual dimension of the everyday (cf. Schrader, Transc. 77). In this book, Kore-eda’s work is the case in point: his filmmaking style has changed throughout his career, with his earlier films being darker and more static than those after 2001, but what remains consistent, and transcendent, is Kore-eda’s focus on people’s mundane lives. Nonetheless, Miyazaki and Shinkai also make a specific point of portraying everyday activities in their spectacular anime films; thus, portraying the quotidian in such a way that viewers are able to see their world differently need not be restricted to “slow” and “realistic” films.

More Japanese Than Thou?—Late Ozu Versus Early Kore-eda: A Case Study As referenced earlier, the entirety of Part I of Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film is focused on the post-World War II work of Yasujirō Ozu and his use of “Zen” aesthetics (16–55). The case of Ozu’s seemingly ineluctable “Japaneseness” and the universal invocations of Ozu in connection with Hirokazu Koreeda’s work bespeak a desire to connect Kore-eda to the “golden age” of Japanese cinema history and to Japaneseness itself. One reason this seemingly ubiquitous comparison of Kore-eda to Ozu is significant is the claim, by now cliché, that Ozu is the “most Japanese” of all contemporary directors of the postwar era, the period

Introduction 31 of “classical Japanese cinema.” Donald Richie appears to acknowledge the problematic nature of this essentialism while still supporting the claim: “The presumed Japaneseness of Ozu’s approach—his emphasis on effect rather than cause, upon emotion rather than intellect—coupled with his ability to metamorphose Japanese aesthetics into terms and images visible on film—is what makes him, as is so often said, ‘the most Japanese of all directors’” (Richie, Hundred Years 123–24). Not coincidentally, this golden era of Japan’s national cinema overlapped with the US Occupation of the country (1945–1952), during which the US government was trying to transform Japan’s political landscape and manage its cultural output and identity, for Japanese as well as Western society. Concomitantly, the West began to pay attention to Japanese films during this period, starting with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashōmon (1950), which won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival and the very first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film (in fact, the category was created especially for this film). Thus, global audiences perceived these films as depictions of “Japaneseness” at a time when Japan was navigating profound identity crises and redrawing its “character” on the world stage. Japaneseness (nihonjinron) refers to “the discourse of Japanese uniqueness,” and Mika Ko explains how it has been used in the nation’s politics and films to project constructed images of Japanese identity and culture, both to Japanese and non-Japanese audiences (see esp. 1–31). The unavoidable trouble with discourses of Japaneseness is that they put forth “a conception of Japan as a signified, whose uniqueness [is] fixed in an irreducible essence that [is] unchanging and unaffected by history, rather than as a signifier capable of attaching itself to a plurality of possible meanings” (Miyoshi and Harootunian xvi). Of course, in the past three decades, as Japan has contended with sizable economic losses in sectors such as technology, the country has turned toward exporting Japanese popular culture, including manga, anime (and its prolific merchandise), video games, and film. In his book on “paradoxical Japaneseness” in Japanese cinema, Andrew Dorman asserts that Japanese film performs an often-contradictory dance between nihonjinron and globalization: Cultural performance . . . is always related to external commercial/industrial contexts: film festival selection; the use of “art cinema” as an effective marketing term; international coproduction; non-Japanese sources of funding. External consortia are heavily invested in the representation of Japan as a unique culture, a culture distinct from the rest of the world and the West in particular. This suggests an essentialist tendency, both in Japan and the West, to understand Japaneseness as otherness; to understand the “Japanese” in terms of their difference from non-Japanese. . . . So it is important that Japan finds new and flexible ways of representing itself, both as a highly distinct culture and a component of a wider global context. (214) This is a critical postmodern understanding of the ways in which the makers and purveyors of Japanese cinema (and other cultural products) are creating

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performances of “unique” Japaneseness at least partially for the purpose of marketing them to the West. This is not to say, however, that the artists who make Japanese media aimed at intra- and international audiences are compromised as creators by their portrayals of Japanese life or the “Japanese” qualities in the work they produce. Rather, artists cannot be separated from their local or their global environments, or from their intended audiences; thus, their creative processes and products always will bear the marks of their many intersecting influences and goals. The films covered in this book have widely varying relationships with Japan and the West, but each uses elements that could be considered discursively Japanese in such a way that could be read as nihonjinron, such as Miyazaki’s and Shinkai’s use of Shinto imagery and Kurosawa’s employment of distinctive aspects of Nō theater. These elements are extensively woven into the aesthetics, diegeses, and themes of these films, as will be argued, revealing that their Japanese properties, which were always already hybrid, are not superficial “bait” for marketing purposes but skillful orchestrations of Japanese signifiers to communicate profound messages to audiences at home and abroad. Concomitantly, it is also important to recognize that what is considered “Japanese” differs greatly from product to product, text to text. One will not encounter the same vision or version of Japaneseness in the J-Horror classic The Ring (Ringu, dir. Hideo Nakata 1998) as in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988) or in Kore-eda’s Maborosi (1995), though these films were made within ten years of each other. The multiplicity of nihonjinron discourses and their diverse motivations is eminently evident in our postmodern, technology-saturated world. Dorman argues, “Japaneseness, whether presented in the form of national identity, ethnicity, cultural iconography or history, is still evident, even in the most innocuous of products. This is because cultural specificity is never static or monolithic; it is malleable and can be adapted to whatever context, market or audience it is presented to” (35). However, in these “products,” particularly film and other media, the local and global forces are “complementary and interpenetrative” (34–35). National and regional boundaries are porous, as evidenced by the movements and evolutions of religions. This can be seen, for instance, in “Zen mindfulness” training in the West, with its focus on self-awareness and personal happiness, which bears little resemblance to Zen Buddhist monastic life in Japan or the principles that guide it; nonetheless, the “mindfulness” movement often trades on an exotic Japaneseness that conveys the stamp of “Eastern wisdom” on lifestyle products.11 It is clear that both Japan and Western nations have generated and utilized nihonjinron discourses and have benefited from them. Over the past century, as Mika Ko explains, different versions of nihonjinron have been promoted by the powers that be in Japan as expedient means to support the actions of the government and military. As Japan was becoming an imperialist power, conquering and ruling over Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, “Japanese nationalism now claimed that the ‘uniqueness’ of Japan was attributable not to its racial purity [as previously had been asserted] but to its ability to assimilate different racial groups” (Ko 13–14). However, this was deliberately shifted in the

Introduction 33 decades after World War II by both the Americans and the new Japanese government, who revived the picture of unique Japaneseness in an attempt to reinstate the myth of a homogeneous Japan, racially uniform and steeped in “traditional” Japanese culture that sets them apart from all others (Ko 14–15). Books such as Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1967) tried to explain the mysterious Japanese and their culture to a Western audience, but there also were Japanese books that descriptively and prescriptively defined Japanese character, such as sociologist Chie Nakane’s Human Relations in a Vertical Society (Tate shakai no ningen kankei, 1967), which argues that the “Japanese” adherence to societal hierarchy was responsible for the rising economic “miracle” at the time (Allison 26–27; Yoshimoto 17–18). Of course, it could not be used to explain why the “miracle” imploded two decades later. Dorman includes Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie’s 1982 book, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, in his account of studies that essentialize Japan, although he also notes that Richie’s more recent publications have qualified his earlier claims (Dorman 7–8).12 Nevertheless, in the revised 2005 printing of Richie’s A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, he still makes the sweeping generalization that, in Japan, “[a]rt and entertainment alike were presentational, that is, they rendered a particular reality by way of an authoritative voice,” which stands in “marked contrast to the representational style of the West in which one assumed the reality of what was being shown” (26). Here, Richie essentializes both Japan and the “West,” in a perspective on Japanese cinema he adopted from Noël Burch’s To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (1979) (see esp. Burch 70–75). Burch’s well-known book admirably places Japanese cinema in its historical contexts, considers the background of Japanese aesthetics, and applies Western theory to Japanese texts (rather than being merely descriptive). However, Burch continually defines Japanese cinema as the “Other” of Hollywood, which stands in for mainstream Western cinema, creating a bifurcation that privileges Hollywood as the touchstone. Burch, Richie, and Paul Schrader all have written valuable treatises on Japanese cinema that elucidate meaningful connections between specific films and traditional Japanese arts and ideas. This book, in fact, builds on many of their keen observations. At times, however, these scholars have contributed to discourses of Japaneseness, perpetuating the notion of a unique, monolithic, unchanging national character and culture, which this study attempts to avoid. There is a wealth of knowledge to be gained by examining classical Japanese aesthetics, including Heian artistic developments and refinement, Zeami’s extensive theoretical ruminations on Nō theater, the popular theater arts of kabuki and bunraku, and the ukiyo-e (woodblock prints and paintings) that celebrated these and other elements of the “floating world” of entertainment, nature, and mythology. However, these arts owe as much to Shinto as to “Zen,” and the aesthetic and philosophical concepts surrounding them have changed over the past millennium for multifarious reasons and in diverse ways. A useful example of this kind of motivated change is the eighteenth-century Native Studies scholar Motoori Norinaga’s intervention in and redefinition of

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the meaning of mono no aware, based on his research on ancient poetry, which is discussed in this book’s chapter on Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001). Moreover, when traditional arts and aesthetics are remediated in film and recontextualized, they are deployed by filmmakers purposefully to communicate perspectives on Japan’s present, and these messages go far beyond simple nostalgia and comparisons between “traditional” and modern Japan. Akira Kurosawa’s conspicuous use of Nō theater elements, for example, is markedly different in Throne of Blood (1958) and Ran (1985), though both films are set in the Sengoku jidai and they share some key themes, because Kurosawa is addressing audiences three decades apart and is speaking to those disparate moments (and, arguably, different primary audiences). While scholars such as Richie, Burch, Schrader, and David Desser certainly do not ignore historical contexts of the films and filmmakers they discuss, there is a propensity to essentialize “traditional Japanese aesthetics” and declare it a product of Zen Buddhism. Japanese cinema, as all cinema, always has employed a plethora of cultural elements and influences, from “home” and elsewhere, and examining the specific intersections of signifiers that are culturally ambiguous, distinctive, or concealing in individual film texts conduces to revealing the variations in “Japanese aesthetics” and their utilization in particular films.13 With the contexts and complexity of nihonjinron in mind, we return now with more nuance to the case of Ozu’s “Japaneseness” and Kore-eda’s widely alleged, and mostly praised, imitation of Ozu’s style. As the longest chapter in this book is dedicated to Kore-eda’s work, the connection merits further examination. It was Kore-eda’s very first fiction film, Maborosi (1995), that ushered in a torrent of journalists and then scholars insisting that the filmmaker was obviously inspired by the great master Ozu. Maborosi is a dark, still, and beautiful film about a widow struggling to understand her husband’s suicide in Osaka years earlier as she establishes a new life with her second husband in a remote fishing village. Despite the fact that no artificial light was used in Maborosi, which contrasts with the brightness of Ozu’s mises-en-scène, Kore-eda’s “contemplative” use of spacetime made the comparison irresistible. In 2008, the release of Kore-eda’s lovely Still Walking brought an avalanche of new comparisons to Ozu because the film is a family drama with evocative pillow shots and some static cinematography, though far less than in his first three films (Lim 10–11). At this point, Kore-eda had stated directly in interviews that he had never been purposely emulating Ozu (Ehrlich; Schilling 12). In fact, he claims not to have looked back at the masters of 1950s Japanese cinema until a dozen years into his fiction-filmmaking career, while preparing for Still Walking, because “[t]he way they made those studio films and the way I was making my films were so different”; he was more inspired by Taiwanese luminary Hou Hsiao-hsien and Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos (Schilling 12). Moreover, when he did review the work of classic Japanese auteurs, he concentrated on the films of Mikio Naruse because he feels they share a similarly pessimistic view of human nature (Schilling 12; Lim 11). Nonetheless, even in 2020, one film scholar argued, “Kore-eda’s cinema frequently makes direct reference to Ozu,” and he makes much of that connection; though, like Desser, he

Introduction 35 tempers that statement by expanding Kore-eda’s intertextual palette to European and other East Asian art cinema (Jacoby 48–49). Regardless, Desser still purports, “Maborosi equals Ozu” (278). When it comes to Kore-eda, many reviewers and scholars seem to be attached to “a desire called Ozu” that is equivalent to nostalgia for a unified sense of Japaneseness constructed in the postwar period and later intricately connected by film scholars to (often essentialized) classical Japanese aesthetics by talented and influential Anglophone scholars (e.g., Burch, Richie, Schrader, and Desser). That being said, even Ozu was not “Ozu” (Shigehiko 128–29; cf. Wollen 168). This point is illustrated by prominent Japanese film scholar and critic Hasumi Shigehiko, in his essay “Sunny Skies,” wherein he discusses Ozu’s unrealistic treatment of weather, that most basic element of the mise-en-scène of our everyday lives: [N]othing could be more un-Japanese than Nature without cold and rain. . . . When Paul Schrader broaches the subjects of wabi (sober, austere refinement) and sabi (the grace, charm, or beauty acquired with age) or gives an account of yūgen (mysterious profundity), or when Donald Richie mentions mono no aware (the pathos or transience of things), we are beset with uncomfortable thoughts. Nothing about the [ever sunny] light in Ozu’s scenes would lead someone to that kind of Japanese aesthetic sense. . . . There is no ambiguity in Ozu’s films to blur the outlines of things. He is a broad daylight director: rather than subtle nuances, he adheres to an excess of clarity. (121) In the rare moments when rain does appear in Ozu’s films, such as the memorable downpour in the middle of Floating Weeds (1959), it is always a specific portent of sorrow rather than a quotidian reality. Thus, Ozu’s work is not a verisimilar signifier of Japan or its “essence.” It is, like the vast majority of cultural products, a construct interweaving some aspects of Japanese culture, past and present, and other discursive elements, ranging from Hollywood filmmaking techniques to idealized weather patterns. In regard to Shigehiko’s point, if this were a game of “more Japanese than thou,” Kore-eda’s work, particularly his first three films, would seem to adhere more closely to the classic aesthetic concept of yūgen (dark, mysterious beauty) than Ozu’s oeuvre. However, we know from Kore-eda’s own statements that international art filmmakers, such as Hou and Spanish director Victor Erice, have been his direct influences (cf. Schilling; Ehrlich). In Kore-eda’s early, experimental fiction films, the prevalent darkness and shadow, the silence and stillness, and the narrative ellipses evoke active contemplation in viewers as they navigate murky aesthetics, meanings, and emotions. Keiko I. McDonald observes, “[Koreeda’s] gift for simplicity lies with visual images and diegetic sounds used as signifiers, inviting us to puzzle them out”; she, also, contrasts this with the “daylight” clarity of Ozu (Reading 216–17). This use of darkness and repeated aural and visual motifs inviting viewers to actively assemble meaning is explored in detail in regard to Kore-eda’s second fiction film, After Life, in Chapter 5.

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The poignant use of darkness in Kore-eda’s early fiction films does contradict the “Maborosi equals Ozu” equation, but it aligns Kore-eda’s earlier narrative work with another acclaimed source of Japaneseness: novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s famous 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, which offers a wide-ranging discussion of the import of various forms of darkness in traditional Japanese aesthetics. He grounds his observations in the aesthetics of Japanese architecture, particularly the traditional Japanese home, its materials and design determined by climate and available resources. Although In Praise of Shadows participates in the rhetoric of nihonjinron by arguing for “unique” Japanese qualities, as Francisca Cho contends, there is “value [in] its cultural and semiotic observations” (100). Cho, not surprisingly, uses Tanizaki’s treatise effectively in her reading of Maborosi (100–01). For our purposes, it is Tanizaki’s attention to the details of everyday life and his connection of those to aesthetic properties of various arts that is most interesting. Thomas J. Harper notes that Tanizaki’s “descents to the earthy plane of toilets and recipes are as vital to his aesthetic as his ascents to the ethereal realm of ancient temples and the Nō” (46). Harper also points out that Tanizaki “conspicuously refrains from claims of some mysterious aesthetic sensibility in the Japanese genes” (46). In Praise of Shadows is a decidedly secular, perhaps cheekily earth-bound, account of Japanese aesthetics: “The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose” (Tanizaki 3). Everyday aesthetics are primary: “The quality that we call beauty . . . must always grow from the realities of life” (17). He connects this observation to domestic architecture, arguing that “our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows toward beauty’s end” (17–18). This seems a remarkably apt metaphor for cinema, the art comprised of light and shadows. Kore-eda’s early fiction films masterfully “guide shadows toward beauty’s end,” and all of his work focuses on the everyday details of life. Understandably, Kore-eda’s penchant for darkness, stillness, and silence—the aesthetics of “emptiness” (mu)—has inspired compelling Buddhist readings of Maborosi, particularly those by William LaFleur and Francisca Cho. Marc Yamada also has written an exceptional piece applying Mahāyāna Buddhist concepts to After Life and I Wish and examining Kore-eda’s nondualistic use of documentary and fiction film techniques (“Between”). These studies are in keeping with the religio-aesthetics used to explore Japanese film in this book. However, some scholars question these approaches anchored specifically in Japanese religion, alleging this is another way of promulgating nihonjinron. Writing of Maborosi, Christina L. Marran contends, We are in the same sort of territory with Kore-eda as we are with Ozu in that there is nothing that marks this film as aesthetically related to anything Japanese except for a kind of obeisance that it seems to pay to Ozu who is consistently, and erroneously, framed specifically as a “Japanese” director. And so I wonder whether it is useful to encourage the portrayal of the mysterious and the unknown in the film . . . in terms other than existentialist ones. (167)

Introduction 37 Indeed, as the title of her article, “Tracking the Transcendental,” implies, Marran queries invocations of spiritual transcendence in regard to this film: “I wonder if speaking about [it] in Buddhist terms, despite William LaFleur’s convincing argument, similarly frames the film in such a way as to ‘Japanify’ it, thereby leading us away from the underlying trans-existentialist and minimalist tone of the film” (167). Cho cleverly escapes Marran’s “Japanifying” charge by rightly arguing that Buddhism transcends Japan and that, according to core Mahāyāna doctrine, it is void of essence (102–06). Indeed, Cho’s insightful chapter on Maborosi makes sophisticated moves to describe the connections between Daoist conceptions of yin (the dark, mysterious feminine principle) and Japanese Buddhism in particular, applying yin aptly to Kore-eda’s use of shadow and characterization of the widow Yumiko (93–96). In her existentialist argument, Marran opines that, as Maborosi does not have anything overtly to do with Buddhism, the film “might rather be about a loss of contact with the religious, about the sense of an absence of the sacred in the modern world, of a concern perhaps that we cannot touch the sacred anymore” (167). The qualifications here are key. The everyday realism in this film—contrary to Schrader’s theory and Desser’s application of it to Kore-eda—can be read as negating the sacred. Readings employing cultural specificity, including national and religious types, are problematic if they claim to be the preeminent or most viable approach instead of one of many. Arguments applying Japanese aesthetics and religious concepts to Japanese film are not necessarily right or wrong, nonessentialist or essentialist. Marran’s secular readings of Kore-eda’s films—she comments on After Life as well (168)—make significant and valid points about these films that can be applied to Kore-eda’s work in general, and the fine Buddhist readings of Maborosi elucidate different possibilities and facets of this film and the two that follow. As frameworks for understanding Japanese film, these various cultural and theoretical lenses can be helpful and illuminating. By being attentive to diverse approaches, we may be able to avoid being blinded by the incandescent richness of Japanese aesthetics and the temptation to view them as essentially timeless, which can prevent us from perceiving the particularities of individual cinematic texts and their multifarious contexts, influences, and motivations. To conclude this brief look at “Japaneseness,” it is clear that essentializing and fetishizing Japan, its people, culture, and ideas, is both a global and a Japanese phenomenon. Some discourses of nihonjinron are so popular they function effectively as clichés around the world, and many have been circulating for centuries, though especially since the Meiji Restoration began in 1868, from the French japonisme movement to the global obsession with Pokémon GO. One can walk down the street in a Los Angeles suburb and see young teens wearing shirts featuring any number of anime characters or sporting baseball caps with “Otaku” (manga/anime nerd) scrawled across the front. “Cool” Japan, the images of itself that Japan exports in sundry pop culture “packages,” is a booming business in a nation that has been dealing with three decades of economic recession and stagnation (Tamaki 30–34). Cultivating Japanese “uniqueness,” selling exoticized

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versions and visions of itself, can be a lucrative proposition, even, and perhaps especially, when that exoticization is actually a hybridization of Western and Eastern elements, such as Kurosawa’s ronin “Western” Yojimbo (1961), which owes a great deal to Hollywood’s John Ford. Furthermore, the influence of American comics and Disney’s animated films on manga and anime is well known (cf. Buljan and Cusack 23–36). Thus, the perceived “Japaneseness” of these popular arts is more about the unique hybrid relationship between various influences in a particular artist’s work. In other words, a film’s “Japanese character” is always dialogical rather than monolithic. As noted, the filmmakers written about in this book—Miyazaki, Shinkai, Kurosawa, and Kore-eda—have varying relationships with exoticizing Japan and Western influences, but one thing they all have in common is that their films are aimed at both Japanese and Western audiences. Additionally, the films covered all contain powerful depictions of sacred space and spiritual symbolism, marshaled for didactic purposes (intentionally or not) and connected to narratives of transcendence of different kinds. These films use religio-aesthetics to argue for compassion and interconnectedness, giving each creator’s culturally shaped perspectives, artistic and philosophical, on how we understand our connections to each other. Transcendence in these films is less about singular satori (salvation) than about recognizing interrelatedness: transcendence—survival, rising above, glimpsing what is beyond the here and now—can only be pursued through our connection with others. In this sense, the messages of these films resemble Martin Buber’s philosophy of the I-Thou relationship, cultivating empathy by seeing oneself in the “other,” but the messaging is even more reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of transcendence, by which he means a recognition of one’s responsibility for others because they are not you: “alterity” calls for a humble orientation toward the preservation and support of those around you, going beyond the self (cf. Levinas 3–37, 97–109). Taking responsibility for others connects one to those others in mutually sustaining relationships of interdependence. Thus, this is not necessarily a “Japanese” message, but it is communicated in these films with signifiers inspired by Japanese culture, life, and history.

Space-Time Aesthetics: Dimensions of MA, Kū, and Mono no Aware Though various paradigms of sacred space are applied in the chapters of this book, the foundational and marvelously protean concept of ma is the central concept that runs throughout and dwells in its kokoro (heart-mind). James McRae pithily defines ma as “the spatiotemporal interval that is continually created between two or more persons or things by their interaction and through which those persons or things interrelate” (131). As an aesthetic principle of space and time, ma is a particularly apt concept to apply to film, wherein the illusion of movement and time passing is created by twenty-four (or more) frames per second and the necessary ma joining them together. Ma is also the pause in cinematic space-time a director might provide for viewers to ruminate within, such as in a still long take. In anime, those filmic “breaks” might be shorter than a full minute, but they serve the same

Introduction 39 purpose, as Miyazaki explained to film critic Roger Ebert when he expressed admiration for the reflective pauses in Miyazaki’s films. The revered anime legend replied, “We have a word for that in Japanese. It’s called ‘ma.’ Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.’ [Miyazaki] clapped his hands three or four times. ‘The time in between my clapping is “ma.” If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness’” (Ebert). As a concept, ma has been applied to all sorts of arts and design, but it has been discussed most saliently in the world of architecture. Architecture scholar Günter Nitschke argues that ma is the foundation of traditional Japanese architecture and defines ma as “place making”—“combining the dualities object/space, time/space, [and] objective outer-world/subjective inner-world” (152). Nitschke aligns ma with kū, meaning void, and he echoes the Heart Sutra when he states in typical Zen Buddhist, nondualist fashion, “Place (Ma) does not differ from void, nor void from place” (“Japanese” 152). Ma is a concept that most often has been attached to Japanese Buddhism, but it reaches much further back into pre-historical religious practice centered on kami. Richard B. Pilgrim contends, “Ma-like elements are best exemplified in Shinto in its sacred spaces—especially spaces thought (or designed) to be open, cleared out, and pure in anticipation of the coming and going of kami” (262). Pilgrim and Nitschke both point out that the Japanese kanji for ma (間) is comprised of the Chinese ideogram for gateway, which contains the character for the sun or, formerly, moon inside it (both important kami), which “suggests a light shining through a gate or door” (Pilgrim 258; Nitschke, “Place” 8). Therefore, the very purpose of ma is not to be “a mere emptiness” but to be the liminal space where enlightenment beams through (Pilgrim 258). Ma is a locus wherein the sacred and profane, the spiritual and the phenomenal, coexist and can be seen for what they are: interdependent and intimately connected. Pilgrim percipiently declares ma is a “religio-aesthetic paradigm” that functions as “a category of experience, knowing, or awareness,” in other words, a “way of seeing” (276). Indeed, this book employs ma as its overarching religio-aesthetic principle and applies multiple facets of ma to explore the films covered. Globally renowned Japanese architect Arata Isozaki asserts, “Space, or MA, is the very foundation of Japanese aesthetics. Minute particles of kami . . . fill that MA” (47). In Shinto tradition, kami can be many things, including earthly and celestial deities, natural elements and objects, and honored ancestors. These diverse kami share an awe-inspiring quality and possess a vital spiritual power or energy. This power is called ki in Japan, but more people are aware of its Chinese counterpart, chi. Thus, ma is an ancient and robust concept of space wherein spiritual power resides and connects the human and divine. Ma is inextricably bound up in the Shinto-Buddhist syncretism previously discussed and lends itself extremely well to the Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (Sanskrit: sūnyata), which generally is translated as kū. It is crucial to keep in mind the foundational meaning of ma when considering the meaning of emptiness in Japanese Buddhism. Kū is not a nihilistic void. Esoteric Buddhist Kūkai, in keeping with earlier Buddhist sources, saw the world as “constantly creating itself

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through the Five Great Processes (godai)”: earth, water, fire, wind, and space (kū, also translated as sky or the heavens) (Parkes 68). Kūkai saw these “processes” as constantly interacting with one another and with a “sixth process, awareness” (Parkes 68). The processual characteristic of nature is key as it illustrates that emptiness refers to the impermanence of all things (mujō) and, therefore, the lack of an essential, stable identity for anything in this world. Everything is empty of a singular essence; thus, all is not only capable of change, but it is always in the process of transformation. The transcendental processes of the protagonists in the films discussed in the following chapters are depicted with multiple types of aesthetic ma, many of which are introduced in this section. One approach to ma that centers on the fecundity of emptiness can be found in the work of Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990), a key member of the Kyoto School of philosophy, which flourished in twentieth-century Japan. Kyoto School philosophers were steeped in Western philosophical traditions and their work constituted a Japanese response to the ideas of important figures such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Using the lens of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism, Nishitani and his colleagues focused on the concept of emptiness, although they considered themselves philosophers rather than theologians working solely on or promoting any religion (B. Davis, “Kyoto” sec. 1). Bret W. Davis maintains that Kyoto School philosophy should not be thought of as “Buddhist thought forced into Western garb”; rather, it is best understood as a set of unique contributions from the perspective of modern Japan—that is, from a Japan that remains substantially determined by its historical layers of traditional culture at the same time as being decisively conditioned by its most recent layer of contact with the West—to a nascent worldwide dialogue of cross-cultural philosophy. (“Kyoto” sec. 1) Particularly relevant to this book is Nishitani’s aforementioned concept of the “place” or “field of emptiness” (kū no ba), another sort of ma, in which the plenitude of the interconnection and interdependence of all things can be experienced: “To settle in emptiness is to become clear in the pure clearness of emptiness. . . . It is the space where the ‘solidarity’ of reciprocal connection is truly possible” (Nishitani, “Emptiness” 185). This concept of a purifying and unifying emptiness is an extension of the traditional Buddhist doctrine of no-self (Skt. anatman). Nishitani argues one must depart from the space of egocentrism and move into the “field of emptiness,” the liminal third space, to purify one’s kokoro and see clearly one’s integral connectedness. According to Nishitani, as Michael F. Marra explains, “[t]he transcendence that is found in kū is essential in order to solve the anxiety of nihilism and meaningfulness. . . . [Kū] (emptiness) is an indicator of the way to transcend nihilism from the inside of nihilism itself. Here lies the possibility of a philosophy of emptiness for the modern age” (Japan’s 262). Nishitani’s approach to the aesthetics of emptiness is also valuable: he argues that kū should be “understood in its original etymological sense of ‘the empty space,’ [specifically]

Introduction 41 ‘the empty sky’ (kokū). . . . The infinitude of emptiness is finally caught in [a concrete] image, the sky, whose finitude allows one to grasp the notion of the unseen” (Marra, Modern 176; cf. Nishitani, “Emptiness” 179–85). This view of the spiritual space of emptiness echoes Kūkai’s notion of the constantly “creating” process of the sky (kū), the natural element canopied above all others. Images of the sky, clouds, and water are extremely common in Japanese arts, and they are representative of the fundamental belief in mujō within Shinto and Mahāyāna Buddhism. Marra describes the cosmic and personal spiritual significance in Nishitani’s kū concept: Descending onto earth, the sky permeates the world and sustains the invisible atmosphere surrounding man. It also opens up at the bottom of the heart of man who emotionally responds to this atmosphere. This opening is what Nishitani calls “the formless place at the bottom of the heart that comes into appearance by taking different forms.” (Japan’s 260) Seigow Matsuoka—approaching the imagery of sky, clouds, and water as ma— maintains that in medieval Japan, “[t]he tie linking the natural with the supernatural was a morphology of clouds, their myriad changes and forms. . . . Most Japanese designs, in fact, are based on changing forms temporarily assumed by clouds and water. In this we can discern one of the reasons . . . why Japanese culture is a ‘Culture of Transformations’” (56). Throughout this book, I will be describing shots that feature empty skies as “kū shots” or examples of the “aesthetics of kū.” All of the directors examined in the book employ the aesthetics of kū, but Makoto Shinkai has made it his signature aesthetic, as will be explored in the chapter on his anime blockbuster your name. (2016). One common use of the aesthetics of kū can be found in what Noël Burch called “pillow shots” and Schrader termed “coda shots,” both referring to the work of Ozu; in these shots, the director provides a pause between scenes in the form of “bridging” shots that often feature an expanse of sky, an empty space-time in which to contemplate (Burch 160–61; Schrader 29). Like other forms of cinematic ma, pillow shots are common in Japanese films, both live action and anime.14 These shots are usually still and frame evocative aspects of the mise-en-scène, predominantly sans humans. Natural symbols of the processual world, especially clouds and water, also commonly appear in pillow shots, occupying the open space of growth and transformation. While Nishitani’s philosophical and religio-aesthetic vision of the sky (kū) as the ever-changing element that stretches above and connects all things is at the center of his work, it also is crucial to consider that kū is his fundamental metaphor for, or embodiment of, the “field of emptiness,” the home-ground where all is interconnected. In other words, kū is as much about ascent, or looking “up” for connection, as it is about descent, looking down to the ground shared by all, as Marra has described (Japan’s 260). Here, the upward and downward gaze are both components of “upward transcendence,” a positive movement toward comprehending interdependence. The space between sky and ground is ma, the spiritually

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charged expanse bridging the distance between. What can be seen hovering in this liminal space, clouds and mist, along with the water on the ground reflecting them, are signs of “mutually circulating interpenetration,” as the water is constantly in process of transformation in these varying forms. Nishitani contends that movement into awareness of one’s “mutually circulating interpenetration” and interdependence constitutes a “returning to the home-ground of the world and of things; and this, in turn, means a return of the self to the home-ground of the self” (Religion [RN] 163; cf. B. Davis, “Encounter” 241). Expounding on Nishitani’s concept of personal illumination, Davis explains, “In order to reveal this original basis of human relations, it is necessary to undergo an existential or religious conversion, namely, a trans-descendence to the field of emptiness as a self-awakening to the home-ground of self and other” (“Encounter” 234). Nishitani uses the redolent term trans-descendence because he wants to move away from the idea of “rising above” and, instead, stress movement “to the ground” (RN 304), the ground referring to a metaphysical foundation where all is interpenetrating but also to the realm of the immanent world: an immanent transcendence, an enlightenment or “conversion” gained by realizing interrelatedness with all the “others.” In this study, the concept of trans-descendence is particularly important in regard to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Kore-eda’s films, which, in both aesthetics and story, center on characters learning to perceive and appreciate the wonders of the world and the potential for meaningful connection with and through mundane things and activities, such as cleaning or sharing food. There are a number of Japanese scholars and practitioners who speak of ma as a key foundational principle of Japanese aesthetics, even if they do not mention ma by name, and argue that it has been and continues to be influential and productive not only in Japan but also for Western artists and designers. One wildly popular global example is cleaning consultant Marie Kondō, whose international bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) launched her into stardom and even led to a popular streaming show on Netflix. Her fundamental idea is that opening up space by decluttering will create calm and help one focus in everyday life. Essentially, ma inspires mindfulness. Yuriko Saito’s philosophy of everyday aesthetics is rooted in her Japanese heritage, as she notes, and she connects spatial “emptiness” to Zen doctrine (Aesthetics 81–87). Saito sees attention to aesthetics in general as a path to beneficial forms of psychological or mental ma: Cultivating aesthetic sensibility conducive to contemplation and reflection helps us become open-minded to recognizing aesthetic values in diverse objects and qualities. . . . Thus, the Japanese tradition, with its hyper aesthetic sensibility towards various aspects of our daily lives, is useful in directing our aesthetic lives to embrace diversity and encourage mindful living. (“Everyday” 150–51) Though Saito’s work takes Japanese concepts as a starting point, her body of work is expansive, examining aspects of everyday aesthetics globally.

Introduction 43 Philosopher Ken-ichi Sasaki also investigates distinct aspects of Japanese aesthetics but explores its dialogical relationship with Western fine arts. He asserts that there is a “sense of space peculiar to Japanese sensibility, which is not only expressed in paintings and drawings, but [it] also determines and structures our perception of the world and representations of places where we are” (sec. 1). As a key example, Sasaki uses space in Japanese sansui painting (literally, paintings of mountains and waters), as opposed to Western landscape painting, arguing that the Japanese art “is characterized by its vitalistic conception: the cosmic space is filled with ki[,] a vital and spiritual element” (Abstract). He goes on to aver that sansui landscapes, prominently featuring open space (ma), represent not the “nothingness of the world [or] . . . the background of human actions and historical events but the unique or holy place that enables man to transcend. . . . Sansui is a live space, full of ki” (sec. 2). This idea of ma space being permeated with spiritual power also is reflected in Nishitani’s notion of the “field of emptiness.” Miyazaki’s and Shinkai’s beautiful, open landscapes in Spirited Away and your name. are vivid examples of this tradition of ki-filled natural space, which is rooted in a number of influences. Foremost among them, however, are ancient Shinto concepts of sacred space, with ma as their bedrock. Arguably, world-renowned Japanese architect Arata Isozaki is the most consequential scholar and proponent of ma as the foundation of Japanese aesthetics, and his work is central to my analyses of the cinematic texts covered in this book. Accordingly, what follows is a closer examination of Isozaki’s crucial perspectives and efficacious concepts and terms as they pertain to this study. Isozaki, whose international career spans over sixty years, won the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize for his lifetime of achievements in the field in 2019. Throughout his career, he has been intrigued with the concept of ma, the space in between; thus, he curated a momentous interdisciplinary museum exhibition called “MA: Space-Time in Japan,” featuring various types of art and architecture, including elements of daily life, connected by this concept. The exhibition was first staged in Paris in 1978; then it traveled to New York, Houston, Chicago, Stockholm, and Helsinki. In 2000, the exhibition was restaged in Tokyo, and, in the fall of 2020, during the pandemic, the Japan House Los Angeles held an online discussion panel with four prominent architects and educators called “Rethinking of MA: Space-Time 2020.” In August of 2020, Kyoto Journal dedicated an entire issue to “ma: a measure of infinity.” Thus, it is clear that ma is not a concept that lives in the past; it is very much a part of art, architecture, and everyday life in the present. An impressive interdisciplinary treatise in itself, Arata Isozaki’s pivotal, extensive essay in the program for the original “MA: Space-Time in Japan” exhibition in New York in 1979 is the foundational text that scholars and creatives from diverse fields turn to for all things ma. Long after the exhibitions were over, Isozaki’s writing has promulgated the concept to artists and architects globally, especially those in Europe and North America. More directly than Saito or Sasaki, Isozaki posits that the concept of ma has established the “unique spatial perception of the Japanese [which] has created a particularized sense of daily life” (13). However, the architect’s distinctive postmodern structures all over the world reflect

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the cultures in which they are situated—such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (completed in 1986)—and embody the fact that he sees ma as an important design principle that can be used to great effect anywhere, adapted to any culture. Like Saito, Isozaki has spent his career connecting East to West. He demonstrates that ma is an aspect of Japanese culture rooted in ancient religioaesthetics, but it also is an approach to space-time that can be used in a multiplicity of contexts today. In other words, ma does not belong to Japan, ancient or modern, but it is a significant, fertile aesthetic concept with multifaceted applications. The crux of ma is that it conceives of time and space as inextricable: “space [is] recognized only in its relation to time-flow,” and time is attached to and measured by how one moves through space (Isozaki 13). This renders the perception of time and space mutually reliant or correlative, as they are within film, an art comprised of time moving through space, or space moving through time, depending on perspective. Benjamin notes this when he observes, “With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended [in time]” (680). Films are “guided tours” through diegetic worlds in which space and time are controlled by the filmmakers. Ma’s most common meaning today is interval, as in music, or an open space between things. However, perhaps befitting a concept of its advanced years, ma has a multitude of applications and connections, stretching from ancient to current times, and many of its uses apply to various aspects of quotidian life as well as art. Isozaki avers that “[t]oday’s usage of the word MA extends to almost all aspects of Japanese life—for MA is recognized as their foundation. Therefore, architecture, fine arts, music, and drama are all known as ‘the art of MA’” (12). Of course, with its confluence of space and time and its frame marking the boundaries between worlds, film also is very much an art of ma. Helpfully, Isozaki provides a significant list and multiple examples of ma’s multidimensional manifestations in art, design, and philosophy. The most fruitful ideas for cinema will be applied to films throughout this book, so bullet-pointed paragraphs follow, headed with the concept names for easy reference.15 Several of the terms have evolved in various ways over the centuries, often from sacred to mundane contexts, and those shifts and connotations are noted where pertinent. Overall, the list starts with ma’s ultimate foundation in ancient Shinto ritual and moves into various secular conceptions, which retain the ki of the kami, according to Isozaki and scholar Matsuoka, who penned the second essay in the “MA: Space-Time in Japan” program. •

Himorogi, yorishiro, and shimenawa: In ancient Japan, worshippers summoned kami by designating an open sacred space, called himorogi, into which kami would descend. The square or rectangular space was created with four posts in the ground and a rope, called shimenawa, tied around them to enclose the space. During the ritual, the kami would descend into this sacred space through a central pillar, the yorishiro, temporarily abide there, and then ascend: a god in motion through space in time (Isozaki 12, 20; cf. Matsuoka 57). Throughout this book, himorogi, an archaic term meaning “the place where kami descends,” is used to designate a specifically Shinto-oriented sacred space reflecting ancient ritual structure, and kekkai, a more common

Introduction 45

•

•

and Buddhist-inflected term, is used to indicate all other types of sacred space. (The two terms are able to be used interchangeably.) The influence of himorogi design and materials on what is commonly considered Zen Buddhist aesthetics can be seen in “the white sand and natural stones that were sometimes placed in the holy space to symbolize the numinous forces [which] led to the creation of dry gardens, kare-sansui” (Isozaki 12, 45). Isozaki contends, “Most of the methods and elements of spatial composition employed in Japan originated in the ancient ceremony of summoning the kami” (20). The himorogi space is one of hierophany, where the sacred manifests. The yorishiro is an example of Eliade’s notion of “of a universal [or cosmic] pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is fixed in the world below” (Sacred 36–37). An axis mundi, including yorishiro and the larger himorogi structure, represents an opening in earthly space-time allowing access to, and perhaps communication with, spiritual entities and dimensions, powers potentially benevolent and malevolent (Eliade, Sacred 36; Isozaki 12, 21). In Shinto traditions, large, old trees often serve as an axis mundi and are frequently marked by encircling shimenawa with the zig-zag paper shide (representing the sun goddess Amaterasu’s illuminating rays) hanging from the rope. The single pine tree painted at the back of the himorogi-inspired Nō theater stage space is also a yorishiro/axis mundi, marking it as sacred, a place where gods and demons descend into actors and tread the boards. Even in traditional Japanese domestic architecture, there is a central pillar (daikoku-bashira) in the home, symbolizing a connection to the spiritual realm (Isozaki 41). These sacred spaces are saturated with ki and serve as thresholds between the natural and supernatural worlds.16 Hashi describes a spatial and temporal bridge. Hashi is the common word now for a physical bridge, but, originally, it referred also to an edge, including everyday structures such as steps (bridging levels), chopsticks (bridging the distance between plate and mouth), or a porch (a bridge between interior and exterior spaces). While hashi implies the bridging of MA (the space between two objects), it also retains a spiritual component: “An edge represented the limit of one world, assuming the existence of another world beyond. Anything that crossed, filled, or projected into the chasm of MA” (Isozaki 12–13, my emphasis). Michiyuki refers to traveling down a road, so it connects to MA as a space that “coordinates movement from one place to another” (Isozaki 17). It also points to the physical space that shapes one’s path and the time it takes to travel it, i.e., how space shapes movement through time. Isozaki gives two helpful examples: the stones leading one across a pond to a tea house, the gaps (MA) between which regulate and direct one’s progress; and the Tokaido, the historical road that connected Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo), along which there were fifty-three waystations, each placed such that the stop marked a place to rest where there was a special landscape to be viewed (17). The rocks and the waystations are MA, where one pauses in the midst of a journey, but the space (pond or road) bridging between stops is also MA, guiding hashi between the

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Introduction space-times of rest. Thus, the interval, or structuring absence, refers to both pause and movement, so it is the alternation or shifting between these varying structures of space-time that comprises MA. Michiyuki ma, like the waystations on the Tokaido which orchestrated space and time, mediate and guide experience and observation, just as cinematic texts do for viewers. Susabi means a diversion to pass the time, a playful amusement, and it connects to MA as a reference to a procession or grouping of signs. “MA is an empty place where various phenomena appear, pass by, and disappear” (Isozaki 16). This is a literal description of images on a screen, an empty framed space where forms materialize and vanish. Writing about Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Kathe Geist considers and extends Schrader’s application of the Zen Buddhist concept of mu (emptiness) to Ozu’s static style, use of silence, and minimalist mises-en-scène; she then connects mu to MA, contending, “Ma is a kind of moving mu, a void in which time and space interact and define themselves through an action” (112). Geist rightly identifies the core difference between mu and MA as movement and effectively uses the concepts of susabi and hashi in her analysis of Ozu’s use of space. However, she reductively associates MA with “Zen aesthetics,” connecting it only with the mu of Buddhist doctrine, and seems to miss the significance of MA’s structuring absences encompassing both movement and stasis, as even stillness is experienced in time (cf. Geist 115). Utsushimi connects to MA as “a place where life is lived. . . . UTSU means void but was later extended to mean ‘projection.’ MI means body. As a whole, the word expresses ‘the physical which is projected into reality’” (Isozaki 40). Isozaki writes that utsushimi can refer to the rooms in a house, which people inhabit by dwelling within and moving through them, like the kami’s visitation of and movement through sacred space (40). Of course, the idea of “projecting” the physical body into a structured space also is particularly well suited to the framed filmic image. Suki, like utsushimi, connects to MA as “the structural unit for living,” such as a room. SU means aperture, but “in the Edo period it had many connotations, from SUKI (like) to furyu ([refined] chic),” aligning the word with positive aesthetics (Isozaki 32). This concept also reflects the idea that each structural space, such as a tea house or a room in a home, is its own intertextual microcosm comprised of a unique combination of objects and design elements that refer to ideas, cultures, or experiences existing outside that space (Isozaki 32–33). The intertextual nature of film and its precisely designed mises-en-scène resonate with suki. Utsuroi deals with temporal “edges”—MA as “the way of sensing the moment of movement. Originally . . . utsuroi meant the exact moment when the kami spirit entered into and occupied a sacred space. . . . Later it came to signify the moment when the shadow of the spirit emerged from the void, . . . [giving] birth to the idea of utsuroi, the moment when nature is transformed, the passage from one state to another” (Isozaki 14–15). Thus, it is a marker of physical and emotional shifts connected to the change of seasons, when

Introduction 47 spring’s first flower buds or winter’s first snow falls (Isozaki 36). “Ma is the expectant stillness of the moment attending this kind of change” (Isozaki 15). Markers of seasonal change, such as cherry blossoms and colorful autumn leaves are the perennial subjects of Japanese poetry and art. The Japanese are known for this heightened aesthetic sensitivity to seasonal elements.17 Yoshida Kenkō, in his fourteenth-century classic Essays in Idleness, proclaims that “the changing of the seasons is deeply moving in its every manifestation” (Kenkō 18). Indeed, Kenkō writes prolifically on this topic in his essays, as well as recording all sorts of delight in sensory experiences of nature and everyday objects. These multifaceted concepts reflect how ma appears in various guises and how it is applied to mundane spaces and experiences, but Isozaki also makes clear that these diverse ma maintain a connection to their sacred, Shinto roots. It is significant that he considers the changes in meaning and usage that take place over the course of Japanese history and that he makes a point of noting how Japanese Buddhism incorporated ma-related aspects of Shinto ritual and design, such as in dry landscape gardens (kare-sansui) and the design of traditional tea rooms (cf. suki) (Isozaki 13–15, 24, 45). As with Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, Arata Isozaki, born in 1931, lived through the ravages of World War II and understands the role State Shinto played in spreading ultra-nationalistic propaganda in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, he prefers to trace ma further back in time to Shinto rather than explaining it exclusively as a Buddhist or “Zen” principle. Isozaki’s experiences during the war explain why. When he was fourteen, American bombs destroyed his hometown of Ōita, on the southern island of Kyushu. Then came the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Isozaki explains, “I grew up on ground zero. . . . [Ōita] was in complete ruins, and there was no architecture, no buildings, not even a city. . . . So my first experience of architecture was the void of architecture, and I began to consider how people might rebuild their homes and cities” (qtd. in Miranda). Creating structures in which to live, ma (e.g., utsushimi and suki), carves or inscribes human space into the void, establishes place where there once was empty space. Seigow Matsuoka, in his contribution to Isozaki’s “MA” program, points out that elements of mythologies from cultures spread across Asia and the Pacific Islands “were interwoven and integrated into Japan,” and “from this admixture” arose Shinto, the way of the kami (57). Thus, Shinto is not presented as “purely” Japanese. He goes on to assert, “The tale of Japanese culture has been told with excess emphasis, perhaps, on its Buddhistic core. We believe that a better understanding of Japan will be gained by tracing the role played by the kehai [dispensation of spirit] of kami in this composite religious culture” (57). As noted earlier, Kasulis also avers that what is generally considered “Zen” aesthetics was ingrained in Japanese culture and Shinto practice at least hundreds of years before the thirteenth century, when Zen emerged (45). He explains, “Zen prospered through its connection with the Japanese arts, not so much because it was

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introducing something totally new to the culture, but because it resonated with something old” (45). While it is clear that the aesthetics associated with Zen Buddhism were influenced by Chinese Chan Buddhism and Daoism, the significant impact of ancient Shinto has often been ignored. Matsuoka declares, The kehai of the kami’s coming and going was to pervade the structure of homes, the structure of tea houses [cha no ma, space of tea], literature, arts, and entertainment, and it has developed into the characteristic Japanese “aesthetic of stillness and motion.” This is what we call MA: the magnetic field from which the ch’i [ki] of kami subtly emanates. (56) Therefore, Isozaki’s and Matsuoka’s focus on ma as a Shinto concept that metamorphoses and expands through time reflects the composite, syncretic nature of Japanese culture rather than a separation of Buddhism from Shinto or a claim that one is superior to the other. What this lens on ma reveals is the notion of the presence of the spiritual in space-time, as indicated by aesthetic principles stretching back into Japan’s pre-history. Regarding the application of the Buddhist-oriented mu or the Shinto-oriented ma, while these two terms can be used interchangeably—especially when referring to aesthetics and its intersection with religion—it is useful to make distinctions when applying ma to film. Ma has three significant qualities that set it apart from mu, envisioned primarily as void and connected to Zen Buddhism. These three defining features are not mutually exclusive, but they highlight various facets of the same core concept: 1) Ma refers to structuring absences; that is, it denotes a type of interval between elements; 2) Ma refers to the confluence or intersection between SPACE and TIME, which describes film itself—a visible trace or recording of space moving through time as shaped by filmmakers, who control viewers’ experience of space-time (cf. michiyuki); and 3) Ma assumes movement rather than stasis, as the pause or interval is considered interstitial space to be traversed as part of a process or journey. These interconnected principles of ma reveal that it is an exceptionally apt and potentially fertile aesthetic concept to apply to film. These also are the qualities that render ma such a productive concept for architecture. For this study, it also is of great importance that both ma and mu are concepts connected intimately with religious discourses. In regard to Kore-eda’s work, for instance, Francisca Cho and William LaFleur discuss aspects of mu in their Buddhist readings of Maborosi. Ma, on the other hand, though sometimes used coterminously with mu, is a broader and more multifaceted concept, as described earlier, that is rooted in the carving out of sacred space in the phenomenal world. Thus, it is overtly connected to the layering and interpenetration of sacred and profane spaces. The formless kami inhabit the space of everyday life as well as that of ritual. This idea resonates with Schrader’s, Bird’s, and Ayfre’s perspective that the “Transcendent” can be revealed or evoked, via their version of transcendental style, when a viewer is led to pay close attention to the quotidian details of life. In this way, film can function as ritual, a michiyuki form of ma that guides

Introduction 49 experience and reminds the participant/viewer of the sacred among the mundane (cf. Plate 1–15). The notion of movement inherent in ma, however, contrasts with Schrader’s notion that mu is best represented by the static image of frozen time (Transc. 82–83). Moreover, Richard Pilgrim asserts that the Mahāyāna doctrine of “emptiness,” as expressed in mu and kū, “are none other than a Buddhist form of ma—a place in between where the subject/object world is continually emptied and, by virtue of that, continuously filled with a radically impermanent, mutually dependent reality” (275). This illuminates the relationship between ma and mu and aligns with this book’s vision of space-time in Japanese religio-aesthetics. Another consequential connection between film and ma is its protean relationship with time. Isozaki contends that Japan traditionally has lacked “any idea of ‘absolute time,’” pointing out that the Japanese measured time by the movements of the sun and moon, regardless of the time of year, well into the nineteenth century (14). For instance, there was no fixed idea of five p.m., only an ever-shifting moment in time when the sun would set. This leads to a sense that time is flexible and reliant upon perception. However, ma also points to the intersection and reciprocal impact of time and space, so, flexible though time may be when humans experience it, time meets space at a particular moment. One can cross a bridge at a similar pace every day, but some days the passing there will feel longer or shorter: fluctuating perceptions of time exist in relationship to place; time inhabits physical space, and place often orchestrates time (michiyuki). In cinema, there might be a long shot of two people sitting in silence in a static frame with little to no in-frame movement, or there could be a long shot of the same two people dancing joyfully, filmed with an unstable handheld camera. Though both shots may be twenty seconds long, it is likely that the former will feel longer than the latter. As Schrader argues, spectators’ experience of film time is tied to cinematic techniques. Filmmakers also can elongate time, as Benjamin says, with slow motion or speed it up with editing and elliptical transitions, which sometimes skip over many years of diegetic time. Controlling and shaping time is what film does, and mainstream films, such as those of Hollywood, use continuity editing and other established conventions to mask this manipulation. Conversely, international art film, such as Kore-eda’s, often plays with time self-consciously, as will be examined in After Life. The third chapter in this book explores time in the blockbuster anime your name., which deals strikingly with temporal displacement and interconnection, as orchestrated by kami (and, ultimately, by Shinkai, the kami of the film). Central to Richie’s and Schrader’s readings of Japanese cinema is the concept of mono no aware, an emotional sense derived from the characters’, and by extension the directors’, attitude toward the ceaseless, inevitable passing of time, bringing perpetual change (mujō). Schrader claims that Ozu’s later films create “the mood of total timelessness integral to Zen art,” relating this to the sixteenthcentury tea ceremony and its minutely regulated procedures, which, he declares, free the mind to “think of nothing, to be timeless” (Transc. 31). This ritualized “eternal now” brings about a static view of life (Schrader’s “stasis”), a transcendence characterized by a sense of mono no aware, which he defines as a sorrowful resignation to the vicissitudes of life, to the “permanence within transience”

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(Transc. 33–34). However, this type of “Zen” resignation seems counter to the Buddhist doctrine of nonattachment, as sorrow bespeaks desire, and mono no aware’s significance is broader than Schrader and his sources acknowledge. Motoori Norinaga argues that the meaning of aware shifted from its association with being stirred deeply by any strong emotion to denoting mainly sorrow (or sweet sorrow) over the course of the Heian period, wherein aesthetic tastes became increasingly “cold” in their pursuit of elegant refinement (Norinaga, “Mono” 174; cf. hie, meaning “chill beauty” [Richie, Tractate 71]). Norinaga describes mono no aware as fluid: “Aware includes a gamut of feelings, including joy, charm, delight, sadness, and love” (“Mono” 184). Richie calls Norinaga’s emendation of the concept a “more modern variant of mono no aware” and steers clear of using the term in Norinaga’s expanded sense (Tractate 52). Schrader and most other film scholars have followed suit. However, contemporary Japanese scholar Makoto Ueda offers one of the clearest, nuanced definitions and includes Norinaga’s perspective: “At [mono no aware’s] core is a deep, empathetic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifest in nature and human life, and it is therefore usually tinged with a hint of sadness; [though] under certain circumstances it can be accompanied by admiration, awe, or even joy” (“Mono”). In the twentieth century, Nishitani reflects on Norinaga’s views and believes that “in the feeling of aware a deep sense of sorrow and a feeling of affection are tied together in a form in which the two elements cannot be taken apart,” positing a “warmth” at the “bottom” of this sorrow (“Kū” 281). Nishitani agrees that mono no aware is concerned with the nature of time, specifically mujō, and a mix of emotions, but he connects the concept to the moment when Shinto and Buddhism were syncretizing: [T]he arising of the feeling of mono no aware is grounded in a sense of impermanence, but this happens because the sense of impermanence becomes a spiritual climate that is different from instances of other senses. . . . [Mono no aware] expresses something that is intimately Japanese. Namely, it expresses a human perspective—one facet of ways of being human—a form. It is not simply something Buddhist; it is the reflection of its form at the time when the Japanese people took Buddhism in. (“Kū” 281, my emphasis) It is significant that mono no aware is identified as a spiritual climate or mood born of syncretic beliefs, rather than solely of Buddhism, as most Japanese film scholars claim. This study also regards mono no aware as a syncretic, multifaceted concept, exploring how mono no aware is connected to perceptions of stillness and movement, distance and connection, and longing and wholeness, which are expressed in the aesthetics of ma. Regarding the relationship between mono no aware and Buddhism, it is significant that the central Buddhist tenet, as laid out by the Four Noble Truths, is that desire for the things of this world must cease in order for one to stop suffering: the ultimate goal of nirvana is reached only by fully awakening to the fact that all in this world is illusion, so attachment to any part of it is painful, rooted in ignorance,

Introduction 51 and should be relinquished. Mono no aware, by definition, is a feeling of empathy with and sorrow for that which is ephemeral in this processual world; thus, it is attachment, as noted by Norinaga in his important work on the concept. While he acknowledges that the Buddha was “deeply sensitive to mono no aware,” as Buddha pitied those chained to the wheel of samsara by their worldly affections, Norinaga asserts that “the Way of the Buddha is a way to abandon mono no aware, [even though] it often reveals mono no aware” (qtd. in Matsumoto 55). It was Norinaga who revived the term mono no aware, long after its heyday in the Heian era, as part of his project to seek out what is “uniquely Japanese,” the roots of which he considered to be in pre-Buddhist Japan. In that he identified mono no aware as characteristic of the “essence” of Japaneseness, Norinaga’s ideas politicized the concept and helped lead to ultra-nationalism despite his personal pacifism (Richie, Tractate 52–54; Kasulis 116–17). However, his application of mono no aware to Japanese literature is quite instructive for understanding and applying the concept to artistic texts, such as film and anime, particularly as he considers mono no aware a key “mode of perception” and communication between artist and audience (Ueda, Literary 202). Makoto Ueda explains Norinaga’s pivotal idea that mono no aware “enables one to feel with others, to understand others” and, thus, to know the other thoroughly (Literary 202–03). Mono no aware is, therefore, “an important principle both aesthetic and moral” that evokes a feeling and understanding of interconnectedness and interdependence (Ueda, Literary 202). Unmistakable in Norinaga’s perspective is the connection of mono no aware to the Shinto worldview of appreciating and intimately relating to ever-evolving natural phenomena of all kinds, through their cycles of life and death, and maintaining a stance of respect, awe, and wonder in their presence. Significantly, Shinto tradition uses three words to describe spiritual power: mono, mi, and tama, which is the term most commonly used to refer to spiritual power in general (Kasulis 14). However, mono and mi are distinct from tama, in that they “emphasize . . . an internal relation between spirituality and materiality,” suggesting that “neither spirit nor matter can exist without interdependence. . . . The material world is at all times in all places spiritual, and the spiritual never exists without the physical” (Kasulis 15). It is revelatory that the general definition of mono is simply “thing” or “things”; thus, mono no aware is literally translated as “the pathos of things,” and the notion that all “things” are spiritual is inherent in the term. The films explored in this book evoke various aspects of mono no aware, from the ma of quiet contemplation to the ecstatic eruptions of emotions such as joy and love. All of these strong emotions can express a spiritual encounter that moves characters beyond themselves and the perceived limitations of this world. While Schrader sees a melancholy mono no aware as concomitant with spiritual transcendence in Ozu’s worlds of minimalist realism, Vivian Sobchack argues that there are diverse emotions (in type and intensity) as well as aesthetic environments in which transcendence can be experienced: This experience of transcendence in immanence occurs constantly in myriad circumstances both trivial and significant, quotidian and ritual—including

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Introduction those such as going to church or the movies, in which ex-static transcendence is not only purposefully solicited but also formally shaped and experientially heightened. No matter the circumstance, however, the structure of this experience is paradoxical in that it emerges from our sensual embodiment even as it seems to release us from our bodies’ ontic constraints and demands. (197)

Here, Sobchack evokes a michiyuki form of ma in her insistence that transcendence— in everyday life and in film viewing—can be “formally shaped and experientially heightened,” but she also alludes to the notion that transcendence can free us from the sense of being fixed in time (an “ontic constraint”). Ma can be an interval, a break in or from time, a movement through the space of transcendence, which might be experienced as a still sadness or as an “ex-static” joy (or anything in between); both can be seen as mono no aware: an experience of strong emotion that moves one to perceive space-time differently. The best films do the same.

Conclusion: The Sacred Spaces of the Chapters In October of 2017, the Yuwaka Bonbori Festival drew more than 15,000 attendees, but this was not an ancient Shinto matsuri (festival), though it featured a procession of participants carrying paper lanterns (bonbori) to show a young goddess the way to her conclave with the other kami (Donko). This small onsen (hot spring) town in Kanazawa prefecture held its first annual bonbori festival in 2011, soon after the popular twenty-six-episode shōjo anime series Hanasaku Iroha had aired its final show, which featured a matsuri meant to honor a fictional young female kami. The fantastical inspiration for the sacred festival does not stop the ritual’s participants from writing their wishes on plaques, as in other festivals, and burning them in the matsuri bonfire, which transports their requests to the kami. The question of whether or not the ritual, its traditional symbolic implements (lanterns, wish plaques, fire), and the space in which it transpires are sacred is beside the point: thousands of people make a pilgrimage to the small mountain town every year to join with others in reaching out to a spiritual power, regardless of their faith or lack thereof. The festival, like most sacred celebrations, is an affirmation of the vital life force, ki, and its flow through all living creatures and natural elements, connecting them to each other. The rapid, exponential growth of this festival demonstrates a draw to sacred spaces and rituals in reimagined ways, particularly for young Japanese. Anime pilgrimages of various types are common in Japan. New religions that have developed in Japan over the past few centuries—which often weave together aspects of Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism, and Christianity—also have been inspired and influenced by manga and anime in the past several decades (Buljan and Cusack 48–60). Indeed, popular culture impacts religion everywhere. In Japan, a nation replete with sacred space and its markers, some citizens are moved by media to create more such space, more rituals, and more amalgamations of spiritual activity and symbology to form transcendent experiences. It is not surprising, then, that the films discussed in

Introduction 53 the coming chapters variously portray sacred space and time, objects, rituals, and practices, revealing the diverse ways in which characters perceive spiritual power and experience transcendence, both human and supernatural, prompting viewers to consider spiritual and cosmic issues. The films of Miyazaki, Shinkai, and Kore-eda covered in this book all use religio-aesthetics, including markers of sacred space (kekkai), to communicate messages about interrelatedness and compassion, the profound “feeling with others” Norinaga associates with mono no aware. The protagonists in these films are not resigned to their situations, as with a melancholy aware, but seek to shape the future for the better on behalf of themselves and their communities. The process of transcendence only can be experienced by moving beyond the self and seeing the world anew as an ever-changing “field” where all things are interdependent. This concept of the interconnection of all natural and supernatural phenomena can be expressed in the term musubi, which begins with the same kanji character as kekkai (結), which means to join or bind together. Musubi is the overarching theme of your name., as will be elucidated in Chapter 3, but it is a core theme in all the films dealt with in the book. Sacred space is where the human connects to the spiritual and where humans connect to one another. The various representations of sacred space—most often through multidimensional ma aesthetics—express this central concept. The films of Kurosawa in Chapter 4 are the exception, as they use the destruction of sacred space to communicate downward transcendence, a process in which relationships are broken and the diegetic world falls into chaos such that all are connected in their descent into the infernal. Thus, the films examined in this book, like the Yuwaka Bonbori Festival, create new sacred space-times wherein to witness, be inspired by, and experience musubi, the holistic connection that causes new things “to be born and grow,” creating both “life and power” while generating maturation and development (Hardacre 477). The flow of the following chapters moves from the films that most overtly portray and incorporate sacred space into their narratives to those films in which sacred space is least marked but, nonetheless, is a powerful presence throughout. The progression, then, is from manifestly transcendent diegetic worlds, illustrated in anime, to relatively immanent mises-en-scène in terms of audio-visual signifiers in live-action films. Not surprisingly, anime is the largest global “seller” in Japanese cinema, and it is saturated with syncretic Shinto and Buddhist elements, though Shinto is predominant. Thus, Chapters 2 and 3 explore the salient ShintoBuddhist elements in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Makoto Shinkai’s your name., with emphasis on Shinto-inspired sacred spaces and beliefs. Spirited Away takes place in a resplendent but dangerous world of the spirits, populated with kami and yokai of all sorts, wherein our young human protagonist, Chihiro, undertakes a pilgrimage to rescue her parents but learns to be generous and compassionate toward all beings on her journey. In your name., teenagers Mitsuha and Taki are swapping bodies, thanks to a natural kami connected to the Shinto shrine at which Mitsuha serves as a shrine maiden (miko), as did her foremothers. These two chapters examine the ways in which these global blockbuster anime films orchestrate sacred space and symbolism, including direct encounters with

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the numinous, to communicate strong messages about transcending cataclysmic circumstances. Both films comment eloquently on the troubles of the Heisei era. Released in 2016, your name. also responds to the 3.11 triple disaster, revising the historical devastation, a choice not always well received by critics and scholars. Chapters 4 and 5 shift to live-action films, which tend toward Buddhist-oriented, though still syncretic, depictions of sacred space and symbology. The fourth chapter examines two classic films by Akira Kurosawa, Throne of Blood and Ran, both of which are set in the tumultuous Sengoku jidai (Warring States period) and conspicuously employ Nō theater elements to reveal the absurdity of humanity choosing endless cycles of violence that doom it to everlasting downward transcendence. This descent into perdition is wrought not only upon those who inflict the destruction but also on those who try to stop it. Buddhist karma does not work for individuals in these diegetic worlds because all are interconnected in this processual “field of emptiness”: they all go down together due to the avarice of the few, driven by their insatiable desire for power. In these films, Kurosawa gives us cautionary tales, warning not only Japan but the world that our fates are inextricably interwoven. A brief look at Kurosawa’s final film, Madadayo (1993), reveals that the iconic filmmaker retained his hope in the redemptive nature of community, compassion, and wonder. The final chapter explores two films of Hirokazu Kore-eda and takes on a new approach to religio-aesthetics using the lens of the growing field of everyday aesthetics. After Life and I Wish return our gaze to worlds of upward transcendence in the present. The first transpires in a spiritual domain where the newly dead choose one memory from their lives to take with them into eternity, and the second follows two young brothers who have been separated from each other in the wake of their parents’ split. Both films deal with characters in liminal spaces, navigating a hashi type of ma to facilitate movement forward into a future in which interconnection is mutually sustaining and brings a recognition of and gratitude for everyday pleasures we so often share with others. Significantly, both of these films also feature a central metaphor connected directly to their characters’ journeys toward transcendence. In After Life, the recently deceased “clients” direct the making of a short film of their “eternal memory,” and this film is the vehicle that takes them into the next world. Cinema is the sacred space of transcendent connection. The protagonist of I Wish, Kōichi, has a meaningful relationship with a massive volcano, Sakurajima, that is visible from his new home, and this kami helps guide him to a broader understanding of what it means to care about and be invested in the world at large. One of the purposes of this textually diverse exploration of Japanese cinema is to demonstrate my contention that there is not one privileged transcendental style in film, nor is there a binary polarity of stasis and spectacle. Rather, there are a multiplicity of approaches, stylistically and thematically, to the transcendent in film, which are related to concepts that are culturally distinct but neither monolithic nor insular. The films of Japan are ideal to explore in this regard due to the nation’s prevalent use of religio-aesthetics, resulting in discernable qualities that persist and evolve in the design aspects of everything from fine arts to popular culture to architecture. In addition, Japan’s perilous geography, as an island nation

Introduction 55 sitting atop a volatile “nest of earthquakes,” makes strategies for survival and overcoming tragedy a central concern. Moreover, the economic and societal precarity in the wake of the explosion of the Miracle Economy has led the Japanese to seek new paths forward, redefining their relationships with each other and with the world. These films of upward transcendence provide visions of movement toward wholeness, portraying the reparation and bridging of the illusory space between separate people and between humanity and the spiritual world, of which Japan has a richly multivalent understanding. Conversely, Kurosawa’s two films are object lessons about endless brokenness. All of these films feature ma as an aesthetic and philosophical signifier, but the films themselves also are ma, fields of emptiness—framed spaces of flickering, ephemeral light—in which senses of connection can be awakened and interdependence can be apprehended. Cinema in Japan has tended toward the didactic, whether consciously or not on the part of the filmmakers, which is another factor leading to diegeses and formal elements that communicate transcendence, either rising above the here and now or sinking under its weight. In diverse ways, each film covered in this book is a stunning, remarkable exemplar of transcendental cinema. In their multifarious evocations of sacred space, spiritual power, and human connection, they inspire and nourish movement toward “feeling with others.”

Notes 1 One excellent example of this scholarship is Buljan and Cusack’s book Anime, Religion and Spirituality, but general accounts of anime and its history inevitably consider the impact and significance of religion, whether Shinto, Buddhism, or Christianity, which are the most common religions referenced in anime. 2 Mike King, instead of hierophany, uses the word luminous, which he defines as “moments in a film that convey something of the profound connectedness of the religious experience, or something of the sacred, or a breakthrough or transformative moment, . . . which has the potential the potential to change the viewer” (19). Essentially, this is what hierophany means in regard to film. Unlike Paul Schrader (circa 1972), King views films with “heightened aesthetics” and those with quiet, stark realism as being “luminous.” 3 Ikigai has become a trendy lifestyle concept in the West, aided by the book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles (first published in Spanish in 2016 and in English in 2017). 4 For an extensive treatment of this aesthetic phenomenon, see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s study Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalism: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (2002). 5 Haunting accounts of the 1995 sarin gas attack from multiple perspectives can be found in acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s collection of his interviews with surviving victims of the attack and members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001). 6 Paul Schrader’s many credits can be found easily on IMDb.com, but some of the highlights are his screenplays for director Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and films he wrote and directed, American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), and the more recent First Reformed (2017), which was his first attempt at making a film that adheres to his concept of transcendental style.

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7 For a superlative, compact but thorough account of approaches to the sacred and transcendental in cinema, including Schrader, see Nayar (35–56). 8 The pertinent works by the authors listed here, building on and/or speaking directly to Paul Schrader’s theory of “transcendental style,” can be found in the works cited for this chapter. Oddly, Bird and Dorsky do not mention Schrader, but their approaches are clearly derived from his ideas. Johnston briefly summarizes responses to Schrader in Reel Spirituality (76–78). In Fraser, see especially pages 117–28; in Detweiler and Taylor, see their chapter on movies (155–83). 9 Citations of Schrader’s 1972 book are taken from the 1988 Da Capo reprint. Citations of Schrader’s new introduction, entitled “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” are from the 2018 University of California republication. 10 Sheila J. Nayar challenges this generalization in her “new theory of film hierophany,” which contends that kinetic film spectacle also can function as a transcendental style evoking genuine encounters with the spiritual. This “spectacular hierophany” is founded in an “oral episteme of visual narrative,” as opposed to Schrader’s and others’ “alphabetically literate episteme,” based in Protestant theology. Nayar explores examples of spectacular transcendence in Bollywood films of various ilk. See especially her chapter on “The Oral Contours of the Religious Spectacular” (57–93). 11 German director Doris Dörrie’s comedy Enlightenment Guaranteed (1999) pokes fun at this disjunction when two middle-aged brothers go looking for themselves on a pilgrimage to a Zen monastery in Japan, though one could argue the film reinforces the exoticism of Japan and Zen Buddhism. 12 It is significant that Donald Richie came to Japan with the US Occupation forces after World War II and went on in 1961 to write Film Style and National Character for the Japan Travel Bureau (Dorman 50). 13 Keiko I. McDonald’s work provides a notable example of examining the particularities of Japanese traditional arts in relation to specific films and their contexts. See, for instance, her monograph Japanese Classical Theater in Films (1994), in which she makes clear and significant distinctions between different theatrical traditions and their sundry usage in Japanese cinema. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto describes McDonald’s work in this vein as “monocultural analysis,” arguing that her approach reinforces nihonjinron (28). However, her nuanced examinations of the impact and employment of Japanese theater in cinema avoid the essentialism of a Japanese aesthetics that represents an unchanging, monolithic “Japanese national character.” 14 See Leigh Singer’s article on pillow shots for the British Film Institute website for a number of examples from the films of Ozu and others. 15 The word MA will appear in capital letters throughout this terminology section in keeping with Isozaki’s style in the “MA: Space-Time in Japan” museum program. Most of the citations in this section are taken from this source. 16 Ki also is a homophone for the word for tree, and kami is a homophone for the word for paper (same sound, different kanji). Consequently, both trees and paper appear as symbols of supernatural power, as seen at shrines, with sacred trees (surrounded by shimenawa), paper shide (zig-zag paper hanging from shimenawa), and paper fortunes (omikuji). Spirited Away prominently features both these spiritual symbols. 17 For a current, thorough investigation of the relationship between the Japanese, the four seasons, and nature aesthetics more generally across history, multiple media, and genres, see Haruo Shirane’s book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (2012).

Works Cited “Aesthesis | esthesis, n.” OED Online, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2021. www.oed. com/view/Entry/3234. Accessed 25 June 2021.

Introduction 57 After Life. Directed, written, and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Soda Pictures, 2007 [1998]. Agel, Henri. Poetique du Cinema. Paris Editions du Signe, 1960. Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Duke University Press, 2013. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2009 [1936], pp. 665–685. Bird, Michael. “Film as Hierophany.” Horizons: The Journal of the College Theological Society, vol. 6, no. 1, 1979, pp. 81–97. Buljan, Katharine, and Carole M. Cusack. Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan. Equinox Publishing, 2015. Burch, Noël. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Revised and edited by Annette Michelson, University of California Press, 1979. Charney, Leo. Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift. Duke University Press, 1998. Cho, Francisca. Seeing Like the Buddha: Enlightenment Through Film. State University of New York Press, 2017. Davis, Bret W. “Encounter in Emptiness: The I-Thou Relation in Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Japanese Philosophy, edited by Michiko Yusa, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 231–254. Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2019 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/ entries/kyoto-school/. Accessed 18 May 2020. Davis, Darrell William. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film. Columbia University Press, 1996. Debold, Elizabeth. “Spiritual But Not Religious: Moving Beyond Postmodern Spirituality.” What Is Enlightenment?, no. 31, 2005/2006, pp. 54–62. https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws. com/wieoldissues/wie_en_weboptimized/EN_issue_31.pdf. Accessed 17 August 2021. Desser, David. “The Imagination of the Transcendent: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Maborosi (1995).” Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, edited by Julian Stringer and Alastair Phillips, Routledge, 2007, pp. 273–283. Detweiler, Craig, and Barry Taylor. A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Popular Culture. Baker Publishing Group, 2003. Donko, Wilhelm. “ ‘Hanasaku Iroha’ Bonbori Festival Report—A Fictional Event Becomes Real Life Tradition.” Crunchyroll.com, 28 October 2017. www.crunchyroll. com/anime-feature/2017/10/28-1/hanasaku-iroha-bonbori-festival-report-a-fictionalevent-becomes-real-life-tradition. Accessed 10 May 2020. Dorman, Andrew. Paradoxical Japaneseness: Cultural Representation in 21st Century Japanese Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional Cinema. Tuumba Press, 2003. Ebara, Miki. “A Chain of Miracles and the Sea Goddess of Okuki.” NHK World, 11 April 2020. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1590/. Accessed 9 August 2021. [A Video Version of This Story for NHK Television Networks Can Be Found Here. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3004346/] Ebert, Roger. “A Magical Dot Over in the Corner.” RogerEbert.com, 11 July 2012. www. rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away-2002. Accessed 18 March 2021. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed, University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1958]. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, 1987 [1957].

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Epstein, Jean. “Photogénie and the Imponderable.” French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1929–1939, vol. 2, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton University Press, 1988 [1935], pp. 188–192. Epstein, Jean. “The Senses I (b).” French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1929, vol. 1, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton University Press, 1988 [1921], pp. 241–246. Fraser, Peter. Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film. Praeger, 1998. Geist, Kathe. “Buddhism in Tokyo Story.” Ozu’s Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 101–117. Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Kindle ed. Oxford University Press, 2016. Harper, Thomas J. “Afterword.” In Praise of Shadows, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Kindle ed., Leete’s Island Books, 1977, pp. 43–50. Isozaki, Arata. “Space-Time in Japan—MA.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 12–53. Jacoby, Alexander. “Authorship: Author, sakka, auteur.” The Japanese Cinema Book, edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips, British Film Institute/Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 38–52. Johnston, Robert K. God’s Wider Presence: Reconsidering General Revelation. Baker Academic, 2014. Johnston, Robert K. Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, 2nd ed. Baker Academic, 2006. Kasulis, Thomas P. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Kenkō, Yoshida. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, translated by Donald Keene, Columbia University Press, 1967. King, Mike. Luminous: The Spiritual Life on Film. Stochastic Press, 2018. Kingston, Jeff. Japan. Polity, 2019. Ko, Mika. Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness. Routledge, 2010. Kondō, Marie. Jinsei ga Tokimeku Katazuke no Mahō [The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing]. Sanmāku Shuppan, 2011. Kuroda, Toshio. “Shinto in the History of Japanese Religions,” translated by James C. Dobbins and Suzanne Gay. Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1981, pp. 1–21. The Last Temptation of Christ. Directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Nikos Kazantsakis (novel) and Paul Schrader (screenplay), Universal Pictures, 1988. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith, Columbia University Press, 1999. Lim, Dennis. “A Death in the Family.” Still Walking [DVD Booklet], dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Criterion Collection, 2011, pp. 4–11. Lindvall, Terry R., W. O. Williams, and Artie Terry. “Spectacular Transcendence: Abundant Means in the Cinematic Representation of African American Christianity.” The Howard Journal of Communications, vol. 7, no. 3, 1996, pp. 205–220. Macquarrie, John. In Search of Humanity: A Theological and Philosophical Approach. Xpress Reprints, 1996 [1982]. Madadayo. Directed and written by Akira Kurosawa, Daiei Co., Ltd./Dentsu Inc./Kurosawa Production Inc., 1993. Marra, Michael F., ed. Japan’s Frames of Meaning: A Hermeneutics Reader. University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. Marra, Michele F., ed. Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader. University of Hawai’i Press, 1999.

Introduction 59 Marran, Christine L. “Tracking the Transcendental: Kore’eda Hirokazu’s ‘Maboroshi.’” Film History, vol. 14, no. 2, 2002, pp. 166–169. www.jstor.org/stable/3815619. Accessed 8 June 2021. Matsumoto, Shigeru. Motoori Norinaga, 1730–1801. Harvard University Press, 1970. Matsuoka, Seigow. “Aspects of Kami.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 56–57. McDonald, Keiko I. Japanese Classical Theater in Films. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. McDonald, Keiko I. Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. McRae, James. “Art of War, Art of Self: Aesthetic Cultivation in the Japanese Martial Arts.” New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, edited by A. Minh Nguyen, Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 121–136. Miranda, Carolina A. “Arata Isozaki, the Japanese Architect Who Designed MOCA, Wins the 2019 Pritzker Prize.” Los Angeles Times, 5 March 2019. www.latimes.com/ entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-2019-pritzker-prize-20190305-story.html. Accessed 15 May 2021. Miyoshi, Masao, and H. D. Harootunian, eds. “Introduction.” Postmodernism and Japan, Duke University Press, 1989, pp. vii–xix. Murakami, Haruki. “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer,” translated by Emanuel Pastreich. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 9, no. 29, 2011, pp. 1–8. https://apjjf. org/-Murakami-Haruki/3571/article.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2020. Murakami, Haruki. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001. Nakane, Chie. Tate Shakai no Ningen Kankei [Human Relations in a Vertical Society]. Kodansha, 1967. Nayar, Sheila J. The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the “Genuinely” Religious Film. Bloomsbury, 2012. Nishitani, Keiji. “Emptiness and Sameness.” Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, edited by Michele Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 1999, pp. 179–217. Nishitani, Keiji. “Kū: ‘On Bashō’.” Japan’s Frames of Meaning: A Hermeneutics Reader, edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2010, pp. 276–297. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness, translated with an introduction by Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press, 1982. Nitschke, Günter. “ ‘Ma’: The Japanese Sense of ‘Place’ in Old and New Architecture and Planning.” Architectural Design, vol. 36, no. 3, 1966, pp. 116–156. Nitschke, Günter. “Ma—Place, Space, Void.” Kyoto Journal, no. 98 (title: “ma: a measure of infinity”), 2020, pp. 8–23. Norinaga, Motoori. “On Mono no Aware.” The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007 [1763], pp. 172–194. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalism: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Parkes, Graham. “Kūkai and Dōgen as Exemplars of Ecological Engagement.” Japanese Environmental Philosophy, edited by J. Baird Callicott and James McRae, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 65–86. Parry, Richard Lloyd. Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. Picador, 2017.

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Pence, Jeffrey. “Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineffable.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 29–66. Pilgrim, Richard B. “Intervals (‘Ma’) in Space and Time: Foundations for a ReligioAesthetic Paradigm in Japan.” History of Religions, vol. 25, no. 3, 1986, pp. 255–277. www.jstor.org/stable/1062515. Accessed 11 September 2019. Plate, S. Brent. Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, 2nd ed. Columbia University Press, 2017. Prohl, Inken. “California ‘Zen’: Buddhist Spirituality Made in America.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies, vol. 59, no. 2, 2014, pp. 193–206. www.jstor.org/stable/43486807. Accessed 22 March 2021. “Rethinking of MA: Space—Time 2020.” Japan House, Los Angeles, 20 October 2020. www.japanhousela.com/events/rethinking-of-ma/. Accessed 10 May 2021. Richardson, Herbert W. “Introduction.” Transcendence. Beacon Press, 1969, pp. ix–xv. Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Revised ed. Kodansha International, 2005. Richie, Donald. A Tractate in Japanese Aesthetics. Stone Bridge Press, 2007. The Ring [Ringu]. Directed by Hideo Nakata, Basara Pictures and Toho, 1998. Saito, Yuriko. “Aesthetics of the Everyday.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2021 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/ entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/. Accessed 12 June 2021. Saito, Yuriko. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford University Press, 2017. Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007. Saito, Yuriko. “Everyday Aesthetics in the Japanese Tradition.” Aesthetics of Everyday Life: East and West, edited by Liu Yuedi and Curtis L. Carter, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 145–164. Sasaki, Ken-ichi. “Perspectives East and West.” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 11, 2013. www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=670. Accessed 14 June 2021. Schilling, Mark. “Kore-eda Hirokazu Interview.” Film Criticism, vol. 35, no. 2/3, 2010, pp. 11–20. www.search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/login.aspx?direct=true& db=asu&AN=505406166&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 6 November 2018. Schrader, Paul. “Rethinking Transcendental Style.” Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. University of California Press, 2018, pp. 1–33. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Da Capo Press, 1988 [1972]. Shigehiko, Hasumi. “Sunny Skies.” Ozu’s Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser. Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 118–129. Shirane, Haruo. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. Columbia University Press, 2012. Singer, Leigh. “The Enigmatic ‘Pillow Shots’ of Yasujiro Ozu.” British Film Institute, 12 December 2016. https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/enigmaticpillow-shots-yasujiro-ozu. Accessed 14 June 2018. Smith, Huston. “The Reach and the Grasp: Transcendence Today.” Transcendence, edited by Herbert W. Richardson and Donald R. Cutler, Beacon Press, 1969, pp. 1–17. Sobchack, Vivian. “Embodying Transcendence: On the Literal, the Material, and the Cinematic Sublime.” Material Religion, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 194–203. DOI:10.2752/ 175183408X328307. Accessed 26 July 2019. Spirited Away. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2001.

Introduction 61 Tamaki, Mihic. Re-Imagining Japan after Fukushima. Australian National University Press, 2020. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows. Kindle ed., Leete’s Island Books, 1977 [1933]. Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan. University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. “Religion in Japanese Film: Focus on Anime.” The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, edited by John Lyden, Routledge, 2009, pp. 194–213. Townrow, Kristin. Photo of torii gates at Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, Japan, 28 November 2019. Tyler, Royall. “Buddhism in Noh.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 19–52. www.jstor.org/stable/30234528. Accessed 21 November 2015. Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1991. Ueda, Makoto. “Mono no aware.” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Kodansha, 1983. Up. Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Disney-Pixar Animation Studios, 2009. Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1989 [1957]. Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. New and enlarged ed., Indiana University Press, 1972. Wright, Melanie J. Religion and Film: An Introduction. I. B. Tauris, 2007. Yamada, Marc. “Between Documentary and Fiction: The Films of Kore-Eda Hirokazu.” Journal of Religion & Film, vol. 20, no. 3, 2016, Article 13. http://digitalcommons. unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss3/13. Accessed 17 March 2018. Yamada, Marc. Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film: The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades. Routledge, 2019. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Duke University Press, 2000. your name. Directed and written by Makoto Shinkai, Toho Co. and CoMix Wave Films, 2016.

2

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away Pilgrimage as Homecoming and Seeing Anew

We must bring to realization the road on which the self encounters the self; we must move back and forth along, and spring off from, the vital path on which the other studies, and fully comprehends, the other. —Dōgen, Mountains and Waters Sutra (153–154)

Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 blockbuster Spirited Away broke all box office records in Japan and worldwide, becoming the highest-earning Japanese film in the global as well as the Japanese markets (“Spirited”). Although this global box office record was surpassed by another anime blockbuster, Makoto Shinkai’s your name., in 2017, Spirited Away retained the box office record in Japan for nearly two decades after its release.1 The film is a wondrous tale of a ten-year-old girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a world of spirits and finds herself working in their tortuous bathhouse, along the way learning respect, gratitude, and how to put others before herself. The film is replete with spiritual and mythic content, a rich compendium of Japanese religious images and ideas, about which much has been written. Miyazaki himself has stated clearly that the film is meant to be didactic, to teach about the “real world”: “The job of this film is . . . to depict this world with clarity within a fantasy framework” (Turning Point [TP] 197, my emphasis). He chose a ten-year-old girl as his protagonist because of the liminality and complexity of this age, poised between childhood and adolescence, a time of movement toward independence and realization of one’s connectedness to the world outside one’s family (see TP 210, 216). It is not surprising, then, that Spirited Away is set in a liminal world with multiple layers of spaces and concepts that are “betwixt and between,” in the words of the renowned anthropologist of ritual Victor Turner (Ritual Process 107; cf. Boyd and Nishimura 6–7). Susan J. Napier, a prominent scholar of Japanese culture, points out that “the entire action of Spirited Away takes place within three liminal contexts—a journey (specifically, a move from an old home to a new one), an abandoned theme park, and, finally, the fantasy other world” (“Matter” 294). Referencing Turner’s concepts, Napier goes on to elucidate animation’s particular proclivity in depicting “threshold” spaces of transformation, which are “associated with aspects of ritual, initiation, and even, in its public setting, carnival, in the Bakhtinian sense of ‘a place that is not a place DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057-2

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and a time that is not a time’ in which one can ‘don the liberating masks of liminal masquerade.’ The liminal world is disordered and amorphous and those who enter it, however briefly, are invariably changed by their sojourn within” (“Matter” 295; cf. Turner, Dramas 239, 143). This certainly is an apt description of the world Miyazaki creates in Spirited Away: it portrays a type of “third space” that is neither entirely secular nor sacred, ordinary nor fantastical. It is an uncanny space “in between” but also a return home. The unheimlich (literally, un-home-like) resides deeply in the “ground,” or nature, of home. This concept is particularly true in Japan, where ancient Shinto beliefs consider many elements of nature to be sacred deities, called kami, and folktales regale with stories of myriad yokai (monster spirits), which are now the frequent denizens of manga, anime, and video games. Miyazaki has discussed on several occasions his affinity with and inspiration from primitive Shinto beliefs of the type extensively researched by eighteenth-century Native Studies (kokugaku) scholar Motoori Norinaga, whose ideas are discussed in this book’s introduction. Norinaga writes that kami include the deities of heaven and earth that appear in the ancient texts [i.e., the Kojiki and Nihonshoki] and also the spirits enshrined in the shrines; furthermore, among all kinds of beings—including not only human beings but also such objects as birds, beasts, trees, grass, seas, mountains, and so forth—any being whatsoever which possesses some eminent quality out of the ordinary, and is awe-inspiring, is called kami. (Eminence here does not refer to superiority in nobility, goodness, or meritoriousness. Evil or queer things, if they are extraordinarily awe-inspiring, are also called kami.) (qtd. in Matsumoto 84) Miyazaki sees this recognition of the sacred, awesome quality of nature as something contemporary Japanese people have lost, thanks to industrialized society and technology, and this lack of attention to the sacredness and wonder of the world results in a calamitous disconnect between people and nature: a profound loss of the sense of the interrelationality of all things, which leads to environmental degradation and egocentric consumerism—what he calls “this weird and ridiculous monstrosity, . . . mass consumption civilization” (TP 246). Miyazaki notes, In my grandparents’ time, . . . it was believed that spirits [kami] existed everywhere—in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything. My generation does not believe this, but I like the idea that we all should treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything. (qtd. in Boyd and Nishimura 7–8) The world of Spirited Away renders the life in all things in a quite literal way, featuring an array of spiritual creatures, such as sumo-wrestler-style radish spirits (radishes are associated with a “pure and rustic life” [Cho 2]), anthropomorphic

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frogs and slugs, giant chicks, diverse permutations of “green men,” and various masked shrine spirit entities, including a kami Miyazaki modeled after a specific ritual mask at the Kasuga Shrine. Regarding the use of religious ideas and imagery, Miyazaki’s work follows suit with the world of Japanese anime and manga in that it primarily finds its inspiration in the fertile, polytheistic arena of ancient Shinto beliefs.2 In Anime, Religion and Spirituality, Katharine Buljan and Carole M. Cusack argue that, unlike in the West, popular culture in Japan is “saturated with the religious and the spiritual” (63). In writing on Miyazaki’s use of religion, Jolyon Baraka Thomas rightly notes the problematic romanticization of Shinto in scholarly work on Miyazaki and its reductive reliance on Norinaga’s “Nativism” for Shinto concepts. Countering this, Thomas highlights the “categorical and historical complexity” of Shinto (105–06). State Shinto and the resultant Shrine Shinto were notoriously used as part of the ultra-nationalist movement in Japan starting in the Meiji period (1868– 1912), leading to Japan’s brutal imperialist campaigns in the first half of the twentieth century and nearly fifteen straight years of warfare for Japan’s military (1931–1945). This ended with the nation’s defeat in World War II by the Allied Powers and the forced dismantling of State Shinto by the American occupying forces residing in Japan from 1945 to 1952. This is, indeed, a complex and controversial issue, and Miyazaki has been careful to acknowledge and distance himself from this nationalistic, essentialist form of Shinto. However, at least one scholar, Lars-Martin Sørensen, has argued that Miyazaki’s work could be used to promote Japanese neo-nationalism despite the filmmaker’s own personal position (see esp. 181–82, 190–93), just as Norinaga’s work on ancient Shinto was instrumentalized to support ultra-nationalism though he himself did not (Kasulis 117–18). In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness—a 2013 documentary about Studio Ghibli and its most famous artist, Miyazaki—the filmmaker Mami Sunada captures a moment at an anime convention in Japan at which neo-nationalist sentiments are being clearly promoted. This deeply dismays Miyazaki and his longtime producer, Toshio Suzuki, who later sadly opines that “the days of creative freedom are ending.” It is this dark view of the current state of Japan and its future that motivates Miyazaki’s creative work, particularly Spirited Away, which he calls “extremely local—it’s from what I would call a ‘land of aboriginals on the edge of East Asia’” (TP 233). In an essay subtitled “The Aim of this Film,” Miyazaki lays out his message in Spirited Away: I would say that this film is an adventure story. . . . However, this story is not a showdown between right and wrong. It is a story in which the heroine will be thrown into a place where the good and bad dwell together, and there, she will experience the world. She will learn about friendship and devotion, and will survive by making full use of her brain. . . . She manages not because she destroyed the “evil,” but because she has acquired the ability to survive. (“Chihiro’s” 15) This statement reveals the filmmaker’s “local” message to Japanese people, especially young women—whom he hopes will be inspired to develop courage

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and compassion—but also his message to a global audience, particularly those who are part of monotheistic cultures. Miyazaki contends that monotheism has fostered an aggressively binary world of “us versus them,” in which each party believes it “ ‘has absolute justice on its side’ and hates the other,” a worldview that has spread with the solipsistic social Darwinism of global capitalism, with its exclusive silos of “winners” and “losers,” otherwise known as “globalization” (TP 232, 235). This sort of self-aggrandizing exceptionalism has been propagandized and perpetuated by governments with imperialistic and bellicose agendas, such as that of early twentieth-century Japan. The ruination and trauma resulting from this, as well as the harrowing natural and technological disasters in Japan’s previous hundred years, in many ways, define the experiences, beliefs, and creative production of Japan throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, as Napier’s monograph Miyazakiworld argues (1–15). She asserts that in “response to a world of mass destruction,” Miyazaki offers “an alternative vision of humane interaction in which responsibility, community, and courage play a part”; in Miyazaki’s work, “Children in particular become the agents of change and reassurance, . . . experiencing and processing trauma but also transcending calamity by working to ameliorate it” (14). The stakes are high. Spirited Away is far more than an adventure story about a girl finding her strength. In the ancient Shinto worldview, Hayao Miyazaki perceives the potential to evade the deadly inclination to see the world in terms of “good” versus “evil,” a view that dehumanizes “others” and encourages anthropocentrism. This type of Shinto existed in Japan long before its official history began to be recorded. Later, Shinto beliefs inherent in Japan led to the successful growth of certain sects of Japanese Buddhism that aligned well with Shinto principles, particularly esoteric Buddhism in the ninth century and Dōgen’s Soto Zen school in the thirteenth century, which affirmed that all things have “Buddha nature” (busshō) and the capacity for enlightenment (Parkes 66–67). Most significantly, this belief in the potentially sacred nature of all things brings these forms of Mahāyāna Buddhism in line with the Shinto emphasis on respect for the immanent world and taking action to care for and protect it. Miyazaki’s ardent focus on reverence for and preservation of the natural world in films such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away, clearly displays this syncretic Shinto-Buddhist worldview, in which everything is sacred, connected, and processual, creating potential for growth and transformation in ways both spiritual and material. Spirited Away is structured as a physical journey through a spiritual world made up of “natural” deities, who are, by definition, immanent transcendent beings, both very much of this world and yet supernatural. In many ways, Chihiro’s odyssey is a pilgrimage. Victor Turner describes pilgrimage as a “liminal phenomenon” with physical and spiritual “spatial aspects” that result in communitas—the formation of strong relational bonds with those sharing the journey—as well as purification (“Center” 191–2). Those relationships within sacred space are transformational. Turner also notes the merging of sacred and secular space: “[A]s the pilgrim moves away from [her] structural involvements at home [her] route becomes increasingly sacralized at one level and increasingly secularized at

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another. [She] meets with more shrines and sacred objects as [she] advances, but [she] also encounters more real dangers . . . ; [she] has to pay attention to the need to survive” (“Center” 204–05). Turner’s ideas echo Miyazaki’s declaration of the main aim of Spirited Away: to depict a young woman’s growth through building relationships, including proper “devotion,” and learning to survive in a perilous world. Examining Japanese approaches to pilgrimage, Allan G. Grapard notes esoteric Buddhism’s distinction between the profane realm of ordinary experience and the elevated domain of the sacred; however, these “territories” are coterminous during pilgrimage: When pilgrims went from one world to the other, they were actually going to meet the Other. This experience in Otherness began with the first step out of the house; as soon as the pilgrims set out on the road, they became foreigners: the pilgrims were and were not themselves as soon as they moved into a realm which transcended their former knowledge of the world. We are told over and over again that this process is of a therapeutic nature: the actual physical effort is good; the rivers crossed purify the pilgrims and may even rejuvenate them; and the pilgrims may realize their own true nature. (206) The voyage toward and into the sacred requires physical work, but, as Dōgen aptly states in the epigraph to this chapter, the journey is also the “road on which the self encounters the self” while learning to “comprehend” the Other. The Japanese title of Spirited Away, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, literally Sen and Chihiro hidden by gods, curiously starts with “Sen,” the name the protagonist Chihiro is assigned by the owner of the bathhouse, the old witch Yubaba, who steals most of Chihiro’s name in order to control her. Kamikakushi is a folk belief that attributes the disappearance of children and women from a community to gods who have hidden them away, usually in the mountains, which are considered sacred space (Reider, “Spirited” 8–9). In some tales, the person hidden by kami reappears in the community, having made a transformational, intimate connection with the spiritual world, as in pilgrimage, unwilling though it may have been; in other cases, the individual never returns. The use of both names in the title, Sen and Chihiro, directly expresses that her two “selves” must connect for her to survive. To return home as a new Chihiro, she must successfully complete a journey of trials and tribulations as Sen, a servant to the gods. This service could be understood as worship. Furthermore, in order to complete this pilgrimage, she must comprehend that she is bound to all others, sentient and insentient, via her kokoro (heart-mind), which bridges the space—the sacred space associated with ma in Japanese religio-aesthetics—between herself and all other creatures and natural elements (including creatures that are natural elements). In essence, Spirited Away presents Chihiro’s journey to herself, not as an egocentric heroine battling against the world but as a life force interconnected with all, bound to serve, respect, and take responsibility for the other.3

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On her sojourn in the spirit world, Chihiro/Sen encounters frightening creatures and learns to “feel at home with them,” developing “the intimate kind of relation[ships] in which each related item is part of the other,” a core Shinto belief (Kasulis 11, 13). The spirit world in the film serves as Chihiro/Sen’s “gate to connectedness” through which she must pass to “experience the interlaced relation between kami and humans. . . . This Shinto gateway leads . . . [back] to where one has really been all along—in the spiritual whole as reflected in each of us” (Kasulis 85). This voyage of discovery is a pilgrimage during which she experiences the purification of her kokoro and does so, appropriately, in the bathhouse of the kami. Pilgrimage, according to Grapard, is “a discovery of the sacred landscape which [makes] possible a direct vision of the metaphysical realm in which the divine resides” (206). Spirited Away itself is just such a vision for its shōjo (young woman) protagonist and its viewers, and Miyazaki’s stated intention is for viewers to understand their integral connections to other beings and the natural world, to feel the wonder that marks the sacred and calls for the respect of all “others.” For its audiences, as well as Chihiro, the film’s spirit world can be, as Thomas P. Kasulis writes of Shinto itself, “the gateway to an awesome mystery that feels like home” (85). As we see in Spirited Away, the physical sacred space through which a pilgrim travels to reach a central location of spiritual power—what Mircea Eliade has called an axis mundi, a threshold which “connects and supports heaven and earth” (36–37)—is also a metaphysical space that must be traversed in order to experience and thus realize interconnection with others of the human, natural, and spiritual kind.4 Movement of body and heart-mind into unknown terrain is required to bridge the gap, crossing a hashi type of ma; however, when one has arrived, the “undiscovered country” reveals itself to be home, who and where you were all along: you see the world anew, with purified (in)sight. In Spirited Away, Chihiro’s pilgrimage is through this physical and spiritual space, and the spirit world—with the bathhouse as its axis mundi (or yorishiro)—is the sacred space she must temporarily inhabit to gain this perception. Ma, as a sacred spatio-temporal agent of interconnection, is an apposite lens through which to read Spirited Away. When esteemed film critic Roger Ebert asked him about the lyrical pauses for reflection in his films, Miyazaki himself explained, “We have a word for that in Japanese. It’s called ‘ma.’ Emptiness. It’s there intentionally” (Ebert). As elucidated in the introduction, the kanji for ma (間) contains the pictorial sign for gate with the earlier sign for moon (now sun) inside it (Nitschke 8). Thus, the ma ideogram represents the sacred ki, the energy that powers and connects all things, beaming through the “gateway” of this world. Architect Isozaki Arata has declared that “MA, is the very foundation of Japanese aesthetics. Minute particles of kami . . . fill that MA” (47). In Spirited Away, these “minute particles” of formless kami, comprised in and of the kū (void), have blossomed into Miyazaki’s imaginatively embodied creatures, which serve as modes of revelation made, quite literally, of light shining through, or reflected from, the frame of a movie screen. In examining the philosophy, or perhaps what one might call the theology, of Spirited Away, it is clear that Chihiro’s pilgrimage into the spirit world can be

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seen as a journey into the ma, the sacred space of “vibrational energy,” where “earthly” kami may be encountered by sensitive humans, [who,] by emptying themselves into the midst of now (naka ima)[,] may directly experience the time/space gods embodied—however fleetingly—in the signs, sounds, and sights of the world. It is an “experiential, mysterious place” created as a third place between all other places and as an accumulation of experienced ch’i [ki] beyond all distinctions, boundaries, orders, and descriptive constructs. (Pilgrim 271) Chihiro/Sen experiences this “in-between” world, where the distinctions between human and spirit, the veil between the sacred and profane, are entirely gone and where she experiences the mystery of being interconnected with all things. Pilgrim reminds us that “[s]uch a mode of awareness, of course, has more often been referred to in Buddhism as ‘emptiness’ (kū, sūnyata) or ‘suchness’ . . . awareness and as a middle awareness between nothingness (mu) and being (u)” (274–75). Esoteric Buddhist Kūkai saw the five natural elements of the world (earth, water, fire, wind, and space [kū]) as “processes” that are constantly interacting with each other and with a “sixth process, awareness” (Parkes 68). The processual nature of the physical elements reflects the spiritual doctrine of impermanence, mujō. Everything is in the process of transformation at all times. Even the thing or being considered good or evil is constantly evolving. This is the positive nondualism that Miyazaki desires to communicate in Spirited Away and that leaves room in this film for both goodness and evil to lack absolute distinctions but rather to exist in liminal shades of gray, wherein compassion, grace, and forgiveness of the other are possible. This openness, a type of ma, also leaves the door open to growth and the development of awareness, that “sixth sense” that Chihiro gains by the film’s conclusion. The Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990) used the lens of Mahāyāna Buddhism to examine the aesthetics of emptiness, as discussed in the introduction. Particularly relevant is his concept of the “place” (ba) or “field of emptiness,” another sort of ma, in which the plenitude of the interconnection and interdependence of all things can be experienced: “It is the space where the ‘solidarity’ of reciprocal connection is truly possible” (“Emptiness” 185). Transcending egocentrism and moving into the “field of emptiness” purifies one’s kokoro, allowing that sense of interconnection. This is also the space of pilgrimage, the terrain one must travel to connect with the other. Nishitani’s idea that this concept of emptiness (kū) can be physically represented by the empty sky (kokū) ties the representation of a natural “process” (the sky) to metaphysical awareness of the interpenetrating quality of all things (Marra 176). Seigow Matsuoka writes of the prevalence of this sort of celestial and fluid imagery in Japanese art and design in general, arguing that it embodies the processual world, thereby expressing mujō, concluding that “Japanese culture is a ‘Culture of Transformations’” (Matsuoka 56). In Spirited Away, Miyazaki’s depiction of Chihiro’s pilgrimage into the spirit world focuses vividly on the elements of water, sky, and clouds,

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which communicate the concept of mujō so central to Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. However, this imagery also conveys that Chihiro/Sen is in sacred space, wherein binaries dissolve as the dust polluting Sen’s kokoro is washed away in Yubaba’s bathhouse. The girl’s experiences in this chaotic place reveal her interdependence with all things. This awareness moves her to take responsibility and make sacrifices for the others around her, others with whom she has always shared a home. Shinto’s goal of feeling at home in and with the world resonates with Nishitani’s key perspective that moving into this ma—an awareness of the “field of emptiness” wherein all things connect—is a “returning to the home-ground of the world and of things,” which also constitutes “a return of the self to the home-ground of the self” (Religion [RN] 163). In other words, understanding interconnectedness with the elements of the immanent world means moving away from selfishness and anthropocentrism, and this is a return to one’s true self and true home (RN 279), as reflected in Sen’s transformation into a new Chihiro before arriving at her “new” home. Nishitani categorizes this awareness as a particular type of transcendence and a “radical deliverance from self-centeredness” (RN 250). Bret W. Davis explains that Nishitani envisions this “deliverance” as “an existential or religious conversion, namely, a trans-descendence to the field of emptiness as a self-awakening to the home-ground of self and other” (234). Trans-descendence is a particularly apt descriptor for the movement of Chihiro/Sen’s spiritual journey in Spirited Away. Nishitani’s evocative revision of transcendence emphasizes movement “to the ground” (RN 304), which refers both to the realm of the phenomenal world and to a spiritual “field” wherein all creatures, elements, and things are interrelated. Throughout the film, Miyazaki’s pervasive imagery of sky, water, and clouds (including steam and mist) communicates trans-descendence as these are exemplars of the processual nature of the physical world, immanent symbols of spiritual interpenetration, and models of impermanence, all central concepts of both Shinto and Japanese Buddhism. In addition, lingering on this imagery, as Miyazaki intimates to Roger Ebert, is used as a pause for reflection, creating a ma in time-space with its attendant sacred potential. Of course, the ubiquity of water in the film is a direct link to the sacred. In Spirited Away, Chihiro/Sen moves through a spirit world centered around a bathhouse, where water is used to purify, and the bathhouse itself is often surrounded by a “sea.” The crucial role of water as processual element, purifier, and connector becomes increasingly important as the film progresses, until in the final, pivotal sequence of Sen’s pilgrimage—her journey to the witch Zeniba’s cottage—the aesthetics of kū predominate.

Ascending Into the Spirit World: Encountering Signs and Wonders Spirited Away opens with a shot of the mopey ten-year-old Chihiro in the back seat of her parents’ car on her way to her new home in a different town. Chihiro is holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in clear plastic, a sign of nature controlled and monetized by humans. The first words of the film are heard in Chihiro’s voice reading the card that had come with the bouquet, “I’ll miss you, Chihiro! Your

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best friend, Rumi.” Immediately, the film introduces the themes of movement, loss of intimate connection, and the potential for change. When her parents point out her new school, Chihiro declares, “It’s gonna stink. I liked my old school.” Miyazaki says directly that he designed her to be a sulky, whiny brat at the start of the film (TP 205). Her mother proclaims, “[Q]uit whining. It’s fun to move to a new place. It’s an adventure,” but Chihiro is thoroughly unconvinced. Nonetheless, her adventure begins at the moment in this scene at which her father exits from the main road and heads upward toward their new home, portrayed in a long shot capturing their car’s climb up toward a row of houses. Miyazaki uses multiple vehicles of elevation to portray Chihiro and her parents’ ascent into sacred space, but it begins here. In Shinto, mountains are considered the residence of the divine, and esoteric Buddhism believes mountains are ideal sites for attaining enlightenment (Grapard 203). Royall Tyler expands on this, pointing out that in early Japanese history it was believed that “[m]ountains in Japan were inhabited by ancestral spirits who merged into a collective, divine presence, and this presence was worshipped by the living. In time, the concern with the afterlife characteristic of Buddhism led to the recognition of these mountains as the paradises of popular Buddhas and Bodhisattvas” (25). Consequently, many of Japan’s tens of thousands of shrines and temples are found on the mountains covering much of Japan’s landscape. Writing of medieval Nō theater, Tyler states that “practically every Noh play contains a journey to a specific, named spot,” and many of these journeys are pilgrimages to shrines and temples that take the Nō protagonists through sacred mountain terrain (21–22). The several ways we see upward movement in Spirited Away are reminders of our entrance into and travel through levels of sacred space. Several shots moving vertically, tilting up or down, especially in these early scenes of the film, also signal the characters’ (and audience’s) transition into spiritual space. One such shot is the cutaway, low-angle long shot here from Chihiro’s point of view that focuses on the top of a large, ancient tree: the shot moves down the tree from top to bottom at a slightly canted angle, making it feel a bit uncanny. At the base of the tree, there are a natural wood torii gate—considerably taller than the car, leaning on the massive trunk—and small stone shrines scattered beneath it. Another shot shows us that the tree is just beyond the point where the paved road they are on ceases and becomes a dirt track into a dark forest. The move from “civilization” to “nature” is clearly marked in these shots, with the vertical move down the tree signaling the movement of the divine down to earth, as through a yorishiro.5 As Eric Reinders explains, “here and elsewhere the slow vertical tilt serves to take us to another world” (118). Chihiro’s mother points out their new, blue house above them on the hill, captured in a low-angle extreme long shot from the car; the house looks minuscule beside the giant, up-close tree trunk to its right and the shadowy forest flanking its left. Nature dominates the modern neighborhood here. As Chihiro’s father seems to tear through the forest at a dangerous speed—not taking heed of the natural world he has entered, not perceiving the need to slow down—Chihiro catches glimpses of more small spirit-houses beside the road and asks her mother what they are. It is clear these emblems of the spiritual world are

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Figure 2.1 Chihiro is frightened by Jizō before following her parents into the tunnel in Spirited Away. Source: (Spirited Away 2001).

foreign to Chihiro. Her mother answers, “They’re shrines. Some people think little spirits live there,” revealing her dismissive attitude toward the spiritual world and Shinto practice. Chihiro also spots an old stone kami figure rooted in the ground, amorphous and apparently robed and hooded with a wide, beneficent smile, hands joined peacefully before him. Just then, the car bumps through a little stream, another marker of purification and entrance into a sacred area, before they skid to an abrupt stop in front of a stone god nearly identical to the one Chihiro just saw but with twin faces, one facing the car and the other into a dark tunnel. This moss-covered stone spirit looks like it could be a cross between a frog and a human, but its oval shape makes it unidentifiable as any specific creature. However, it clearly serves as a dōsojin, a generic type of kami that is a guardian of boundaries and protector of travelers, pilgrims, and those traversing through transitional (or liminal) spaces. It also bears a resemblance to some stone figures of the extremely popular Bodhisattva Jizō, a monk devoted to guiding toward enlightenment all those suffering in the six realms of reincarnation—which include beings in hell, hungry ghosts, animals, asura (demigods or demons), humans, and deities (kami)—and who escorts those languishing in the Buddhist hells into various heavenly paradises. Jizō is multifaceted and appears in diverse forms, but two of his main functions are deeply connected to this film: he is the preserver of pilgrims and travelers and the rescuer and protector of children. Miyazaki used traditional stone Jizōs previously in his 1988 film My Neighbor Totoro, in which the classic six Jizōs are seen directly behind four-year-old protagonist Mei, who is lost as night falls; they portend her imminent rescue. Jizō is one of the many

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Bodhisattvas who was woven into Shinto-Buddhist syncretism through the system of honji suijaku (literally, original ground traces), which posited that kami were “traces” of the true, “original” Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.6 Jizō was assimilated into “the worship of the old gods of the roads and of boundaries, the dōsojin and sae no kami” (Glassman 33). Thus, in practice, Jizō functions as both Bodhisattva and kami. Miyazaki has been clear that his kami creations in Spirited Away are all nameless spirits because “Japanese spirits originally had no form. . . . So in principle I didn’t want my designs of Japanese spirits to be based on existing images” (TP 218). Though he obviously was inspired by Shinto and syncretic Buddhism, Miyazaki filled the “void of form” with his extraordinary kami creations. This “field of emptiness,” or ma, is the open, sacred space into which he invites his kami, as in traditional Shinto ceremonies. However, Miyazaki reverses the process: Chihiro enters into and departs from the sacred realm of the kami rather than the gods descending to earth and then returning to their domain. Nevertheless, the ascending trajectory of the characters in the mise-en-scène of the opening sequences does reflect these vertical movements. Despite the prevalent religious imagery in his films, Miyazaki is understandably wary of official religion, considering its role in Japanese ultra-nationalism. He explained in an interview with The Village Voice: Dogma inevitably will find corruption, and I’ve certainly never made religion a basis for my films. My own religion, if you can call it that, has no practice, no Bible, no saints, only a desire to keep certain places and my own self as pure and holy as possible. That kind of spirituality is very important to me. Obviously it’s an essential value that cannot help but manifest itself in my films. (qtd. in Thomas 110) The core value of purity and avoidance of pollution is at the very heart of Shinto and of several types of Japanese Buddhism, such as esoteric and Zen schools. Miyazaki’s films focus on the importance of compassion, service, and responsibility for all things, sentient and insentient, and he uses the imagery and concepts of the religions foundational to Japanese culture to communicate these ethical principles, which is common among artists of sundry types. Religio-aesthetics can be seen in multifarious Japanese arts stretching from the ancient period to the present. Kasulis asserts that ninety percent of Japan’s population identify with Shinto (4). However, as Thomas explains, the aspects of Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism that have profoundly shaped Japanese worldviews tend to be perceived as “ ‘common sense’ (jōshiki) or ‘Japaneseness’ rather than anything explicitly religious” (9). It is not surprising, then, that Shinto and Buddhism have profoundly shaped the mises-en-scène and moral landscapes of the spectacular anime creations of the self-proclaimed “non-religious” Miyazaki. Returning to the entrance to the spiritual world at which Chihiro’s family has stopped, we find the double-faced (and facing) stone god serving as a Jizō figure, ushering Chihiro into not exactly a “paradise” but a magical world where kami reign and humans are unwelcome; it is both wondrous and dangerous for her and

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her parents. In keeping with Miyazaki’s parental portrayals in other films, most notably My Neighbor Totoro, Chihiro’s parents do not sense the strangeness of this place because they are adults, but the child is sensitive to the kami of the natural world. The family finds themselves in front of what seems to be an old red building enveloped by forest, with the stone kami centered in front of a dark tunnel, the only visible entrance. Her father, touching a crumbly red wall, declares that the building is fake, but Chihiro is spooked, noting, “The wind is pulling us in.” Just previous to this, a high-angle long shot down at the family in the car from the top of the building communicates that someone, or something, is watching them, and the sound effect of the wind also confirms that Chihiro’s fear is justified. When her parents decide to explore the building, Chihiro declares, “I’m not going. It gives me the creeps!” and plants herself beside the stone god; this is shown in a two-shot which treats the god and girl as equals by centering them both in the frame. However, Chihiro then realizes her proximity to this mysterious entity, cringes in fear, and runs after her mother into the menacing tunnel. Her mother shortly chides her for “clinging.” Though Miyazaki usually depicts parents positively, the parents in Spirited Away are unprotective, egocentric, and materialistic, as soon will be evident. When the family emerges from the tunnel, they are in what looks like a dusty, cavernous waiting room with Romanesque vaulting, a Catholic-style holy water font, and a round stained-glass window through which colored light is streaming. The Christian symbolism in this space is unmistakable, from its cathedral-like architecture to the painterly chiaroscuro featured in so many European Renaissance paintings of sacred subjects, but this space of light and shadow clearly has been abandoned long ago and is more a secular “fake” of sacred space. The family hears the sound of a train, a symbol of modernity, movement, and progress, before exiting into the bright sunshine of this new world. A long shot from the family’s point of view reveals a sprawling green meadow punctuated by a few stones, the nearest being carved and weathered, clearly another stone god, and the open blue sky containing fluffy white clouds soars above. This is the space-time of kū and ma, the empty sacred space that bespeaks the interconnectedness of all. They have arrived in the spirit world. This shot pans across toward the left, revealing a dilapidated hut and a nearly overgrown path flanked by old stones rooted well into the ground. Two of the stones resemble the Jizō-esque kami at the tunnel entrance, but the one closest to camera is looking straight at us, its hand seeming to pull it up out of ground (or perhaps the kami is peeking up out of ground), reminiscent of the stone Jizōs arising up out of mossy ground in temple gardens, such as at Kyoto’s Sanzen-In. Chihiro’s father looks around and declares, “It’s an abandoned theme park. . . . They built them everywhere in the early nineties. Then the economy went bad, and they all went bankrupt.” In this landscape, he sees the loss of affluence that came with the bursting of the “Bubble Economy” in Japan, leaving the nation with the habits of materialistic mass consumption and less financial means to indulge their desires. What he does not perceive is the sacred milieu that Chihiro has been sensing all along. Miyazaki underscores their entrance into sacred time at this moment with a low-angle shot looking up at the top of the clock tower on

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the building they just exited, where we see two of its four clock faces, one for each direction, reading 11:37, though a recent shot of the father’s wristwatch showed it was ten in the morning. The large white cloud behind the clock reminds us of the fleeting, unstable nature of all phenomena, and the shot itself moves down the building to show us another, very different clock face, this one with hands pointing to a different time from the clocks above it. More strikingly, the marked hours on this clock vary greatly in their sizes, as if some hours are longer than others; plus, there are thirteen “hours” on it. Much later in the film, when Chihiro travels by train to the witch Zeniba’s house in Swamp Bottom, we see a clock on the train platform with no hours marked on it. Time is relative and unpredictable in sacred space, and, perhaps, it does not exist at all, at least not as we understand it. This is the protean time of pilgrimage and of ma. The kami of this world seem to be beckoning her, as the “great process” of the wind had pulled her into the tunnel, and now, as evidenced by swirling leaves and blowing sound effects, the wind is pushing her to follow her parents as they head up the grassy hill before them, much to her consternation. The rising landscape— shown in a long shot in which the three traverse diagonally up the slope, cutting across the frame—again emphasizes the upward trajectory of their journey. When Chihiro catches up to her mom and exclaims, “That building was moaning!,” her mother replies, “It’s just the wind,” again disregarding the signs of nature’s spiritual powers. Before ascending a steep stone staircase into the little village of ramshackle buildings, Chihiro and her parents must cross over a rocky river bed, now with only a trickle of water flowing, which prompts her father to remark that the theme park owners were planning to “put a river here.” Once again, he sees this as a fake world of “wonder,” ignoring the true beauty and spiritual mystery of the place just as his wife does. A low-angle long shot here shows a diminutive Chihiro climbing the broad staircase featuring a large stone frog at the top. This is the first of a great many frogs in this spirit world. Indeed, frogs play a significant role in Yubaba’s grand bathhouse, where Chihiro/Sen ends up working. Sentient “frog men” of various sizes work in the bathhouse, and Sen’s stingy, greedy managers are both large frog men. This is not a random choice: frogs are prominent figures in Shinto iconography. Kasulis explains, “The Japanese word for frog is ‘kaeru,’ a homophone for a word meaning ‘to return home’” (12). The frogs prevalent throughout Spirited Away express the major theme of returning home to the sacred space, the “field of emptiness,” in which one is immanently aware of being interdependent with all natural and supernatural phenomena. Another prominent symbol that is seen for the first time as the family walks down the main street of the village appears on a shop sign and in its window: the hiragana character meaning eye, sight, and vision (me,め), which is repeated multiple times at various points in the film alongside actual drawings or neon signs depicting open eyes. Hiragana is used because it is the easiest of the three types of script used by the Japanese and, thus, the first taught to children, so young Japanese viewers will be able to read these “signs.” Miyazaki gives us a close-up shot of the me signs here, and the shot then tilts down, becoming a long shot of Chihiro’s father climbing another set of stairs (more vertical movement). In this street of restaurants, it is odd to find what seems to be an optometric shop, but Miyazaki’s symbolism is

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clear: this is the place where Chihiro/Sen will learn to see that she is connected to, responsible for, and interdependent with all around her. It will be an arduous ascent to awareness, to seeing anew. What follows the family’s arrival at the village is the much-discussed restaurant scene, during which Chihiro’s parents, drawn by the scent of delicious food, sit down and commence stuffing their faces with unbelievable piles of curious cuisine. Chihiro is too scared to join them when they sit to eat, so she wanders back to the street, looks both directions, and her eye is caught by an old tree curved over a large red lantern with the kanji for oil (abura) on it, sitting atop of another set of stairs. The tree and lantern are emphasized with a slowly zooming in, low-angle long shot from her point of view, wherein they appear in the top center of the frame but eventually dominate it. Chihiro looks small and frail in the high-angle reverse shot of her climbing the stairs and also in the subsequent shot looking down on her from above the lantern as she walks into the shadow of the tree; once again there is a strong sense that she is being watched. It is at this moment that she turns to her right and sees the grand bathhouse of the spirits, the Aburaya (literally, oil shop). Miyazaki’s impressive bathhouse is modeled after the ornate Dōgo Onsen Honkan bathhouse, located in Matsuyama, but his Aburaya is distinctly more vertical in design, a towering red building several stories high, decorated with gold accents.7 The shot tilts up this time, rather than down, to emphasize its height, but this move also indicates that we have arrived at the primary residence of the spirits; there is no higher plane, except the ascension to the top floor of the bathhouse, where its owner Yubaba occupies the penthouse, the very top of this “sacred mountain.” The low-angle long shots of the bathhouse display its splendor, emphasized by the wide swath of sky behind it featuring darkening clouds on its right side and mostly open blue sky on the other, a harbinger of the difficulties and lessons to come. A sea appears to lie behind it. Incongruously, there is a prominent, gray smokestack belching black smoke standing to the left of the bathhouse, equaling its height, with a flag suspended just in front of it containing the same kanji for “oil” that appears on the lantern. Miyazaki borrowed the name for the bathhouse from an inn (hatago) in Haibura, Nara, that was important in the Edo and Meiji periods and was celebrated by the Native Studies scholar Motoori Norinaga, who was related to the family who had established it (M. Suzuki; Nosco 162). However, the “oil shop” is an ironic name for a place dedicated to purifying the kami. Moreover, the ever-spewing smokestack draws attention both to the paradox that getting clean, even here, requires polluting sources of energy and to the reality of the industrial contamination of nature in our world. This also highlights the fact that neither the kami nor their world is perfect: in Spirited Away, as in the eighth-century Kojiki, kami can perform good and evil deeds, become polluted, and wash to renew their purity. This cycle of pollution and purification may be endless and inescapable, but there is hope for positive transformation, a principle that will bear out in the plot not only for Chihiro/Sen but also for the kami she helps. Chihiro then approaches the bathhouse by walking halfway across the large bridge leading to its dark entrance, over which a very asymmetrical, weathered wooden sign reads Aburaya, a piece of wabi-sabi aesthetics on an opulent façade,

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reminding us of linear time. While she stands on this bridge, another graphic representation of “in-between” space (hashi), she is approached by the young, human-looking Haku, the first kami she meets, who brusquely orders her to leave this place immediately, as it is twilight, the liminal time when the spirits flood into the bathhouse. Note the collapse of time here as just moments ago it was before noon. Haku’s name means white, the sacred color, or absence thereof (ma), representing purity in Shinto. When Chihiro runs back to her parents, she finds them transformed into giant pigs, still ravenously devouring everything they can reach but now being smacked in the face by a shadowy spirit with what appears to be a fly swatter. This is a rather on-the-nose gesture, but it certainly communicates Miyazaki’s opposition to mass consumption culture. Chihiro flees from the pigs, not fully realizing they are her parents, and races back past the large stone frog kami, which is featured prominently in the foreground of two shots; now, however, there is water flowing from its mouth. The frog is a sign that Chihiro is on “home-ground,” but, at this point, she is still frightened by this mysterious, awe-inspiring world. When Chihiro reaches the bottom of the stairs, she finds herself waist-deep in dark water, and a point-of-view shot captures the black, liquid expanse stretching out before her (ma), which is topped by an illuminated cityscape. Distraught and unable to exit across the “fake” river, as it is now a massive lake, Chihiro sees the parade of disparate spirits streaming into this world as darkness falls. Haku sweeps in at this point and rescues her from physically disappearing by feeding her a bitter biscuit. The connection to the Greco-Roman Persephone myth is clear here, but Napier points out that the food that helps and heals creatures in Spirited Away is invariably very simple or terribly bitter (“Matter” 306), the opposite of the delectable feasts voraciously consumed by Chihiro’s parents and by the insatiable character No Face in the bathhouse in later scenes. Napier argues, “The message is obvious: it is through swallowing unpleasant medicine [or simple ‘homely’ foods] rather than indiscriminate gorging that the characters can develop and change” (“Matter” 306). In addition to this moral messaging, there is another essential connection here to Shinto mythology. In the Kojiki, the female creator kami Izanami dies giving birth to the fire god, and her husband/brother, the kami Izanagi, travels to Yomi, the underworld, to retrieve her; however, because she has eaten the food of that place, she may not leave. As in the Greco-Roman myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the wife instructs her husband not to look at her, but Izanagi cannot restrain himself and does so, seeing that Izanami now is a rotting carcass crawling with maggots. After fleeing from Yomi, Izanagi washes in a river to purify himself, and the eminent sun goddess Amaterasu is born from the effluence from Izanagi’s left eye: a goddess born from the act of bathing (Kasulis 115). There are a number of connections to Spirited Away in this myth, but the most salient at this point in the film are the following: the notion that one becomes an inextricable part of a spiritual world by ingesting food from the place (though Miyazaki’s is definitely not a dark underworld); the need of the kami for ritual purification (hence the bathhouse); and the critical function of purification to clear one’s sight and “give birth” to the sacred. In the case of Chihiro, her experience with the ritual purification of the gods cleans the “pollution” from her sight (kokoro), birthing her new

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vision of the sacred in all things. The pervasive “eye” symbols throughout the film keep this theme ever in our vision. Once Haku has helped Chihiro regain her solid form, he ushers her across the bridge to the bathhouse, casting a spell of invisibility over her, which fails, thanks to an overeager frog creature seeking Haku’s attention. It is at this point that we hear spirits complaining about the “human smell,” which is clearly pungent and disgusting to the kami. Humans are seen as pollution in the spirit world, as the kami of the natural world are polluted by humans. This creates a need for the kami to push, or grow, past their prejudice against humans in Miyazaki’s story, just as Chihiro/Sen must learn not to be afraid of the kami but to extend them her help. Chihiro’s first big, dangerous task in the spirit world is to descend the massive staircase on the exterior of the bathhouse, arriving in the basement, where the six-armed, curmudgeonly Kamaji frantically keeps the boiler running with the help of susuwatari (soot sprites, previously seen in My Neighbor Totoro). Her intense fear is made evident in the many long shots of this tiny girl against the backdrop of a very dark, hulking building, yet she pushes through to Kamaji’s basement, where he helps her by co-opting one of the bathhouse employees, Lin, to take Chihiro all the way up to Yubaba’s penthouse so she can beg for a work contract. Haku has informed her that working in the bathhouse is her only hope of remaining in the spirit world and rescuing her parents, preventing them from being eaten by the kami. In Kamaji’s basement, Chihiro begins to learn one of her most important lessons, gratitude, when Lin orders her to thank Kamaji for taking the risk of helping her. As Lin and Chihiro make the long vertical journey up to Yubaba’s penthouse, we get a look at the chaos of this lavish and labyrinthine leisure spa and its kami clientele. This is a place of commerce as well as sacred space, like many large shrines. Napier states that Miyazaki modeled the interior of the bathhouse after that of the “modern, flamboyant wedding palace in Tokyo, the Meguro Gajoen: multi-storied with vast high-ceilinged rooms, enormous elegant elevators, and gorgeously appointed restrooms” (Miyazakiworld 201). In interviews, Miyazaki has called the Spirited Away bathhouse “the real Japan” and “Japan itself” (TP 218, 217), as well as comparing it to Studio Ghibli (TP 221): the bathhouse is both a sacred and commercial space, where kami seek leisure (another meaning of ma) and ritual purification. It is also a hierarchical world where workers compete for lucre in a “sink or swim” environment. There is a carnivalesque look and feel to this bustling entertainment palace: some hustle to serve and earn and others purchase services and goods. Pilgrimage routes and locations, Turner reminds us, feature “markets and fairs”; there are attractions and distractions both holy and unholy (“Center” 205). Commerce and the sacred coexist in pilgrimage spaces. In their focus on survival, pilgrims often need to earn and spend resources, and Chihiro learns how to do both in order to not only survive herself but also help, sometimes even resurrect, kami and her parents. As Turner argues, commercial activities during pilgrimage “are more contractual, more associational, more volitional, more replete with the novel and the unexpected, fuller of possibilities of communitas, both as secular fellowship and comradeship and sacred communion, than anything he has known at home. And the world becomes a bigger place” (“Center” 205). This is precisely what Chihiro/

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Sen experiences, and, in this scene, she is about to sign an actual contract in this mysterious world. When Chihiro reaches the top floor of the bathhouse, Yubaba’s garishly opulent penthouse, we see another marker of sacred space: the kanji for heaven or sky (another connection to kū) appears on the elevator doors as she exits into this shadowy, perplexing space, strikingly different from the brightly illuminated spa areas. In this scene, Chihiro’s first encounter with the witch Yubaba is terrifying, but you can see the girl’s strength rising as she knows she can only survive and attempt to rescue her parents if she secures a work contract with Yubaba. When Chihiro signs her contract, Yubaba magically removes three of the four characters in her name, leaving only the one that alternately can be read as Sen. Chihiro literally means one thousand (chi) inquiries or fathoms (hiro), so, as Boyd and Nishimura point out, it can be taken to mean “looking deeply” or “inquiring after many things” (2). Sen, meaning one thousand, leaves her as only a number, a means by which Yubaba collects more wealth. It is Sen’s courage to face Yubaba and to explore and participate in this world that brings her to awareness and maturity. Though Yubaba steals her name to control her, Chihiro/Sen does not cease to look deeply and discover her interdependence within this challenging kami world. Miyazaki uses Yubaba, the bathhouse’s demanding and frightening boss, as a central example of the lack of essential, binary categories of good and evil in Spirited Away. The figure of the crone exists in most cultures around the globe, but Japan’s yamauba figure is particularly prominent in the nation’s folklore and literary, pictorial, and performing arts. The name Yubaba means “hot water woman,” but her appearance as a grotesque old witch with a giant head, wrinkly face, protruding nose, and claw-like fingernails marks her as a yamauba, meaning “old woman of the mountains.”

Figure 2.2 Yubaba, the intimidating bathhouse manager, is a powerful and complex yamauba figure in Spirited Away.

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She has been portrayed as a kami (a sacred mountain deity), an oni (demon), and a yokai. In her book Japanese Demon Lore, Noriko Reider asserts, “The yamauba as an oni woman is ever transforming” (88).8 In the tales and plays featuring yamauba, she takes on various roles, but her two most prevalent personae are the human flesh-devouring witch and the nurturing “Granny Mountains” who takes care of kami, warriors (especially Kintarō), or the seasons themselves. As the “great mother and nurturer,” yamauba is portrayed as the kami who gives birth to the twelve months of the year or to the four seasons (Reider, Japanese 64). The two medieval Nō plays that feature yamauba—Yamamba (an alternate spelling) and Adachigahara (Black Mound)—depict her as the “mountain-hag” who must ceaselessly dance the seasons into being and the cannibal witch who threatens to devour a group of Buddhist priests, respectively. It is believed that both were written by the Nō maestro Zeami in the fifteenth century. As Nō plays teach Buddhist doctrine, it is not surprising that even in her nurturing role as progenitor of the seasons yamauba is perceived negatively, though sympathetically, as a representation of the “piled-up dust of passions” that chain her to the “wrong attachments” of this world (Zeami 177). In this, one can see the Buddhist conflation of bad karma with the Shinto “dust” of pollution. In Yamamba, the kami herself preaches that “Good and Evil are the same” and “Right and Wrong are one” (Zeami 170, 175), referring to Zen Buddhism’s more radical doctrine of nondualism, but this “field of emptiness” also is the open space of the processual world where good and evil, as all else, are perpetually evolving and there is no distinction between the phenomenal and metaphysical. This is precisely the space Miyazaki creates for Spirited Away’s narrative of growth and connection, in which the protagonist must learn to respect and even extend help to spirits that appear evil (Yubaba), rapacious (No Face), and faithless (Haku). Her survival depends on her mindful heart’s transcendence of the reductive good versus evil dichotomy and also her recognition of her interdependence with all things. This does not negate the very real threat to her posed by the powerful Yubaba, who, as nature itself, is unpredictable and potentially destructive; after all, yamauba gives birth to winter as well as spring. Miyazaki declares, “In Yubaba’s world, one must always live with the constant threat of being completely devoured” (TP 198), directly referring to yamauba’s cannibalistic destroyer persona. However, in Yubaba’s identical twin sister, Zeniba, he gives us a nurturing “granny” figure, whom Sen encounters later in the film; in Zeniba, we undeniably find the positive, maternal yamauba. Miyazaki confirms that Yubaba is a “special type of ‘everyman’” and that Yubaba and Zeniba are truly “two facets of the same person”; he also compares himself to the “schizoid” Yubaba (TP 223, 240–41). However, the split between the characters of Yubaba and Zeniba is not as clear-cut as it might seem; there are shades of gray in both characters: Yubaba is the successful manager of a flourishing and much-needed business, she recognizes and compliments exemplary work when she sees it, and she does mother and protect her giant baby Bō, despite her tendency to overindulge him. On the other hand, Zeniba violently pursues Haku when he is in his dragon form, leaving him bloody and on the brink of death, which may be justified by the fact that he steals a magical seal from her, but it still reveals her proclivity for fierce revenge.

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With the yamauba twins of Spirited Away, Miyazaki strongly reinforces his stated theme of the complexity of the world and the impermanence of essentializing categorizations.

Scrubbing Sen: The Path of Gods and Monsters There are three further crucial sequences in Spirited Away that are spectacular turning points in Chihiro/Sen’s pilgrimage and that demonstrate Miyazaki’s central foci: the “Stink Spirit” scene, the events surrounding No Face’s rampage, and Sen’s journey to and from Zeniba’s house. A great deal has been written about these episodes in the film, so this study focuses on the markers of sacred space and other elements of Shinto-Buddhist aesthetics that strongly express Miyazaki’s goals.9 On her first day of work in the bathhouse, despite Lin’s complaint that this is “frog work,” Sen is assigned with Lin to handle the largest tub, which is reserved for the most filthy clients. Long shots in the tub room reveal large old pine trees painted on the natural wood walls, very reminiscent of Nō theater space with the single, sacred pine painted in the center of the main stage’s back wall—a design that evolved from the sacred spaces roped off in fields for agricultural rituals (himorogi) in which kami were invited to descend, i.e., an axis mundi. In this consecrated space, the tub itself proves to be a yorishiro, the central place where a kami reveals itself. As Sen and Lin are scrubbing the disgusting tub, Yubaba calls down to the frog foreman to tell him, “We have an intruder.” A gigantic mound of dark brown sludge, with openings for two eyes and a mouth, is shown approaching the bathhouse; it appears to be a “Stink Spirit” reeking of excrement. However, Yubaba makes it clear that they must welcome all spirits; plus, she has an inkling that this creature is not what it seems. Sen is ordered to greet the spirit as it enters and show it into the large tub; as she does, the aroma is so pungent her hair stands on end and the food Lin is bringing her rots immediately. Nevertheless, Sen manages to welcome the spirit politely, despite the disgust of her fellow workers. In a bird’s-eye shot above the big round tub, we see the tiny figure of Sen cower against the wall and the massive, oozing “Stink Spirit” enter the room and plunge into the full tub, causing the green “herbal formula” water to pour over into the room and Sen to slip. Yubaba seems entertained and comments, “Let’s see what she’ll do next.” This, obviously, is a test. When Sen refills the tub, using another bath token to request more water from Kamaji, the bathhouse manager and Yubaba both express concern that Sen is wasting good resources on this filthy creature. Nonetheless, what is quickly apparent is Sen’s genuine commitment to providing relief to this guest. When she, precariously poised on its edge, falls into the tub with the spirit, she discovers a hard metal protuberance jutting out from its body. The alarmed Lin, a tough character, calls out that she “won’t let him hurt” Sen, but Sen responds to her own possible endangerment with compassion for the spirit: “I think he needs help. It feels like there’s a thorn in his side.” At this point, Yubaba realizes this is not a Stink Spirit and mobilizes all her workers to drag the “thorn” out of the kami. In a group effort, they all pull a huge heap of garbage—including a bicycle, household

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appliances, construction materials, and a toilet—out of him. When Sen pulls a stubbornly stuck fishing line out of the spirit, a sound like a cork popping out of a bottle is heard along with a big, relieved sigh. In the tub, the spirit’s watery green “paw” envelopes Sen as she looks at him with wide, surprised eyes. A close-up shot here from Sen’s point-of-view shows a large Nō theater mask, a mask used for wise old man characters, floating center screen in a blank field of pale yellow, perhaps a reference to gold, purity, and/or enlightenment.10 In a film of opulent optics, this shot of intimate spiritual connection takes place against a blank backdrop, emulating the open field of ma, wherein kami and humanity encounter one another. The viewer also looks directly into the face of this ancient river kami as he says, “It feels good.” Boyd and Nishimura point out that the English version’s translation of these words as “Well done”—focusing on Sen’s efforts rather than the renewal of the nature spirit—may be a concession to Western egocentrism (8). In either version, Sen’s courage, compassion, and hard work result in the purification of both the river kami and of her kokoro. For Sen, this is a type of misogi, a Shinto ritual purification in which the whole body is immersed in water. When the kami’s watery appendage lets Sen go, she finds a green dumpling in her hand, a special gift from the deity. This ancient god, now free of the weight of human pollution, laughs joyfully and rises up in its true shape of a majestic white dragon (traditionally associated with water), which flies up and away from the bathhouse. All Miyazaki’s key themes are found in this scene: hard work, compassion, purity and pollution, and the interdependence of all natural entities, sentient and insentient. The river kami and Sen demonstrate that one should not judge a creature by its appearance and that transformation and renewal are eminently possible when beings work together. Sen’s relationship with No Face provides another graphic example of the importance of selflessly helping others and forming mutually supportive community. No Face is one of Miyazaki’s most fascinating creations, and that is saying a great deal. Comprised of a relatively blank, colorless mask with simply designed, unmoving features and a body made of what appears to be a plain black sheet, No Face floats along in the world all alone. Indeed, when he is visible in his initial shape, the bottom of his black body is transparent, like the footless ghosts of Japanese folklore, shadowy figures hovering between substance and absence. Miyazaki compares him to people with poorly defined identities, who lack the ability to connect genuinely with others: “There are No-Faces all around us. . . . No-Face is just a name and a mask[;] other than that we don’t really know what he’s thinking or what he wants to do. . . . I do think there are people like him everywhere, people who want to glom on to someone but have no sense of self” (TP 222). His expressionless mask-face is reminiscent of that of a sad clown or a mime. The Kasuga Shrine kami in the film also have colorless faces comprised of a mask that is worn by the ritual performers at the eponymous shrine; however, their masks are far less blank and No Face is not traveling with a group, as they are in the film. Reider opines that No Face is a Tatarigami, a type of demonic spirit bringing calamity, which we also see in Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) (“Spirited” 19). No Face certainly does wreak havoc in the bathhouse.

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We first see No Face when Chihiro is crossing the bridge with Haku to enter the bathhouse for the first time; he is the only other spirit who is able to see her as she is hidden by the invisibility spell. He stares as she passes. On her first day of work, before the river kami arrives, Sen discovers No Face standing out in the rain, apparently unable to enter the bathhouse, so Sen invites him to come in, and he proceeds to follow her around, though usually as an invisible presence. Perhaps he follows her because she has been kind to him, or perhaps he senses that she, too, is an outsider. In any case, he provides her with bath tokens when she needs them, then invisibly, creepily hangs around to watch her work. After the river kami’s glorious departure, the bathhouse workers scramble to scoop up every last grain of the gold nuggets the kami has left behind for them. In a highangle long shot, we see No Face reappear and quickly disappear again, standing apart and watching the frenzied, greedy workers. He reappears in a later scene when a small frog worker is trying to pry bits of gold out of cracks in the floor, despite the fact that a shimenawa rope has been hung to cordon off the space as sacred. No Face, having learned that everyone desires gold, magically manifests gold nuggets in his palm and offers them to the frog, proceeding to gobble the frog up whole. Previous to this, No Face has never spoken, only made quiet little grunts, but now he speaks clearly with the frog’s voice in a kind of magical ventriloquism. As he has no identity of his own, No Face has had no voice, but violently consuming another being has empowered him and whetted his appetite for more. Through No Face, Miyazaki is commenting on the superficiality of consumer culture, of purchasing one’s identity and then uncontrollably, insatiably consuming ever more to try to satisfy one’s heart-mind. As No Face’s black body expands outward, he becomes, unmistakably, a monster. Speaking of No Face, Miyazaki avers that “there’s only a paper-thin difference between evil spirits and gods” (TP 222), and No Face crosses that permeable non-boundary throughout the film. When the bathhouse employees realize No Face has endless piles of gold to give them and a ravenous hunger for every type of food they put in front of him, the entire bathhouse descends into chaos as they clamber to bring him more food. He grows increasingly larger as he eats and develops a broad, toothy mouth that gorges on everything in front of it and demands, in the voice of the frog, ever more. No Face’s gluttony inspires the workers’ flagrant display of ludicrous greed, a grotesque dance of vapid and meretricious consumerism. During this pandemonium, Sen comes through the center of the bathhouse trying desperately to get to Yubaba’s penthouse to help Haku, who has been badly wounded by Zeniba. Nonetheless, she takes the time to stop and thank No Face politely for helping her with the bath tokens, expressing genuine gratitude, but she refuses to take any gold from him. This enrages No Face, who starts swallowing workers whole. When Sen is blocked from taking the elevator up to Yubaba’s penthouse, she quickly improvises and embarks on climbing all the way up the exterior of the building, employing responsive virtuosity in her attempt to save Haku, an example of Buddhist skillful means (upaya). It is a perilous challenge, but she does not hesitate for a moment, even when the pipe on which she is running detaches

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and she must leap to catch on to a ladder. This dangerous ascent stands in stark contrast to her frightful descent into Kamaji’s boiler room near the start of her adventure, thus marking her growth into courage and selflessness, as this is an altruistic effort to help Haku. Just before this, Sen had confronted myriad white paper figures attacking Haku in his dragon body, and, during her climb, one such paper figure is attached to her back. In Japanese folklore, these are shikigami, powerful spirits that often inhabit paper and do the bidding of a sorcerer. Paper is frequently used as a sacred instrument in Shinto, as seen in the zig-zag shide hanging from shimenawa, “partly because the ordinary word for ‘paper’ is a homonym for ‘kami’” (Kasulis 67).11 When Zeniba manifests from this paper figure in Yubaba’s penthouse, Sen begs for Haku’s life, but Zeniba is intent on retrieving the powerful seal he stole for Yubaba and believes Haku should die for his crime. Zeniba drops Haku and Sen through a trap door, and they fall all the way to Kamaji’s boiler room. Haku and Sen are accompanied by Yubaba’s spoiled, giant baby Bō, whom Zeniba has transformed into a mouse, and Yubaba’s bird, which is now a fly. In the basement, Sen attempts to revive the bleeding, snarling dragon Haku by forcing part of the river kami’s dumpling down his throat. Haku thrashes wildly and regurgitates Zeniba’s golden seal, topped with a carved frog, and a live black slug, which Sen squishes. Haku transforms back into his human body, but he is gravely ill. Sen decides to go to Zeniba’s house to return the seal, apologize for Haku, and beg her to lift the curse on the thief. Kamaji warns her that Zeniba is dangerous but generously offers Sen the train tickets he has been saving for forty years to help her; although, he tells her, they will only get her to Zeniba as the train only goes one way now, away from the bathhouse. Miyazaki may be saying here that in a world that relentlessly pollutes nature and no longer notices its wonder, the kami have less opportunity to purify themselves. On this hazardous journey, Sen must find her own way back, but she does not demur. This courageous, selfless choice is immediately followed by another: Sen confidently declares that she will take care of the bathhouse’s No Face problem before departing. No Face has been on a rampage and yelling for Sen since she refused to take gold from him. Yubaba orders Sen to get as much gold from him as possible and then get him out the door. When Sen enters the large room where No Face awaits her, having shoved away the food which clearly does not satisfy him, long shots of No Face reveal that he has grown to enormous proportions: he has a bulbous black body with spindly little arms and legs. In a striking profile long shot, the gargantuan No Face stretches out his narrow neck toward the tiny figure of Sen, now kneeling before him in humble but calm supplication. This shot is reminiscent of the many images of “hungry ghosts” in Japanese art. Although his neck is not quite as skinny as theirs, it is far thinner than his tumid belly. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the realm of hungry ghosts, one of the six “paths” of samsaric existence, is inhabited by specters who were insatiably avaricious in their previous lives. No Face has developed the behavior and body-type of a hungry ghost. What he wants more than anything is Sen’s friendship, and he offers her anything she might desire, but Sen informs him she must leave and

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advises him to go home. No Face replies that he has no friends or family and is terribly lonely: the only thing he wants is Sen. When he grabs her by the throat, Sen, unperturbed, responds, “If you want to eat me, eat this first. I was saving this for my parents, but I think you better have it.” With that, she gives him the last piece of the river kami’s dumpling. The dumpling works as an emetic again, and No Face begins to vomit up all he had consumed. He chases after Sen in a seething rage as she draws him out of the bathhouse. Sen, along with the mouse and fly, escapes from the bathhouse in a small boat with Lin’s help, and No Face, back in his original form, follows by diving into the blue sea that now completely surrounds the bathhouse. Sen insists that No Face will not hurt her and that it is the bathhouse, a place of commerce and consumption, that makes him “crazy.” The following scene is comprised of another pilgrimage within her journey: the trip to and visit with Zeniba. The train voyage with which it opens is a visually stunning sequence dominated by the aesthetics of kū. The torrential rains that fell the previous day, when the river kami came, have formed a glassy blue seascape stretching out as far as the eye can see, and its color matches that of the sky while its surface also reflects the white clouds above. The first of many kū shots is the one from Lin’s point of view as she bids Sen farewell. It is a long shot of Sen walking along the shallowly submerged train track to the island-like platform in the distance: in the open blue swath of water and sky, Sen seems to be walking on water, floating in the middle of the screen between the planes of sea and sky. She is on her way to a more intimate, home-like sacred space, a break from the consumerism of the bathhouse but still dangerous. The open space of the sky and water creates a new space of ma, a “field of emptiness” representing the interconnectedness of all, as the sea and sky comprise nearly the entire mise-en-scène. The four tickets Kamaji gives her for the “Sea-plain Electric Train,” make it clear that her journey this time will be a horizontal one. Kamaji has directed her to get off the train at the sixth stop, Swamp Bottom, which references the six realms, or paths, of reincarnation (samsara), as enumerated earlier. This formulation would make Swamp Bottom, where Zeniba lives in her European fairy-tale cottage, a type of Buddhist hell, the sixth realm, but the place is cozy rather than infernal. This is another nod toward the nondualism Miyazaki touts in his declaration of the aim of Spirited Away and serves, perhaps, as a Zen Buddhist metaphor: the six “paths” are ultimately the same, on one horizontal plane/plain; the distinctions between them are formed by one’s perceptions as governed by the individual’s level of awareness. Sen, with her motley crew, now understands her fate is tied to the well-being of others, who are a part of her “home-ground.” Moreover, the name on the front of the train she alights with No Face, the mouse, and the fly is nakamichi, meaning “middle way.” In traditional Buddhism, this refers to moderation between extremes of thought or behavior, such as asceticism and indulgence, as Buddha laid out in his Eightfold Path. Writing of this train scene, Reinders further connects nakamichi to Mahāyāna Buddhism, in which the “middle way” evolved to refer to “a non-duality of all extremes, such as the apparently opposing views that

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things are real or things are unreal. Middle Way then is a synonym for emptiness of self or no-self” (134–35). Thus, it is entirely fitting that this important sequence featuring the train ride of Sen—on a journey to selflessly intercede for Haku— visually represents her awareness of interdependence on a plane of “empty” sea and sky, ever changing but also connecting all things. Inside the train, packages bear the hiragana for me (eye) and an eye drawing, reminders of Sen’s gained insight. The few fellow passengers are dark, human-shaped shadows, appearing to be from an earlier time, perhaps the time of Miyazaki’s childhood and trauma, during and just after World War II. The ghostly figures are silent and stare down at the ground somberly. This train sequence is quiet and pensive, permeated with shades of blue in the mise-en-scène. After the carnivalesque activity in the bathhouse, this ma in time and space is a pause for reflection, as the calm sea mirrors the sky and the train’s movement reflects the ever-changing clouds and gradual darkening of the sky as the sun descends. As Dani Cavallaro contends, this scene is a superb example of the Japanese concept of “the spirit of seijaku,” meaning “a stirring impression of energized stillness, on the one hand, and a soothing sense of serenity amidst swirling activity, on the other” (159). It is a vision of the vital energy (ki) that connects all things on their transformational journeys. The train heads into twilight, that liminal time when night and day overlap, coexist within each other. The scene is accompanied by slow, sparse piano and strings playing in a minor key. There are a number of exterior long shots of the train horizontally bisecting the blue of the sea and sky in the frame, the train seeming to float on the surface of the water. There also is a poignant, frontal full shot of Sen and No Face sitting side by side on the bench, framed by the train windows behind them and the blue and white of sea, sky, and clouds.

Figure 2.3 Chihiro, No Face, the mouse (baby Bō), and the fly on the Sea-plain Electric Train in Spirited Away.

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The journey is presented as a montage of images, featuring a variety of fleeting sights and the gradually darkening sky. The small islands they pass, containing a village or even just a solitary house, also seem to float in the sky, as they hover in the distance, reminding one of the meaning, if not the content, of ukiyo-e, which literally translates to “paintings of the floating world.”12 Ukiyo-e, a significant influence on manga and anime, is an art form that developed in the Edo period (1603–1868) and includes paintings and woodblock prints of urban pleasures and entertainments, the “floating world,” such as “courtesans, geishas, kabuki theater, and other evanescent, transitory pleasures” (Buljan and Cusack 17). After darkness has fallen, Miyazaki shows the train passing neon signs that seem to float in the black air, perhaps a reference to the content of ukiyo-e. However, the term also carries the Buddhist connotation of the impermanence of this illusory world, connecting back more positively to Nishitani’s “field of emptiness,” wherein one attains awareness of the mutually circulating interdependence of all things. As the sun sets, there are stunningly beautiful shots of pink and purple light streaking through clouds and sky, also reflected off the sea, which allude to the purple clouds associated with the descent of Amida Buddha to earth to collect faithful Buddhists after death and take them to the Pure Land, a celestial paradise.13 Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli co-founder, anime master Isao Takahata, memorably depicts Amida himself spectacularly descending on purple clouds in both Pompoko (1994) and Princess Kaguya (2013).14 Here, as the train travels increasingly deeper into the land of the shades, a type of underworld, this image is a harbinger of hope: Swamp Bottom will not be the end of the line for Sen. Indeed, Sen, like Amida, is on a mission of mercy to help a suffering creature. At the end of the scene, there is a final profile close-up of Sen’s determined face looking bravely forward toward her next task as the train moves into the darkness; the

Figure 2.4 A kū shot of the train bisecting the frame, marking the edge between sky and water, during twilight in Spirited Away.

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reflection of her face in the window behind her foreshadows the merging of Sen with Chihiro that follows. The aesthetics of kū throughout the train ride sequence vividly communicates this range of rich, interconnected concepts and serves as a ma of contemplation in the structure of the film. The Swamp Bottom scene begins with a shot of the aforementioned station platform clock bearing no hands, its age indicated by the moss or rust hanging from it. If time is flexible and ever-varying in the bathhouse area, where commerce pushes the community to hustle, in Swamp Bottom, the distinctions of linear time are not marked at all. The round shape represents time’s cyclical, sacred nature in this place. Sen, No Face, the mouse, and the fly are led through the dark, swampy terrain by a sentient lamp to Zeniba’s European-style storybook cottage. This new landscape is another type of sacred and liminal space; it is mid-way between the sea and land, of which we are reminded by another shot of the nakamichi sign on the front of the train as it pulls into Swamp Bottom. Writing of Shinto beliefs, Yoshida Kanetomo explains that Earth’s “supernatural powers” are found “in gas emanations from mountains and marshes, tides of the ocean, and energy of matter” (qtd. in Hardacre 222). They have traveled between the two yamauba figures, from the sacred “mountain” of Yubaba’s bathhouse to the sacred depths of Zeniba’s swamp, but, as Miyazaki reminds us, these two “twins” are truly one. Moreover, this one, multivalent yamauba figure represents, and perhaps controls, the whole range of existence, the six realms, and the cycling of the seasons; thus, she is the mother of us all. It is this maternal yamauba, not the menacing Zeniba she had encountered in Yubaba’s penthouse, who welcomes her and her companions into the simple, comfortable cottage adorned with Zeniba’s homespun crafts. Sen immediately returns Zeniba’s seal to the witch, apologizing on Haku’s behalf, and Zeniba notes that the protective spell on the seal has been broken by Sen’s love for him. She also reveals that the black slug Sen stomped on was Yubaba’s spell to control Haku, which explains his “evil” behavior and reminds us that evil and good are not always what they appear to be. As the witch serves Sen and the now-placid No Face a proper British-style tea, Zeniba explains that she cannot help Sen save her parents or Haku, who only can be released from Yubaba’s indentured servitude by remembering his true name. Before asking Sen to call her “Granny” (cf. Granny Mountains), Zeniba tells Sen that she will have to figure out how to save them herself by using what she can remember about them. As Sen struggles to remember, “the boys” (No Face, the mouse, and the fly) work together with Zeniba to spin thread on a spinning wheel, powered by the mouse running inside it so quickly that its spokes are invisible. This is the first work this spoiled baby Bō has ever done, yet he is clearly loving it. Miyazaki is reinforcing his theme of hard work here. Significantly, the spinning wheel is a traditional element in yamauba folklore, appearing in many of the tales and symbolizing her crucial role in propelling the four seasons as they cycle annually through nature. Integrated into Buddhism, yamauba’s spinning wheel becomes the samsaric wheel of birth, death, and rebirth in the six realms; thus, it represents attachment to worldly desires as does the figure of yamauba herself in Buddhist conceptions. However, this wheel can also be linked to the Zen circle,

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ensō, meaning circle of togetherness (literally, mutual circle), which depicts the emptiness, the processual nature, that connects all things. These associations with the spinning wheel can be aligned with Nishitani’s notion of “infinite finitude,” the awareness of the inexorable movement toward, and vulnerability to, death in the world of linear time while understanding the “endlessly revolving” or “circular process of finitude itself”: “The endless rotations of finitude, the circular process of finitude itself, is an endless pilgrimage of finite existence on a horizon embracing the forms of human existence and the existence of other species” (RN 172). On her pilgrimage into this spirit world, Sen/Chihiro finds herself fighting for her finite life, but, in her striving, she learns that there is an infinite horizon, a “field of emptiness,” connecting her intimately to all forms of life as they circulate endlessly in time and space. Her own survival is interdependent with that of others. In Japanese folklore, yamauba is a physical embodiment of this pilgrimage, giving birth to the cycle of the seasons, the birth and death of the world, which never ceases, yet each year, like each life, has an end, “infinite finitude.” As the four work together to make the troubled Sen a gift, we see Zeniba guiding the creatures in their tasks, teaching them to spin and knit threads into one, a symbol of musubi, the generative force creating physical and spiritual union.15 Zeniba even compliments No Face on his spinning. When they have finished, Zeniba presents Sen with a tie for her hair, promising, “It’ll protect you. It’s made from the thread your friends wove together.” As she puts the knitted circle around her ponytail—the gathered threads binding her hair, further images of interconnection—they hear the dragon Haku arriving outside. Sen is overjoyed to see him healed and strong again, and Zeniba forgives Haku on the condition that he takes care of Sen. After Sen tells “Granny” her real name, Chihiro—signifying that Sen and Chihiro are now united—Zeniba bids them all farewell, except for No Face, whom Granny keeps around to be her helper. Miyazaki has argued that “there’s probably a bit of No-Face in all of us” (TP 212): having a useful purpose in this world, one that benefits and supports others, may prevent us from seeking identity and fulfillment in voracious, vapid consumption. Chihiro’s parting words from Granny are “Thanks for everything!” as she goes flying off on dragon Haku. Gratitude has become a part of the fabric of who she is.

Miraculous Homecomings As Chihiro and Haku, with the mouse and fly, soar through the dark sky with scattered white clouds, we encounter several more kū shots, this time illuminated by a bright moon, another symbol of ephemerality and cyclical time. In this sequence, Chihiro has momentary flashbacks to her younger self being rescued from a swiftly moving river, leading to her epiphany that Haku is the river kami that saved her from drowning years ago when she fell into him. When she explains this to Haku, telling him that his true name is the Kohaku River, his dragon scales fall off like white sakura petals. Knowing his true name breaks the final hold Yubaba has on him. After Chihiro notes that the Kohaku River was filled in and

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apartments were built over it, Haku exclaims, “That must be why I can’t find my way home.” Although his home has transformed, he now understands who he is, which sets him free. A series of kū shots show Sen and Haku falling downward through the deep blue air, hands clasped together, and then, after ceasing to fall just above the water’s surface, they begin to fly forward together. When the group arrives back at the bathhouse, they descend upon its bridge, where Yubaba has set up Chihiro/Sen’s final test. The mouse transforms back into giant baby Bō, who is now more independent and speaks up for Sen. When Sen calls Yubaba “Granny,” the witch is baffled, but Miyazaki’s message is clear. Chihiro is no longer afraid of Yubaba: she sees the witch as a multifaceted creature, not essentially evil or good, who is a part of her “family.” Chihiro boldly takes on Yubaba’s test: she must pick her parents out of a line-up of pigs, but it takes her just a few moments to declare that her parents are not among them. The bathhouse workers, including Kamaji and Lin, as well as the kami patrons, are watching this trial from above, and all break into joyous cheers when Chihiro gets it right and the contract disappears into thin air. Chihiro/Sen has not triumphed alone; she has been part of this diverse community, formed bonds, served with them, and sacrificed for them. As Chihiro bids goodbye to all, she bows to Yubaba, saying, “Thanks for everything, Granny,” reinforcing her new awareness of her indebtedness to and interdependence with all aspects of the world. Haku leads her back to the now-dry riverbed at the bottom of the frog-topped staircase. He cannot cross this boundary of sacred space but sends her on to her parents, waiting at the entrance to the dark tunnel (now, apparently, missing the cathedral-like waiting room). One of the last views of Chihiro and Haku together is a low-angle medium shot looking up at them, the pair appearing to float in the blue sky with white clouds, depicting the kū that will always connect them. Haku instructs her not to turn around and look back until she is on the other side of the tunnel, a plot point hearkening back to the story of Izanagi and Izanami and of Orpheus and Eurydice. After Chihiro and Haku’s hands have unclasped in a closeup, there is a cutaway to a low-angle extreme long shot of a broad green pasture with blue sky and moving clouds floating above it; this interstitial space between worlds is another ma. When this shot pans left, we see a tiny Chihiro confidently running down the slope, diagonally across the screen, emphasizing her descent back into the “human” world. Her waiting parents have no recollection of their time as pigs. In a low-angle, profile close-up, Chihiro’s magical purple hair tie glints in the sunshine, confirming to the audience that this has not been an airy dream. She will take the lessons learned, and perhaps the protections offered, with her even if she does not remember her experiences in the spirit world clearly, which Miyazaki hints at in the end. Chihiro successfully refrains from looking back until they are through the tunnel, unlike her mythological ancestors, and the Jizō-dōsojin stone god now bears only one face, looking in one direction: toward the road leading to Chihiro’s new life. A final high-angle long shot shows her family’s car heading out of the dark forest toward the light, with the sense that the spirits are still there, now watching over her protectively, but they are also with her in a way she could never before perceive.

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Although we do not see Chihiro arrive at her physical new home, the entirety of Spirited Away has depicted her pilgrimage into sacred space, in which she has learned to be at home in the mysterious world of the spirits. Indeed, her experiences lead her to an awareness of her interconnection and interdependence with all things in this world. In the course of her adventures in Miyazaki’s brilliantly creative “field of emptiness,” where the sacred, processual world dissolves boundaries between the self and others, she learns to respect those around her, to work together with them, and to exert herself on their behalf because she is inextricably bound to them. This sense of communitas motivates her to facilitate the “homecoming” of others as well. Her compassion for the disgusting “Stink Spirit” inspires her to courageously help cleanse him of the pollution humans heartlessly caused, removing the weight of that corruption and liberating the old river kami to return to his sacred place. She helps No Face, a lonely, homeless (and potentially dangerous) creature, find a new home and purpose with Zeniba. Chihiro not only saves Haku’s life; her retrieved memory reveals Haku’s true identity, illuminating his original home, even if it is no longer accessible. Knowing that he is the Kohaku River frees him from Yubaba’s manipulation and brings him back to his kami self. Chihiro’s interactions with these characters, but especially with Yubaba/Zeniba, illustrate that “good and bad dwell together,” and one must transcend these binary categories in order to extend grace, forgiveness, gratitude, and respect to others. As Miyazaki says, Chihiro learns to survive “by making full use of her brain” as well as her heart (“Chihiro’s” 15): her kokoro is purified and, thus, she sees the world clearly. Her new vision, or enlightenment, is expressed well by Nishitani’s description of interdependence: “The boundary wall of individuality . . . that closed [the person] off becomes transparent, and [the] being enters into a revolving reciprocal relationship with other beings with the perspective of the world connections” (“Emptiness” 203). In this way, Chihiro returns to her “homeground”: she is aware of the “wholeness of everything” and, therefore, understands that she is not only part of that whole, but she is also whole within the interpenetrating world (Nishitani, “Emptiness” 205). Miyazaki declares that in Spirited Away, Chihiro “realizes she has a life force in her that makes her capable of bold decisions and action” (TP 198). It is this life force—the spiritual energy that vibrates through all things, ki—that empowers Chihiro as she intimately connects with others and takes responsibility for them and herself along the way. The integral lessons learned on this pilgrimage may become dim memories for Chihiro, her kokoro may grow dusty, but the ephemeral, ever-rotating world we call home always provides hope for transformation and sacred space in which to purify and renew our vision.

Notes 1 In 2020, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (dir. Sotozaki Haruo) broke Spirited Away’s Japanese box-office record, and, in 2021, when it was released worldwide, the film surpassed your name.’s global box-office record to become the highest grossing Japanese film of all time (Rubin; Ehrlich). This is surprising for a few reasons. First, a great

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many movie theaters around the world were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic when the film was released. For instance, only fifty-seven percent of the movie theaters in the United States were open when the film was released there (Rubin). Second, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train is a “bridge” film that is intended to connect the first season of the Demon Slayer anime series to its second season, a common practice with anime series in Japan. Thus, some critics argue, it helps immensely if one has watched the twenty-six episodes of season one before diving into the complex diegetic world of this film, and that is a significant time commitment (Ehrlich). However, the anime series was streaming on Netflix when the film was released in North America, so it was easily accessible. Regardless, it is remarkable that a film embedded in a televisual/ streaming anime series has out-grossed these two stand-alone masterpieces. See Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s discussion and list of scholarly work on Miyazaki’s anime through a religious lens in his outstanding book Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan (103–24, see esp. 105). This taking responsibility for the other resembles Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of transcendence, as noted in the introductory chapter. As discussed in the introduction, Eliade’s well-known concept of axis mundi is mirrored in the Japanese concept of the central column, yorishiro, in an ancient holy place or altar (himorogi). The kami would descend into the yorishiro and dwell there for a time; thus, these central columns functioned as gateways between the natural and supernatural (Isozaki 12, 21). For definitions of the Japanese terms regarding sacred space and ma that appear throughout the chapter, see this book’s introduction. Honji suijaku officially appeared in Japan as early as the ninth century (Teeuwen and Rambelli 1). Reinders also notes Miyazaki’s statement that the bathhouse is similar to “the Rokumeikan (1883–1941), a Westernized (but culturally hybrid) guest house in Tokyo, which was the focus of scandal for a time; and the Meguro Gajoen, a banquet hall and hotel from 1931” (124). In her book, Noriko Reider also includes a section about Yubaba in Spirited Away (Japanese 158–62), and she has published an excellent article on the film focusing on folklore (“Spirited Away”). For just a few of the outstanding discussions of these sequences, see Napier, “Matter” and Miyazakiworld (195–211); Reider, “Spirited Away”; Reinders, The Moral Narratives of Hayao Miyazaki (118–38); and Boyd and Nishimura. Here, the specific mask used is Hakushiki-jō, in the Okina (old man) category. This mask is much older than Nō theater and was used in the ancient Shinto rituals of dengaku, sacred rites to pray for agricultural success, and sarugaku, circus-like performances for celebratory occasions. In dengaku, kami would be invited into a designated sacred space (himorogi). Other moments when paper takes on spiritual power are seen when Yubaba magically lifts three of the four characters spelling out Chihiro, leaving her the name Sen, on her bathhouse work contract and when the card Chihiro receives with the flowers serves to remind her of her true name. Haku tells Chihiro, “If you completely forget [your name], you’ll never find your way home.” Thus, paper is a key part of her salvation. For accounts of ukiyo-e’s influence on anime, see Cavallaro (40–43; 76–77); see A. Suzuki for a brief discussion of ukiyo-e and Miyazaki (2, my pagination). Amida Buddha, the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life, is directly referenced earlier in the film when Chihiro is crossing the bridge into the bathhouse with Haku, under his spell of invisibility. Walking just in front of them is a large kami with a red bucket head and a voluminous yellow robe sporting multiple strips of paper unmistakably containing the first two characters of the nembutsu (Namo Amida Butsu), the mantra recited by Pure Land Buddhists to facilitate their rebirth into Amida’s Pure Land. Six different shots provide a clear view of these sacred paper flags festooning the kami’s robe.

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14 These Takahata scenes, featuring Amida and his Buddhist cortège descending to earth on bright purple and pink clouds to retrieve beings who belong in the Pure Land, are similar to an episode featuring the same in the conclusion of the Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike (compiled in the fourteenth century). 15 See this book’s chapter on Makoto Shinkai’s your name. (2016) for a more detailed treatment of the rich concept of musubi.

Works Cited Boyd, James W., and Tetsuya Nishimura. “Shinto Perspectives in Miyazaki’s Anime Film Spirited Away.” Journal of Religion and Film, vol. 8, no. 3, article 4, 2004, pp. 1–14. Buljan, Katharine, and Carole M. Cusack. Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan. Equinox Publishing, 2015. Burch, Noël. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, revised and edited by Annette Michelson, University of California Press, 1979. Cavallaro, Dani. Japanese Aesthetics and Anime: The Influence of Tradition. Kindle ed., McFarland and Company, 2013. Cho, Francisca. Seeing Like the Buddha: Enlightenment through Film. State University of New York Press, 2017. Davis, Bret W. “Encounter in Emptiness: The I-Thou Relation in Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Japanese Philosophy, edited by Michiko Yusa, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 231–254. Dōgen. Mountains and Waters Sutra (1240). Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, University of Hawai’i Press, 2011, pp. 152–156. Ebert, Roger. “A Magical Dot Over in the Corner.” RogerEbert.com, 11 July 2012. www. rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away-2002, Accessed 18 March 2021. Ehrlich, David. “ ‘Demon Slayer’ Review: The Anime Hit Arrives in American Theaters, But There’s a Major Catch.” IndieWire, 23 April 2021. www.indiewire.com/2021/04/ demon-slayer-movie-review-1234632567/. Accessed 8 May 2021. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, 1987 [1957]. Glassman, Hank. The Face of Jizô: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. Grapard, Allan G. “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness: Toward a Definition of Sacred Space in Japanese Religions.” History of Religions, vol. 21, no. 3, 1982, pp. 195– 221. www.jstor.org/stable/1062158. Accessed 3 November 2020. Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Kindle ed. Oxford University Press, 2016. Isozaki, Arata. “Space-Time in Japan—MA.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki. et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 12–53. Kasulis, Thomas P. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Marra, Michele, ed. Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader. University of Hawai’i Press, 1999. Matsumoto, Shigeru. Motoori Norinaga, 1730–1801. Harvard University Press, 1970. Matsuoka, Seigow. “Aspects of Kami.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 56–57. Miyazaki, Hayao. “Chihiro’s Mysterious Town: The Aim of this Film.” The Art of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, edited by Studio Ghibli, English text edited by Alvin Lu, VIZ Media, 2002, pp. 15–16.

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Miyazaki, Hayao. Turning Point: 1997–2008, translated by Beth Cary and Frederik L. Schodt, Viz Media, 2008. Napier, Susan J. “Matter out of Place: Carnival, Containment, and Cultural Recovery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2006, pp. 287–310. www.jstor.org/stable/25064646. Accessed 21 January 2019. Napier, Susan J. Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art. Yale University Press, 2018. Nishitani, Keiji. “Emptiness and Sameness.” Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, edited by Michele Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 1999, pp. 179–217. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness, translated with an introduction by Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press, 1982. Nitschke, Günter. “Ma—Place, Space, Void.” Kyoto Journal, no. 98 (title: “ma: a measure of infinity”), August 2020, pp. 8–23. Nosco, Peter. Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan. Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1990. Parkes, Graham. “Kūkai and Dōgen as Exemplars of Ecological Engagement.” Japanese Environmental Philosophy, edited by J. Baird Callicott and James McRae, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 65–86. Pilgrim, Richard B. “Intervals (‘Ma’) in Space and Time: Foundations for a ReligioAesthetic Paradigm in Japan.” History of Religions, vol. 25, no. 3, 1986, pp. 255–277. www.jstor.org/stable/1062515. Accessed 11 September 2019. Reider, Noriko T. Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present. Utah State University Press, 2010. Reider, Noriko T. “Spirited Away: Film of the Fantastic and Evolving Japanese Folk Symbols.” Film Criticism, vol. 29, no. 3, Spring 2005, pp. 4–27. search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=18274903&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 15 August 2019. Reinders, Eric. The Moral Narratives of Hayao Miyazaki. McFarland and Company, 2016. Rubin, Rebecca. “Box Office: ‘Demon Slayer’ Overtakes ‘Mortal Kombat.’” Variety, 2 May 2021. https://variety.com/2021/film/news/box-office-demon-slayer-beats-mortalkombat-1234964597/. Accessed 4 May 2021. Sørensen, Lars-Martin. “Animated Animism—The Global Ways of Japan’s National Spirits.” Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook, vol. 6, no. 1, August 2008, pp. 181–196. doi:10.1386/nl.6.1.181_1. Spirited Away. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki, producer Toshio Suzuki, music by Joe Hisaishi, adapted to English by Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt (dubbed version), English subtitles by Linda Hoaglund, Studio Ghibli, 2001. “Spirited Away (2001).” IMDbPro. https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/boxoffice. Accessed 12 May 2020. Suzuki, Ayumi. “A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 51, 2009, n.p. www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/ SpiritedAway/index.html. Accessed 11 January 2020. Suzuki, Mami. “Aburaya—The Original Edo Period Inn in Haibara, Nara.” Tofugu, 7 September 2020. www.tofugu.com/travel/aburaya-nara/. Accessed 15 June 2020. Teeuwen, Mark, and Fabio Rambelli. “Introduction: Combinatory Religion and the honji suijaku Paradigm in Pre-modern Japan.” Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm, edited by Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pp. 1–53. Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan. University of Hawai’i Press, 2012.

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Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press, 1974. Turner, Victor. “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions, vol. 12, no. 3, 1973, pp. 191–230. www.jstor.org/stable/1062024. Accessed 4 June 2020. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Transaction Publishers, 2007 [1969]. Tyler, Royall. “Buddhism in Noh.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 19–52. www.jstor.org/stable/30234528. Accessed 21 November 2015. Zeami, Motokiyo. Yamamba. Japanese Noh Drama: Ten Plays, Vol. II, edited and translated by Sanki Ichikawa, et al., Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkôkai, 1959, pp. 159–178.

3

Makoto Shinkai’s your name Celestial Destiny and Transcendent Love in the Space-Time of Disaster

If our life did not fade and vanish like the dews . . . or the drifting smoke, . . . but lingered forever, how little in the world would move us. It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful. —Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350), Essays in Idleness (sec. 7; 23–24) This is . . . a full statement of a basic mono no aware tenet: one forgets, it is too bad, but one forgets pain as one forgets pleasure, one cannot hold this smooth and moving life. —Donald Richie, “ ‘Mono no Aware’” (35)

Anime luminary Makoto Shinkai is a painter of celestial light. Of the five elements—or five processes, as Kūkai calls them—earth, water, wind, fire, and sky, Shinkai’s cinematic gaze abides in the empyrean, the firmament that arches over all the other ever-changing elements, binding them together. Unlike Hayao Miyazaki’s focus on bringing Chihiro/Sen into a more intimate relationship with the kami of earth-bound nature in Spirited Away (2001), Shinkai, in his global blockbuster your name. (2016) and his oeuvre generally, is an aesthetic poet of the sky and the cosmic realms above it. His “camera” is always looking up into the most changeable element of our human experience that, nonetheless, hovers above us from birth to death, eternal yet relentlessly metamorphosing into night, day, and all manner of weather. The sky is resplendent though it can be both benevolent and mortiferous. This constant possibility of loss, death, and destruction is something that haunts Japan, a nation essentially comprised of a string of volcanoes on the Pacific Ring of Fire and prone to diverse calamitous natural disasters. As celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami poignantly said in a speech quoted at length in the opening chapter, “To be Japanese means . . . to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes” because of Japan’s precarious geographical position, “riding atop four enormous tectonic plates . . . , atop a nest of earthquakes” (1). This speech was given only a few months after nearly 20,000 lives were lost in Japan’s northern region of Tōhoku in the triple disaster of March 11, 2011 (3.11): the magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake, triggering a thirty-foot tsunami, which resulted in the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The immensity of the loss is staggering. In her monograph Re-Imaging Japan After Fukushima, scholar Mihic DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057-3

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Tamaki asserts that the 3.11 disaster marks a major turning point in Japanese culture and that there has been a “desire to reconstruct Japanese identity” in its aftermath (2). After 3.11, “mainstream media were a constant source of fear and suffering,” Tamaki argues; however, “cultural responses provided those who were ready with a more forward-looking way of re-imagining their country” (3–4). Makoto Shinkai’s your name., the first feature-length film he began making after 3.11, was just such a “forward-looking” cultural response to the devastation and overwhelming loss of the triple disaster. Indeed, your name. is a disaster film with a difference, using Shinkai’s signature aesthetic of the celestial to provide, figuratively and literally, a cosmic and breathtaking view of large-scale catastrophe that falls from the heavens. Makoto Shinkai, born in 1973, is a part of the Japanese equivalent of Generation X, “the shin jin rui (new human beings),” and, thus, grew up watching the anime of the late 1970s through the 1990s, which became increasingly focused on science fiction versions of apocalyptic destruction, warfare, and traumatizing technologies, the apogee of which, arguably, is Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s 1988 post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk classic, Akira (Broderick 8). Shinkai began making animated shorts in 1999, and, as he turned to writing and directing projects, he decided to focus on the science fiction genre with which he was so familiar and for which he knew there would be a ready audience. His mainstream debut was the twenty-five-minute science-fiction film Voices of a Distant Star (2002), which features a high school couple who attempt to stay in contact while the teen girl is off battling aliens in far-flung galaxies. The focus on a teen couple dealing with separation and its concomitant, poignant longing would be a central plot element in nearly all his films to come. The distinctive aesthetic component expressing this powerful longing always is a wide, deep blue sky and the cosmos above it. Following the release of Shinkai’s third major anime film, the stunning 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007), Japanese publisher Kodansha released The Art of Makoto Shinkai: A Sky Longing for Memories, a book full of memorable images from his three mainstream films to date, providing detailed explanations of the rationale behind design and color choices. It also includes a section on the technical tools used to create the films, particularly his lush backgrounds, and “testimonials” from Shinkai and ten of his background artists. The book clearly attests to the distinctive beauty audiences had recognized in Shinkai’s art nearly a decade before the release of the film that would become the highest-grossing anime feature in global film history, your name.1 In the book’s interview with Shinkai, he describes his fascination with trains and with twilight, explaining that his earliest memory of “scenery” is watching the sunrise and sunset over the mountains in his native, alpine Nagano Prefecture as he traveled to and from school every day by train (162). In a 2016 interview with the filmmaker, journalist Nick Bradshaw asks Shinkai about the inspiration for his celestial bounty: The big, generous skies that recur in his films, [Shinkai] agrees, are a legacy of his childhood. “I grew up high in these beautiful mountains, the sky was big, and you can look at the clouds all day; you just don’t get bored,” he says, before hazarding an analogy between star-gazing and romantic yearning: “I still like looking at the sky, stars, clouds. I think for me as a boy, maybe

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 97 girls were the same as Tokyo: fab, really beautiful, great, but unavailable. I admire the sky, I admire Tokyo. . . . So I think that’s why the characters I create love looking at the skies, because they’re admiring something beyond their reach, and it’s definitely from my own experience as a boy. (41) Here, Shinkai draws a direct connection between the wide, overarching sky and romantic longing: the open sky is the space wherein longing resonates, a representation of the absence of that which is desired. What Shinkai does not mention, though, is that most of his coupled protagonists long for each other, so the ache is mutual. Thus, it is particularly apt to note the fact that the same sky stretches above those who yearn for one another, thereby connecting the two who are physically apart. However, the love of gazing into the heavens in Shinkai’s films expresses more than a romantic yearning on the part of the characters; the celestial imagery also communicates the comprehension of a larger, cosmic perspective on the experiences of individuals. To put it in German Romantic terms, it expresses Weltschmertz (world-sadness or weariness) as well as Sehnsucht (personal longing). Furthermore, as noted earlier, the sky is the overarching natural “process,” as conceptualized by esoteric Buddhists in Japan and the Shinto-Buddhist syncretism that dominated Japan for a millennium (Kasulis 102). Thus, the sky (kū) embodies the ever-evolving world, in which there is always potential for finding the object(s) of one’s yearning, be that a person, a place, or an emotion. Matthew Tan well articulates the predominant themes in Shinkai’s work, which include the encounter and distance between others, the desire to traverse the space from one to another, and [the sense of] being driven to traverse that distance through the attraction of one for another. Each of these are helpful artistic reference points to embody, respectively, faith as the encounter with the other, hope as the becoming that comes with closing the distance from one to another, and love as the attraction to another which reaches a climax in the self-forgetting for the sake of another. (7) Here, Tan effectively approaches faith, hope, and love as Christian theological virtues evident in Shinkai’s oeuvre, but these three principles also are inherent in the Shinto concepts of radical interconnectedness and the sacredness of all things in the processual world. Following philosopher Josef Pieper, Tan defines “faith” not as a doctrine but “a desire to be in that other place that we have not yet seen,” explaining that “my encounter with another person opens up the world that lies beyond the confines of the one in which I live” (3). Faith, in other words, is the desire to seek connection that results from an encounter with an “other” that expands one’s view of life and the universe. The other is a gateway, or bridge, to a new comprehension of oneself, the world, and one’s place in it, which makes the other a hashi type of ma.2 Therefore, the other is a path to transcend one’s present self and grow into an enhanced awareness of one’s interconnectedness. Tan notes the “tendency in Shinkai’s work to have visible gateways to invisible worlds” (2),

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and the filmmaker’s diverse images of celestial canopies are the primary aesthetic signifiers of these gateways, ma in its original sense of sacred space (kekkai). In your name., the plot specifically revolves around a Shinto shrine, and the teen girl protagonist, Mitsuha, is a shrine maiden (miko) whose connection to the kami will be the saving grace of five hundred people. Thus, traditional Shinto gateways to the sacred are plentiful throughout the film, including torii gates, kagura dancing, ceremonial sake (kuchikamizake), a kami tree, and an ancient sacred cave. Nonetheless, the realm of the sky, with its evocation of longing for an “other,” remains the primary portal to and sign of the interdependence and intimate connection of all that is sentient and insentient, natural and supernatural. The heavens, in the words of Thomas P. Kasulis, function as “a holographic entry point opening to a grasp of the whole” of the universe, in which “[t]he part reflects the whole [and] the whole is in every part,” as in a strand of DNA (23). Shinto “emphasizes the world and the person as interdependent poles with a single field of resonance,” and, for Shinkai, this space of resonance is the sky (Kasulis 25). This is called the “field of emptiness [kū]” by philosopher Nishitani Keiji of the Zen-inspired Kyoto School, with kū (空) referring both to Buddhist emptiness or void (Skt. sūnyata) and to the sky or open air (296). The aesthetics and plot of your name. exquisitely embody these principles. Makoto Shinkai wrote your name. as an original feature film, rather than deriving it from a manga or television series, and this may be one reason the cinematic narrative works so well as a whole. However, in the midst of your name.’s production, stretching from 2014 to 2016, Shinkai decided the story needed to be told in a written medium, so he penned the Japanese “light novel” your name., which was published in early 2016 and released before the film. Shinkai calls it “a novelization of the movie” but also explains that there is a dialogic relationship between the novel and film, whereby writing the novel altered Shinkai’s vision of his two main characters, Mitsuha and Taki, which he believes impacted the voice recording still in process when the novel was completed (Shinkai, your 177). He calls this a “ ‘gift exchange’ between a movie and a novel” and notes that the most salient difference between the narratives in the two media is point of view: the novel is told in first-person from the two protagonists’ perspectives while the film is generally presented from a third-person perspective, diegetic voice-overs notwithstanding. Intriguingly, Shinkai declares that “the story worked better as an animated film” because of the magic of collaboration: “I think movies are in a place that’s far beyond the ability of individuals” (your 177–79). Yet, he goes on to say that the message of his film is more directly communicated in the novel, which lacks the interference of images: “This story is a fantasy . . . , but [there are] [p]eople who believe that they’re sure to find something someday, even though it hasn’t happened yet, and who keep reaching out for it. I felt that those feelings needed to be related with an immediacy that differed from the glamour of the movie” (your 179). Indeed, the novel is more direct and more intimate, and the fact that Shinkai felt compelled to write it reveals his desire to drive home his message of survival and hope in the post-3.11 era. When the incandescent splendor of the film is stripped away, the call for survivors to “struggle, magnificently”—the title of the novel’s penultimate chapter—shines brightly. This study of the film will be

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 99 referring to the novel at points in which it sheds light on a deeper or expanded understanding of your name.’s characters, themes, or plot, to which we now turn. The narrative of the film your name. is quite complex, as the timeline is twisting, intersecting, and repeating, like its core concept musubi, which will be discussed later. From a great height, this plot is circular in appearance, as it begins and nearly ends with the same images and episodes. However, on closer inspection, the complicated syuzhet of the film is recursive throughout, doubling back on itself multiple times, purposely ordering events to create connections between disparate places and times, and to build a sense of mystery and suspense. As your name. develops, it becomes clear that time in the film is both diachronic, moving forward in a linear fashion, and cyclical, a continual cycle of return associated with sacred time (cf. Eliade 35–37). Your name. begins in a preternaturally deep blue sky, somewhere above the atmosphere of Earth, in which small meteors are streaking brightly down the screen like fireworks, with one wider streak of light whose round, red meteor is revealed as the shot moves downward. Continuing this extreme long shot, the “camera” follows the larger meteor streaking down through the cerulean plane, in which we now see the bright sun in the background with “lens” flares emanating from it and a faint rainbow stretched in a circle around it. The sun floats just above a blanket of white clouds tinged with pink and orange, looking like a sunrise, a natural beginning and an image of the liminal. This is the first visual reference to the theme of twilight and the supernatural power of in-between, liminal space and time (ma). We see the seemingly tiny red meteor make its way through the cloud cover and emerge into the night sky above Japan. Then the shot shifts to the meteor’s point of view as it is descending over a strange, perfectly round lake with an illuminated town circling it, Itomori. This point-of-view shot bespeaks and foreshadows the Shinto kami power that will be associated with celestial and other natural phenomena in the film. Cut to black. The film moves from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic as we hear a young woman’s voice-over during the black void: “Some mornings, I wake up crying without knowing why.” The next images establish that we are in Tokyo and then inside a young man’s room, which is confusing as the voice is female. Next, there is a male voice-over, “Whatever the dream was I had, I can never remember it. But.” What follows is a sequence typical of this film, in which we cut between the lives, in this case the bedrooms, of the two protagonists, Mitsuha and Taki. In this scene that introduces us to this cross-cutting style of storytelling in the film, the two seem to finish each other’s sentences and thoughts in their voice-overs, leading us to understand that they think and feel similarly. They are deeply connected, but how? The images we see are dreamlike, a bit out of focus and desaturated as if overlit. Mitsuha’s voiceover picks up where Taki’s left off: “But, the only thing that does last when I wake up is a sense of loss, which lingers for a long time afterwards.” As she speaks, we see a medium shot of her tying an important symbol in her hair, a red cord, then Taki’s voice-over declares, “I’m always searching for something, or someone.” Mitsuha’s voice concludes the dialogue, “I’ve been consumed by this feeling ever since that day.” Cut to black, and now we are back in Tokyo watching, through the eyes of a young man, a large comet streak across the sky while a red meteor splits from it and descends toward Earth. Then, inexplicably, we are watching the same celestial marvel from the perspective of a young woman in a very different landscape,

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surrounded by mountains, wearing a lovely blue kimono and looking up to view what they think, in unisonous voice-over, is “nothing more or less than a breathtaking view,” a natural wonder. Thus, the film quickly establishes its major themes of cosmic perspective and intense human longing with these images and words featured in the opening, which are repeated multiple times throughout the film.

Figure 3.1 During the opening sequence in your name. (dir. Makoto Shinkai 2016), Taki watches the comet and meteor streaking across the sky from atop his building in Tokyo.

Figure 3.2 Marking the end of your name.’s opening sequence, Mitsuha (right corner) gazes upward at the beautiful spectacle of the comet streaking across the night sky with the meteor having broken off, headed straight for her town of Itomori.

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 101 The credits follow the episode just described, as if the opening sequence were outside of diegetic time, and, as we shall learn, the comet and meteoric events are presented as operating in a liminal, sacred time that is not tied to chronological dictates. The credits feature an energetic song by the Japanese pop band Radwimps, singing lyrics crafted specifically for the plot and themes of this film in conjunction with Shinkai. These credits run over a montage of our two teen protagonists. The accompaniment by the Radwimps foreshadows the fact that this band’s songs will be a frenetic backdrop for condensed narrative information conveyed in swiftly paced montages throughout the film, depicting various moments in Mitsuha’s and Taki’s lives, a michiyuki form of ma guiding us through their experiences. The true story time of your name. commences following this song, when we hear a phone alarm and shortly after see Mitsuha sit up in bed, confused. This pattern of the two teens arising in the morning to alarms and being bewildered throughout their days, finding strange clues and traces of the other person in their lives—such as Mitsuha finding the phrase “Who are you?” written in large figures in her notebook—reveals that these two high school students are switching bodies involuntarily. As their lives are very different—Mitsuha lives in the small town of Itomori up in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture and Taki lives in bustling, cosmopolitan central Tokyo—there is much “fish out of water” comedy. The gender-switching plot also provides this type of humor, of course, which has been seen before in Japanese cinema in Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1982 live-action hit Tenkōsei, in which two teens of the opposite sex switch bodies also due to a Shinto-inspired supernatural intervention. As journalist Mark Kermode points out, your name. “juxtaposes male and female, town and country, science and superstition, past and present.” These juxtapositions are key, and not unprecedented in film comedies worldwide, but, in your name., they all revolve around a central catastrophic event: a meteor striking the town of Itomori on October 4, 2013, killing five hundred people, including, as we learn by the third act, Mitsuha and her family. In this film, Mitsuha and Taki learn what it is like to walk in another person’s shoes, literally, and they sometimes take hilarious pleasure in antagonizing each other, such as Mitsuha (in Taki’s body) successfully setting up a date with Taki’s work crush and Taki (in Mitsuha’s body) being physically aggressive with students who mock Mitsuha’s family. However, despite, and because of, the frustration they experience, they bond as human beings and begin to fall in love with each other. Their memories of being in each other’s bodies fade quickly after they awake in their own beds, but they write each other notes in their phones and notebooks. When they finally try to call each other, in their proper bodies, the calls never get through. Although the memory of Mitsuha has faded, Taki feels a longing for someone and goes looking for her in Gifu Prefecture, traveling in the direction he feels drawn. At the point of giving up, Taki is surprised when a waiter at a small-town restaurant sees his drawing of Itomori, with its round lake appearing as it had before being struck by the meteor three years before. The waiter drives Taki to the rubble of Itomori, where there now is a double lake, aptly described in the novel as a “gourd-shaped” lake, and Taki is perplexed. However, he is even more flummoxed when he goes to the local library and reads

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newspapers, magazines, and books about the natural disaster, finally finding Mitsuha and her family’s names in a book listing those killed in the catastrophe. He looks at maps of the region, trying to spark his memories of his time there in Mitsuha’s body, which he now only distantly recalls, attempting to decipher the mystery of what he has experienced. He feels drawn to a crater-like basin at the top of a mountain, where he had gone in Mitsuha’s body to perform a sacred rite in a cave shrine. Once there, he drinks sacred sake, the kuchikamizake developed from Mitsuha’s saliva, and has an out-of-body experience in which he travels back in time to awake in Mitsuha’s body one last time on the day three years earlier when the meteor strikes Itomori. This time, Taki (in Mitsuhas’ body) tries to mobilize her two best friends to warn the whole town and, by any means necessary, get the citizens to evacuate to the safety of the high school baseball field. Mitsuha’s father, the mayor of Itomori with whom she has a troubled relationship, puts a wrinkle in their plan, but, with a bit more supernatural intervention, Mitsuha and Taki are able to save the five hundred who had died in the original timeline. The film ends with a repeat of the images with which the film starts, the beautiful cosmic event: Taki in Tokyo staring into the brilliant night sky and images of the meteor headed straight for Itomori. This time, though, we see the meteor hit the town and the sublime, incendiary destruction it wreaks. However, in this iteration, there is a coda, a leap forward in time to five years after Taki’s trip to the sacred crater, making it eight years after the Itomori disaster that all the citizens “miraculously” survived. We see Taki and Mitsuha living separate lives in Tokyo. They have no distinct memory of each other, but, as we see in the opening sequence of the film, they both are inundated with longing for something or someone they cannot identify. Finally, they spot one another on commuter trains stopped side by side. They hurriedly exit their trains and search for each other in the station and then the adjacent streets, in a final bit of emotional suspense. They find each other at last on the staircase leading up to the Suga Shrine, a hashi edge, a ma of liminal sacred space. Both are in tears as they realize they have found what they had been seeking.3 Just then the Radwimps song lyrics cry out, “Looking up at the sky after shedding a stream of tears / I could see for miles of blue / It’s never been so clear.” The shot then tilts up from the ground into the clear blue sky. Cut to black.

Mono no Aware, Sehnsucht, and the Place of Emptiness Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it. —Dr. Brand in Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan 2014)

It is clear from the description of the diegesis that your name. is a complex film involving multiple generic strands of anime, but the theme and tone pervading it from start to finish is what the Japanese call mono no aware (literally, the pathos of things). It is now commonplace for writers to warn that mono no aware is not

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 103 translatable (cf. Richie, Tractate 52). The two epigraphs of this chapter express two “visions” of the term’s meaning. The multivalence of mono no aware is examined in some detail in the introductory chapter of this book, so it will suffice to summarize here. It is common for film scholars, including Donald Richie and Paul Schrader, to align mono no aware with Buddhism—particularly with Zen’s central focus on impermanence (mujō) and emptiness (kū)—and define the concept as a resigned acceptance of the ephemeral nature of all things, characterized by sorrow. However, in the eighteenth century, Native Studies scholar Motoori Norinaga revived the Heian era term but redefined it according to its various uses in ancient Japanese poetry, which he associated with pre-Buddhist Shinto beliefs. Thus, Norinaga argues that mono no aware can be applied to the profound stirring of any emotion, “including joy, charm, delight, sadness, and love” (“Mono” 184). The core of meaning connecting Norinaga’s allegedly Shinto definition and the more common Buddhist-oriented understanding of mono no aware is mujō, the notion of the processual nature of all phenomena, which is a crucial element of both Shinto and Mahāyāna Buddhist worldviews, including Zen, and is inextricably linked to the concept of emptiness. Schrader has argued that mono no aware, with its deep sense of longing due to mujō, is communicated on film via still shots, static long takes, silence, and a pronounced use of negative space to produce meaning (Schrader 27–37). Most often, the work of Japanese “Golden Age” auteur Yasujirō Ozu has been connected to this view of the aesthetics of “Zen” and its concomitant concept of mono no aware. What readings of Ozu’s work through the lens of Zen aesthetics have tended to ignore is that Zen’s principal doctrines resonate with longstanding Shinto values, ideas, and aesthetics. Indeed, Zen beliefs, like those of earlier, esoteric Buddhist schools, were able to rise in prominence in medieval Japan due to this alignment with Shinto (Kasulis 44–47). The fairly quiet films of a past master such as Ozu, or a present one such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, do not seem to have much in common with most anime films and their saturated color, often frenetic movement and editing, and blaring soundtracks. However, some anime films resembling that description do, nevertheless, use the aesthetics of emptiness— open visual and aural space—to create meaning. This is the very definition of ma, and, as examined in this book’s introduction and chapter on Spirited Away, ma is a concept that stretches into Japan’s past, centuries before Zen’s emerging popularity in the thirteenth century. The character for ma (間) depicts a gateway with the light of kami shining through it, and, like Spirited Away, your name. itself is just such a gateway, beginning and ending, as it does, with open celestial space, what I have called the aesthetics of kū, the “field of emptiness” connecting all elements of this universe filled with ki, tama, and mono, all terms for spiritual power (Kasulis 14). The sacred Shinto signifiers in your name. noted earlier and the rituals performed in the film function as reminders, to both the characters and the viewers, of the spiritual power binding all together and of the mystery and wonder of the world, which never ceases to bring life, love, and loss, evoking mono no aware. Furthermore, in Shinto tradition, mono refers “specifically to a changeling

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spiritual quality that moves among the forms of ghosts, goblins, animals, and humans” and can “play a part in spirit possession” (Kasulis 16). Thus, your name.’s plot featuring souls switching bodies, particularly when one of those souls belongs to a dead girl, is extremely apt. Kasulis notes that the term mono emphasizes “an internal relation between spirituality and materiality,” expressing a fundamental “interdependence” in a “material world [that] is at all times in all places spiritual” (Kasulis 15). Thus, as mono directly refers to “things” in mono no aware, the notion that everything is spiritual is inherent in the term. This focus on interrelatedness in Shinto is the crux of Norinaga’s understanding of mono no aware as a strong sense of empathy. As Makoto Ueda avers, Norinaga’s mono no aware concerns “enabl[ing] one to feel with others, to understand others” (Literary 202–03). As noted, Shinkai’s most distinctive aesthetic is that of the wide blue sky, the overarching element which simultaneously evokes loss—a kū or ma in which the yearning heart resonates—and universal connection. The most common narrative trajectory in his oeuvre involves two adolescents in love who long for one another across ma, distances of space and time. Norinaga praises literary expressions of romantic love and desire, if they involve deep, empathetic feelings (not only desire), because he believes that it is through these works “that we learn what true human feelings are, that we learn mono no aware,” a compassionate way in which to perceive the world (qtd. in Ueda, Literary 205; cf. Norinaga, “Mono” 174). Norinaga declares that poetic work “does not concern itself with good or evil, wisdom or stupidity,” but “has as its prime aim in presenting the natural ways of the foolish human heart” (qtd. in Ueda, Literary 205). There is no fabula more expressive of the strong, and often foolish, longings of the human heart than that of teenage romance, with its magnified emotions and lovers unaware of the fact that hungry, all-consuming love, like all else in our evanescent world, fades with time. The high school romance is a perfect vehicle for capturing that sense of mono no aware, and, to more mature viewers, it may impart a sense of mono no aware regarding the erosion of their naïve belief that romantic love is eternal. Susan J. Napier argues that the three most important “modes” of anime, from its beginnings to the present, are apocalypse, elegy, and festival (32). Interestingly, your name. falls into all three modes as a comedic high school romance involving time travel, body-switching, and a catastrophic disaster. However, mono no aware, the core of the elegiac mode, is the primary tone in your name. and in his films overall. This is seen particularly powerfully in his third major film, 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007), the title referring to the speed at which a cherry blossom—that perennial symbol of the brevity of beauty—falls from a tree to the ground. While Shinkai’s first two films fall squarely in the science fiction genre, because he believed that would sell, in his third film, he wanted to leverage his success and stretch his wings by creating a film closer to his personal artistic vision (Shinkai, Sky 162). Your name., his fifth film, is an even more fully developed amalgam of his penchant for romantic yearning, achingly stunning skyscapes, and seasonal imagery, with the added elements of comedy and Shintobased, supernaturally inspired science fiction elements. In the interview included on the Blu-ray release of the film, Shinkai explains that the science fiction genre

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 105 is a great vehicle for putting audience members in imaginary scenarios that draw out empathy. He asserts that the body-switching plot forces viewers to consider “What if I am you?” and to imagine being the other person (“Interview”). This is precisely Norinaga’s definition of the meaning and purpose of mono no aware: it evokes feeling for and with others. Norinaga’s musings on the origins of the word aware also illuminate Shinkai’s celestial style as a painter of light. In his explanation, he references the famous myth of the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu—the goddess from whom all of Japan’s emperors have descended— in which she hides herself in a cave (ame no iwayado: heavenly rock dwelling), rendering the world dark. When Amaterasu is finally drawn out of the cave by the other kami, all beings say “Ahare,” meaning “heaven has cleared up” (ame haru) (qtd. in Matsumoto 65–66). Norinaga goes on to say that “this ahare (aware) refers to the joy which many kami experienced at the moment when Amaterasu came out . . . and illuminated the darkened heaven and earth” (Matsumoto 66). This account expands the meaning of mono no aware to include not only the pity and sadness attending loss but also an ecstatic wonder at the splendor of the visible natural world, which Amaterasu’s light reveals. This joyous exhilaration evoked by and expressed in the sacred, illuminated heavens is an excellent touchstone for the ways in which Shinkai depicts the texture of light and uses celestial light metaphorically. Shinkai is known for his unusual depictions of light that frequently emulate lens effects, such as lens flares and bokeh, meaning blur in Japanese, which refers to the way a camera lens captures points of light that are out of focus in portions of an image. Selective focus within shots is common in your name. Moreover, in shots depicting sunlight, Shinkai often creates areas where light seems to refract and hover in air, on the brink of transforming into the wavelengths of rainbow colors. This results in different levels of color within frames, for instance, multiple shades of blue in a sky and selective focus wherein parts of a shot are blurred, as if less-saturated light waves were like mist. In addition, Shinkai frequently uses a free-floating camera style, always in motion like the wind itself, as if the camera were depicting the point of view of a kami, literally and figuratively: all things are evanescent, ever-mutating, fluid. Shinkai believes that light and weather are better captured by animation than by live-action filmmaking (Taylor-Foster). He proves this hypothesis in your name. by developing his own, light-saturated aesthetics of kū. However, Shinkai’s skies are not merely “voids” or empty spaces; they always are punctuated with clouds, which filter, refract, and reflect the light and its many colors and textures. As elaborated on in the introduction, Seigow Matsuoka argues that Japanese aesthetics, since the medieval period, have reflected Japan as a “Culture of Transformations” by using “a morphology of clouds, their myriad changes and forms,” to represent the link between the natural and supernatural and to express impermanence and emptiness, in the sense of both Shinto and Buddhist beliefs (Matsuoka 56). With its transformations of landscapes, history, and, ultimately, time, plus the transmigration of souls involved in body-switching, your name. is a remarkable representation of this “culture of transformations” and uses myriad portrayals of clouds and sky to achieve this. Apropos of these observations, Keiji

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Nishitani illustrates his concept of the “field of emptiness” with a description of the properties of light: “Just as a single beam of white light breaks up into rays of various colors when it passes through a prism, so we have here an absolute self-identity in which the one and the other are yet truly themselves, at once absolutely broken apart and absolutely joined together. They are an absolute two and at the same time an absolute one” (102). Considering the aesthetics, themes, and body-switching plot of your name., this statement could be read as a poetic or philosophic reading of this film. Nishitani’s ideas here also explain why there will always be space for a mono no aware born of loss, as separation between discrete entities perpetually exists in the phenomenal world, even when one is present with the other, or in the other, as is the case with Mitsuha and Taki. For this yearning couple, the “field of emptiness” that both connects and separates them is represented by Shinkai’s “all-encompassing cosmic sky” (Nishitani 296). In his 2009 article on longing in Shinkai’s films, Adam Bingham calls the films made up to that point “rhapsodies in a predominantly minor key,” noting that their elegiac tone is “built around love and loss, memory, nostalgia, and personal trauma” and connecting these characteristics to mono no aware (218). The examinations of adolescent love and deep yearning in the articles by both Bingham and Tan point toward the German concept of Sehnsucht, though they do not mention it. In the first and last diegetic montages in your name., Taki says, “I’m always searching for something, or someone,” which is echoed by Mitsuha directly after. These repeated declarations in the film certainly evoke the usual sorrow associated with mono no aware, yet they also express a distinct hope for the future, as could be expressed by Norinaga’s mythic reading of aware as the wondrous, illuminated sky. Sehnsucht, a poignant longing, also is a helpful concept because it carries a “positivity” with it, “a constructive sense of the highs and lows, the gains and losses of life” (Scheibe et al. 279). As with mono no aware, people seek art that communicates Sehnsucht, as it can be a powerful inspiration for creativity and can join people together in the sharing of profound emotions. Norinaga’s expanded interpretation of mono no aware also has this potential, as demonstrated in your name. itself and by its enormous draw for audiences around the world. Psychological researchers studying how Sehnsucht operates in people’s lives define the “dynamic core of Sehnsucht” to be “(a) thoughts, desires, and emotions associated with personal utopias or the search for an optimal life and (b) the accompanying sense of incompleteness and imperfection” (Scheibe et al. 781). This constant searching with a sense of lack or loss dominates Shinkai’s oeuvre. However, the other four major characteristics of Sehnsucht, though present in most of his films, are especially prominent in your name.: “(c) conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; (d) ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; (e) reflection and evaluation of one’s life; and (f) symbolic richness” (778). Indeed, your name. has a distinctive “tritime focus,” in which “[r]etrospection, concurrent evaluation, and prospection operate together” in both the minds of the characters and in the highly complex plot structure that constantly interweaves past, present, and future (Scheibe et al. 781). The use of energetic montages juxtaposing the experiences the protagonists have in each other’s bodies along with prevalent voice-overs—in

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 107 which Taki and Mitsuha ponder their emotions and struggle to recall what happened during the time they were in the other’s body—emphasize three important elements: the film’s and protagonists’ tritime focus; the characters’ ever-shifting strong emotions about each other, ranging from anger and frustration to empathy and affection (i.e. bittersweet); and the characters’ reflection and growing understanding of themselves as they intimately inhabit the life of the other. The vital role played by Shinto beliefs, practices, and iconography in your name. imbues it with a symbolic richness that surpasses that of any of Shinkai’s other works. Although 5 Centimeters intensely focuses on gorgeous seasonal imagery to evoke mono no aware, it is representative of Shinkai’s pre-3.11 work, in that there is little hope for the future, which holds only more unfulfilled longing: the loss is permanent. Even in The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), in which the young couple is reunited in the end, a new world war has just commenced at the denouement. The films Shinkai has made since Japan’s triple disaster of 3.11, as evidenced by your name. and Weathering with You (2019), conclude with more hope. The motif of crying in your name. demonstrates this shift: Mitsuha and Taki both awake with tears streaming down their faces multiple times throughout the film, but they do not understand why; there is a somatic sense of loss though their minds cannot recall the cause. In the final shots of the protagonists in the film, when they at last encounter each other in Tokyo and realize this is the person each has been seeking all these years, tears involuntarily flow down their faces in joy. This could be called an aware moment: “heaven has cleared up,” and the shot tilts up from their tear-streaked faces into the blue sky. In keeping with Sehnsucht, the tears that once represented a bitter loss and inexpressible longing now bespeak a hopeful future in which an “optimal life” might be possible. As Susanne Scheibe and her fellow researchers have argued, “Sehnsucht is inherently multidimensional in emotional tone and multifunctional in its potential consequences. It combines the search for progress and utopia with the insight of the fundamental unattainability of optimal states and the essential imperfection of human life” (Scheibe et al. 279). This dynamic of loss and gain in the concept of Sehnsucht renders it particularly appropriate as a lens through which to view Shinkai’s post-3.11 work. The prevailing subtle, elegant tone associated with mono no aware can be juxtaposed with the often more hyperbolic or exuberant emotional display included in Sehnsucht, making it a useful tool with which to examine the elegiac mode of anime.4 In your name., Mitsuha and Taki move beyond the resigned sadness of traditional mono no aware—which predominantly focuses on nostalgia for someone or something in one’s past—and push forward proactively to transcend the boundaries of time in order to prevent catastrophic loss and inspire hope for the future.

Musubi, Time, and Cinematic Syntax In your name., Shinkai ties together the above ideas—mono no aware, Sehnsucht, and the all-connecting “field of emptiness” embodied by the sky—through the film’s core concept of musubi, the only religio-aesthetic principle he actually

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describes in the dialogue of the film. Helen Hardacre writes, “The noun musubi means ‘connection’ or ‘relation’ in a Shinto context, and it also means the action of causing things to be born and grow, the creation of life and power, the formation of value, causing to mature and develop” (477). Hardacre defines musubi in the context of matsuri, which, in the narrow Shinto sense, refers to “any shrine observance of a celebratory nature,” but the term also can be used in the vernacular to refer to diverse types of festivals (477). Napier aptly and fruitfully connects matsuri to Mikhail Bakhtin’s extensive work on carnival. Bakhtin avers, “Carnival is the festival of all-annihilating and all-renewing time . . . [Its rituals express] the inevitability and at the same time creative power of the shift-and-renewal, the joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) position” (124). Festival or matsuri time is that of ritual and cyclical processes; it is a sacred space outside of linear time, a principle Shinkai emphasizes in the time-traveling of your name. Napier also notes that the festival mode in anime “is often linked to female characters” who live in diegetic worlds, where “norms are transgressed . . . , sexual and gender roles are broken or reversed, and a state of manic intensity replaces conventional restraint” (31, 13). Shinkai has said that your name. was partly inspired by the popular carnivalesque, gender-switching anime television series Ranma ½ (1989), which is evident in Mitsuha and Taki’s madcap energy and ludic antics as they switch bodies and try to save the lives of Itomori’s citizens (“Interview”).5 Furthermore, the religious significance of matsuri is at the heart of your name. Hardacre notes, “According to one etymological interpretation, matsuri is a noun derived from the verb matsurau, meaning ‘to submit to the will of the Kami’. . . . Thus the ultimate aim of matsuri is to join humanity and the Kami together [musubi] so that both can be revitalized” (477). Musubi, as an expression of radical interconnectedness and interdependence, is evoked in your name., from start to finish, in a dizzying array of guises. The Shinto matsuri featured in the film, particularly the kagura dance performed by Mitsuha and her younger sister, Yotsuha, both traditional shrine maidens (miko), are visual signifiers of humanity connecting to the kami and submitting to their will. Mitsuha’s grandmother, the priestess of the shrine that had been run for generations by the Miyamizu family, explains to Mitsuha early in the film that the specific meanings of the rituals they continue to perform every year were lost a few hundred years before when a large fire in Itomori burnt down the shrine buildings, consuming its historical documents. Nonetheless, the family continues to worship and submit to the kami in these rituals because, as the grandmother declares, “The tradition shouldn’t fade.” While the priestess is explaining this to her granddaughters, she is training them in the art of sacred cord braiding, a traditional Shinto handicraft that both enacts and symbolizes musubi, interweaving threads together into a single cord. The one crucial red and orange cord featured throughout the film is the visible symbol of Mitsuha and Taki’s union, their love. We first see the cord as Mitsuha is tying it in her hair in the credit sequence montage. Then, at the very start of the diegesis, we see what seems to be a dream Mitsuha is having in which she cries out “Taki? Don’t you remember?” and the image cuts to Mitsuha stepping

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 109 off a crowded commuter train. The girl unfurls the cord she uses as a hair tie toward a confused young man whom we later learn is Taki. Here, he is three years younger than his 2013 high school self who will be switching bodies with Mitsuha, but this will not be clear to viewers or the characters until the last act of the film. Significantly, the cord is multi-colored and symmetrical: the colors from one end to the other consist of broad expanses of red then orange, a small rectangle of sky blue, and a pure white square in the center, then back to blue, etc., forming a circular pattern of colors. The novelization of your name. makes it clear that the red and orange refer to the colors of the sunset, the twilight that becomes such a key symbol in the film of spiritually empowered liminal space, ma, wherein transcendence of space and time are possible. The red and orange cord is seen in the film nearly every time Mitsuha is on screen, worn in her hair, but it also appears wound around Taki’s wrist as a “good luck” charm, in his words, though he cannot remember how or where he got it. Like the cord, the plot structure of the film is circular in that the end connects to the beginning with repeated footage, mimicking musubi. Moreover, as observed earlier, the complex tritime nature of the plot intricately weaves together the past, present, and future of Mitsuha and Taki. Speaking of the temporal strategy in your name., Shinkai has stated that he set out to create an unpredictable story with a complex timeline, asserting that the way time flows in the film is difficult to explain in words, yet the visuals do not reveal all the story’s secrets either: [F]rom the beginning, I had given up trying to explain it perfectly within the movie. I thought it was unnecessary for the audience to understand exactly how time and space worked. But, in exchange, I had to make sure the audience was interested in Taki and Mitsuha’s feelings. The audience had to at least understand how Taki and Mitsuha felt in each scene. . . . So I abandoned having the audience understand the timeline perfectly from the start. (“Interview”) Two affinities with Norinaga’s Shinto philosophy are evident here: first, there is a clear connection to Norinaga’s belief that to interpret mystery through reason “is to objectify the mystery into something external to be studied, killing the resonance of the mindful heart, kokoro” (Kasulis 115); second, this resonates with Norinaga’s reading of mono no aware as the mode of the human heart, a way of feeling with and for others. Both of these ideas are connected to the makoto no kokoro, the sincere mindful heart that prioritizes empathy and embraces awe-inspiring mystery, which is unable to be construed with reason. The profound connection between the protagonists is the beating heart of this film. However, time is a crucial element that must be overcome and transcended in order to secure the survival of the central couple as well as five hundred Itomori citizens. Unlike the world in Spirited Away, beings in your name. do not live in a realm outside of time. The kami must open up a portal in time using the ritual products of worship; nonetheless, Mitsuha and Taki are required to struggle valiantly to change present, past, and future, which shift

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in definition depending on the perspective one takes. Timing is everything when it comes to surviving a calamity, as emphasized in the film, and, in keeping with Shinto beliefs, death is to be fought against and rejected when possible. Death is taboo; it is corruption in the Shinto worldview, which values purity above all else.6 In contrast, Buddhism believes that death merely moves you forward into your next karmically earned incarnation on the wheel of samsara. This is why the vast majority of funerals in Japan are conducted by Buddhist priests. It is telling that Shinkai, in this film, essentially reverses the massive death toll resulting from the meteor striking Itomoro. Erasing the loss of five hundred lives, particularly a few years after the harrowing disaster of 3.11, underscores the tyranny of linear time that keeps marching forward as well as the salvific potential of sacred time that binds disparate times together (musubi). Memory is another way of transcending linear time, as all times are synchronous in the mind, but, as the recursive features of your name. demonstrate, memory also is subject to the vagaries of time, eroding and gaining, perhaps, a lovely wabi-sabi character in its disintegration, evoking that mono no aware sense of nostalgia and loss as it slips quietly away from us. In your name., Shinkai uses numerous techniques to express these ideas regarding time. As already stated, some key moments in the film are repeated throughout, including the spectacle of the comet soaring through the skies of Itomori and Tokyo and the meteors streaming down after breaking off from it. Also repeated is the confusion of both Taki and Mitsuha as they inquire about each other via writing on their skin, in notebooks, or in their smartphones as their souls continue to swap bodies. The question “What is your name?” is reiterated in various ways, of course, including in the film’s title; although the title, judging by its unusual punctuation, is meant to be a statement rather than a question, perhaps foreshadowing their reunion. Shinkai uses a bridge (hashi) in central Tokyo as a familiar image to which he returns, representing an in-between place (ma) of searching and longing, a bridge of mono no aware. At one point, we see Taki on this bridge trying to phone Mitsuha but failing to get through as the sun goes down behind him, displaying a wide twilit sky, the deep blue and pink blending, as the two teens have been blending into each other. This low-angle long shot peering up at the sky is copied later with Mitsuha standing in the same spot on this bridge after spending an unsuccessful day in Tokyo searching for him; she has no idea she is three years too early. In a sad but hopeful voice-over, she says, “But there’s one thing I’m certain of. If we see each other, we’ll definitely know right away that you were the one who was in me, and that I was the one who was in you.” In addition, Shinkai’s self-conscious manipulation of time, a guiding, michiyuki form of ma, can be seen in several time-lapse sequences capturing magnificent aerial extreme long shots of the movement of sun and moon over the landscapes of Itomori and Tokyo, juxtaposing two sides of Japan: a small town situated in natural splendor and a glittering urban megalopolis. Split screen effects are used, often comedically, to compare the experiences of Mitsuya inside Taki’s body and Taki inside Mitsuha’s, and these tend to take place at moments of strong emotions, especially when they speak simultaneously. We learn later that

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 111 these split screen images are showing parallel experiences that are taking place three years apart in time, so the filmic grammar of the split screen incapsulates musubi, disparate times joined in one frame. The common cut-to-black Shinkai uses between episodes, a dramatic pause achieved by a cinematic ma, also can mislead viewers in regard to when the next episode occurs in the chronological timeline. Thus, the ma or void of the black screen is a structural principle used throughout the film to mark a break in time, but it also obfuscates the linear timeline, and, arguably, draws attention to the “field of emptiness,” the space of sacred time, in which all times, as well as all phenomena, are interpenetrating. In addition, frenetically paced montages of the two teens living their own and each other’s everyday lives against the aural background of exuberant Radwimps songs represent how quickly time passes. Moreover, the montages highlight the lack of linear, chronological sequencing both in the film and in the realm of memory, which is able to summon images, feelings, and experiences so rapidly and, musubi-like, intertwine and superimpose them. In these montages, viewers have no idea if the various images flickering before them happen sequentially, and it does not matter because, as intended, Shinkai has moved us to feel with and for these characters. Vivid renderings of musubi and the aesthetic-philosophical concepts that accompany it in your name. pervade every moment of the film. The energetic Radwimps-accompanied montage during the opening credits concludes with what could be called a musubi shot: it starts with a low-angle extreme long shot behind a young man on a Tokyo rooftop and traverses rapidly over the landscape in blurred green tones until the shot finally arrives in Itomori inside Mitsuha’s bedroom, ending with a close-up of her face. This type of dramatic cinematography is far more suited to the fluidity of animation than to live action, and here the shot draws a line of connection between our two protagonists (musubi), tracing the physical distance between them and serving as an appropriate bridge into the first moments of the story. Shinkai provides two rather direct heuristic lessons in your name.—one on the significance of twilight and the other on the import and profundity of musubi—which give the viewers tools with which to perceive and understand the major thematic messages in a narrative that can be disorienting. The lecture on twilight is given by a young female teacher at Mitsuha’s high school very early in the film. As there are verbal explanations as well as close-ups of vocabulary on the chalkboard, viewers learn along with the students in the class. The teacher circles the word tasokare on the board, explaining its literal meaning as “two-light” but goes on to underline its supernatural aspects: “It’s dusk, a time when it’s neither day nor night, when the border between worlds blur, and one might encounter something not human. . . . Some people also call it ‘Golden Hour.’” When a student asks, “What about ‘magic hour’?,” the teacher assents that it refers to the same time of day but is a term used mainly by photographers. This is significant because, for the remainder of the film, characters primarily call twilight magic hour, underscoring both the spiritual portent of this liminal time and Shinkai’s extensive use of lens effects (e.g., lens flares, bokeh, selective focus) throughout. Twilight in this film is a time of ravishing beauty that

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evokes mono no aware and Sehnsucht, but it also symbolizes the “convergent interpenetration,” to use Nishitani’s words, experienced by the body-switching kokoro of our teen protagonists (Carter 8). They are two yet one, blending into each other across space and time. The symbol-rich preamble to the film’s musubi message appears in the aforementioned kagura ritual scene, wherein markers of sacred space-time abound. In this early scene, Mitsuha and her sister, in their roles as Miyamizu shrine maidens, perform a dance with sacred red cords, wearing traditional white robes and luminescent golden dragon headpieces, referencing the Shinto connection between dragons, water, and purity. Their family name Miyamizu literally means holy shrine water, another purity allusion. The girls dance on a traditional square, empty wooden stage with a backdrop of natural wood featuring a single sacred pine in its center, representing an axis mundi (yoroshiro), much like the Nō theater central stage. The simple, open stage space is a ma into which the formless kami can descend and radiate their power, reminding humans of the sacred nature of all things and bridging the distance between the supernatural and phenomenal worlds. The ritual also features a tradition in which the young virgins chew rice in their mouths and spit it into sacred vessels where it will ferment into a sake called kuchikamizake, “the world’s oldest sake,” as Mitsuha’s friend notes. Mitsuha looks miserable performing this part of the ritual, and her fellow high school students mock her quietly in the audience, but the novel provides her internal horror: she asserts that the kuchikamizake ritual “seems intentionally designed to brutally humiliate women” (25). When the shrine maidens have finished, a chirpy Yotsuha and mortified Mitsuha descend the steep shrine staircase; the agitated teen rushes down in frustration and stops at a landing directly under an old red torii gate. She feels there is no way out of this small-town, old-fashioned life, screaming into the night: “I hate this town! This life too! Please make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” As Shinto has no belief in reincarnation, there is humor in a Shinto shrine maiden brazenly requesting that the kami or a Buddha grant her a more “auspicious” rebirth. Of course, this also points to the Shinto-Buddhist syncretism dominant from the eighth century until the official Meiji efforts to create State Shinto in the latter nineteenth century. Nonetheless, syncretic Shinto-Buddhist practice is still alive and well today. In your name., as in other body-switching comedies, a wish or a curse seems to be the cause of the transmigration rather than samsara. However, we learn later that this sort of body-swapping has happened to several generations of Miyamizu young women, so Mitsuha’s outburst here in a spiritually charged environment functions more as foreshadowing than causation. The film’s lesson on musubi takes place during a pivotal and strikingly beautiful scene capturing Japan’s beloved hues of autumn, that season of mono no aware when the brightly colored leaves undergo profound changes, embodying in a short period of time the progress from garish youth to delicate disintegration. This captures the sense of “utsuroi, the moment when nature is transformed, the passage from one state to another,” rooted in the awareness of the movement of kami into sacred space (Isozaki 14–15). In this swiftly paced film, Shinkai markedly

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Figure 3.3 Sacred trees with shimenawa framing Mitsuha, who is carrying her grandmother, and her little sister, dwarfed by the natural world in your name.

slows down here, giving us a ma in the diegesis. The sequence is festooned with contemplative shots of brilliantly colored leaves; deeply saturated shades of red, orange, and yellow seem to float through the frame. In one shot, the radiant leaves are actually floating and swirling on the surface of a crystal-clear stream, reminding viewers of the fluidity and evanescence of all things in this world. This is the backdrop for the foot journey of Mitsuhu, her sister, and their priestess grandmother to the location of their shrine kami’s “body,” a great, ancient tree in the center of a crater at the top of a mountain. On this day, Mitsuha’s body is possessed by Taki’s kokoro, and he is taken aback by all the ancient, seemingly exotic traditions he knows nothing about. As the three ascend the mountain path, chiaroscuro lighting effects emerge when rays of sun stream through the tall trees. In one long shot, the group is framed by two massive trees in the shot’s foreground whose trunks are circled with thick white shimenawa, the ropes marking sacred space. In the midst of this otherworldly beauty, Grandma explains to the girls that musubi is what people used to call the local guardian deity, and she goes on to explicate the concept: [I]t means union. This word has profound meaning. Tying strings together is a union. Connecting to people is a union, and the flow of time is a union. These are all part of the god’s power. The braided cords that we make are tied to that, a skill from the god. They represent the flow of time itself. They assemble and take shape, they twist, tangle, unravel now and then break, and reconnect. That’s what a union is, what time is.

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Throughout this speech, Shinkai intercuts gleaming, bokeh-laden shots of the natural phenomena around them, which graphically illustrate these principles, but, when the cords are spoken of, he gives us close-ups of multi-colored cords that the camera follows like paths of destiny stretching into the distance. A short time later, when they stop for a picnic, Grandma elaborates, noting that eating or drinking is also musubi, because, “[w]hen something becomes part of a person, it’s a union.” This addendum pointedly tells us that Taki and Mitsuha’s body-switching is musubi, and her earlier explanation imbues musubi with a sacred quality that indicates divine destiny.7 The floating “camerawork” following this episode seems to be from a kami’s point of view, revealing in extreme long shots the majesty of nature from the heights of a sacred mountain. When the three arrive at the top, they are standing on the rocky edge of a crater, and a high-angle long shot reveals the anatomy of the sacred space below them while violins swell on the soundtrack. The bottom of the round crater into which they descend is verdant and marshy, and there is a distinctive tree in its center, the “god’s body,” intertwined with a very large slab of rock, shaped almost like a large seat (perhaps, the throne of the kami) (cf. Shinkai, your name. 62). We soon learn this rock contains a cave, a dark ma serving as a holy of holies, where the shrine maidens will place their kuchikamizake urns. As the women proceed toward the cave through the green grasses, symbolizing a primordial life force, they encounter a circular stream (cf. Isozaki 34). Grandma tells the girls that crossing this brook will transport them into a sacred, timeless space: “What lies ahead is the hereafter. It’s the netherworld.” The stream also represents a final ritual ablution before entering the kami’s inner sanctum, the cave where they place their urns before a plain rock altar. This scene concludes with the priestess

Figure 3.4 The “god’s body” in the center of the crater with Grandma in your name.

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 115 and her granddaughters (with Taki inhabiting Mitsuha’s body) descending the mountain during “magic hour,” as Yotsuha describes it, when resplendent sunset shades of pink, orange, and lavender reflect off a blanket of clouds and the perfectly round Itomori Lake glitters in the distance.8 When Grandma glances at Mitsuha, she realizes her granddaughter is “dreaming,” and there is an abrupt cut to Taki gasping awake in his own bedroom, tears streaming down his face for reasons unknown to him, an iconic moment of Sehnsucht. This entire scene, with its focus on core philosophies, sacred signifiers, and natural splendor, maintains an otherworldly atmosphere—the sense that the power of kami permeates this world—and reveals that there is a divine purpose for the strange goings-on in the characters’ lives. The emotional climax of your name. takes place later in this same sacred space, the kami’s crater, during the magic hour, when Mitsuha and Taki finally meet in person in a transcendent moment outside of time. In the your name. novelization, Taki (in Mitsuha’s body) is astonished at the preternatural resplendence of the verdurous crater the first time he sees it, thinking this “floating garden” comprises the pinnacle of a “sacred mountain, or a power spot, or a save point” (61). In this complex “reunion” scene on the crater’s edge, it is made clear that the crater is all three of these things. Also, the edge itself is a hashi in its older sense of a threshold between worlds and space-times (Isozaki 12). This culminating scene is set up earlier when Taki, in 2016, is motivated by a vague memory and sense of connection to seek out the crater. Most of Itomori had been destroyed by a meteor back in 2013, and Taki had recognized Mitsuha’s name in the list of the dead, but he strongly senses there is more to discover: the Sehnsucht drives him forward. This time, his journey up the mountain is in pouring rain under gray skies. While stopping in a cave to have a snack, he recalls Grandma’s words from that sunny autumn day in his mind: “They assemble and take shape, they twist, tangle, unravel now and then, break, and reconnect. That’s what a union is, what time is.” During this voice-over, we see an intricate spiderweb dripping with rain, a dull brown maple leaf, and a high-angle long shot of Itomori Lake as it is in 2016, the “gourd-shaped” double lake marking exactly where the meteors hit Itomori, although they struck twelve hundred years apart. Throughout the film, the repeated images of the single and double Itomori Lake display the gleaming physical manifestation of the will of the kami and serve as time markers for 2013 or 2016. The circular and gourd-shaped lakes reveal a purposeful, crafting hand of nature—that is, of kami—and the two meteors falling from the sky and hitting nearly the same spot, creating one lake of two intersecting circles, bespeaks the force of divine destiny. The visual merging of the lakes resulting from celestial intention is a macrocosmic vision of Mitsuha and Taki’s coming together: they are linked across time and space for a divine purpose. This is musubi. When Taki reaches the crater on the mountaintop in 2016, he sees that the brook is now a circular river around the god’s body, the intertwined tree and cave (another example of musubi). A long shot of the landscape behind Taki captures the distinctive double lake with a rack focus move drawing the eye to its surface.

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At the bottom of the crater, cold mists rise from the green grass, creating a supernatural ambiance as Taki faces the river and speaks, “What lies next is the netherworld.” After descending the steps into the dark cave, Taki kneels before the stone spirit house with the shimenawa stretched before it and, saying “This was mine,” picks up the white vessel, now covered in green moss, a wabi-sabi aesthetic touch marking the passage of time. Remembering that Grandma called the kuchikamizake “half of” Mitsuha, Taki speaks a type of prayer-wish: “Musubi. If it’s true, and time can be unraveled, just give me one more chance.” After drinking the sake, he rises and stumbles backward, falling in slow motion to express Taki’s dizzy state of mind. We then are given a point-of-view shot looking up, where he sees a luminous comet shooting across the dark cave ceiling, appearing to be an ancient cave painting coming to life. The elaborate spiritual vision that follows is the most intense hierophany—or perhaps theophany—in the film. The formless kami takes Taki on a journey that illustrates a cosmic view of musubi while showing him the pivotal moments of Mitsuha’s existence. The viewer is along for the ride from Taki’s point of view, following the swiftly moving comet through black space as it transforms into a red-orange cord spiraling into a dark future. We hear drops of water falling and echoing in the empty cave during this, imbuing the whole scene with a sense of the primordial void. Next, we see Taki plunge into dark water with the red cord Mitsuha gave him stretching up above him as the water goes bright white, pink, and lavender, like twilight (cf. note 7). Taki seems to be following the red cord through this watery nothingness as the cord changes colors to blue then pink and undulates through the sky, emulating traditional dragon imagery and its connection to water (cf. Spirited Away). The cord he follows transforms back into a comet and red pieces, meteors, fall from it. Despite this menacing sight, the soundtrack music is quiet and peaceful, and we keep following the meteors as they descend through the atmosphere of Earth until we can see the whole of Japan and the blue trail of one meteor headed straight toward it. Now the cosmic trip moves from macro to micro as the red meteor begins to transform and divide like cells; we hear a heartbeat and a baby’s cry, then see Mitsuha as an infant in her mother’s arms. What follows are visions of turning points in Mitsuha’s life, such as her mother dying, her father abandoning the shrine, and her grandmother taking over the care of her granddaughters. The red cord then leads him up into a white void in which he sees a montage of Mitsuha’s life while he and she were body-switching up until the day of the meteor hitting Itomori. All of the events of Mitsuha’s life are portrayed in less-saturated color, resembling that of pastel pencils, and with the edges blurred out, in emulation of the ephemerality of memory, which dissolves in time. Taki yells helplessly after her, “You’ve gotta get out of town before the comet strikes! Mitsuha, run!” At the end of this procession of Mitsuha’s experiences, we see the footage previously shown of Mitsuha in her festival kimono staring up at the beautiful comet and the meteor plunging toward Itomori. Taki screams her name as an extreme close-up of Mitsuha’s face pulls into a magnificent reflection of the meteor in her eye. Instead of showing her getting killed, the next shot takes

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 117 us abruptly into Mitsuha’s bedroom, in which she wakes up with Taki’s kokoro on the final day of Mitsuha’s life. The film branches off here to show Mitsuha (inhabited by Taki) reliving that day and attempting to save the people of Itomori. We return to the kami’s crater only at the end of this harried day, when Mitsuha has failed to convince her father, Itomori’s mayor, to raise the alarm and evacuate the town. At this desperate moment, Mitsuha (possessed by Taki) scrambles to get up to the crater to connect to Mitsuha’s kokoro, somehow, to get her to convince her father. The poignant and visually stunning first encounter between the two now smitten teens, finally embodied as themselves, takes place when Taki awakens in the kami’s cave in 2016, but Mitsuha’s kokoro is still in Taki’s body. Meanwhile, Taki, in Mitsuha’s body in 2013, is scrambling to get up to the crater to find her. (What follows may be bewildering and inspire wonderment, as Shinkai intends.) Mitsuha in Taki’s body climbs up to the edge of the crater and is horrified when she looks down at the destroyed Itomori and the double lake, where her part of the town once was. As the shot pulls into Taki’s face it transforms into Mitsuha’s visage, and we again see the zoom into her eye bearing the reflection of the falling meteor. Mitsuha (in Taki) drops to her/his knees, “So does that mean I died?” A high-angle extreme long shot over her shows Taki’s body as a diminutive figure in the sprawl of the magnificent surrounding mountains. From the cosmic perspective, does it matter if she perished in the disaster? At this point, there is a flashback to Mitsuha’s trip to Tokyo the day before the meteor falls, during which she gives Taki, who is three years younger, the red cord on the commuter train, as shown in the film’s opening montage. When the film returns to the sacred mountain, the shades of twilight—pink, orange, lavender—reflect off the clouds blanketing the mountains, which the crater floats above. The sun hovering on the horizon emanates a pronounced vertical lens flare effect that seems to mark time’s synchronic convergence in this spot on the space-time continuum. The two distraught teens uncannily call out for each other in the other’s body: Mitsuha’s body yelling “Mitsuha!?” and Taki’s calling “Taki!?” As the two hear but cannot see each other, there is an elevating, soaring extreme long shot above the giant ring of the crater, and it is clear that this, too, was purposely created by natural kami, by an ancient meteor strike or volcano eruption. The symmetry is precise, with the god’s body—the intertwined tree and rock “seat” containing the cave— exactly in the center, the axis mundi. As we see Taki and Mitsuha running on the crater’s rocky rim in separate medium shots, the temporal distance between them is marked by the recurring images of the single lake (2013) and double lake (2016) appearing in the background behind them. There are also repeated highangle long shots above them featuring the tell-tale different lakes. These rhyming medium and long shots communicate that Mitsuha and Taki are spatially very close to each other on that rim, building suspense. The sound of their voices is carrying through time, but their physical bodies are still three years apart. Capturing the uncanniness of the moment, shots of each of them bear a smear effect, as if their bodies might be slipping through time.

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Figure 3.5 Taki (possessed by Mitsuha) on the crater’s edge seeking Mitsuha (possessed by Taki), his body smearing as he slips through time, with the double lake of 2016 below him in your name.

Figure 3.6 Mitsuha inhabited by Taki calling out for Mitsuha in Taki’s body with the single lake of 2013 below in your name.

Finally, the two run blindly past each other on the rim, there is a wind chime sound, and viewers see a red cord stretched out in the air between them. They each stop, sensing the other, and turn to look, but no one is there. In profile long shots of each, we see Mitsuha and Taki reach their arms out toward each other into thin air,

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 119 each hand piercing through the bright, vertical sun flare that now seems to separate them and represent the permeable boundary of linear time. Emphasizing this, there are parallel close-ups of each of their hands reaching, having passed through the vertical flare of the sun that hovers just above their hands, but now there is a new circular flare of light around each hand, forming a magical halo marking transcendent sacred space in the shape of cyclical time. Just then, a shadow falls across Mitsuha as the sun declines behind the head of a cumulus cloud in the colorful sky, and the two say together like a sigh, “Magic hour.” Medium closeups of each teen feature a background of pink light cutting diagonally through the bottom of the frame and a deepening blue hovering in the top two-thirds of the screen, graphically portraying the liminal moment: two “lights” are blending together. At last, they can see one another and are meeting as their true selves, having instantaneously migrated back into their own bodies. In the following low-angle long shot of the two, in profile, facing each other for the first time, they appear to be floating in a two-colored sky, treading on the pink-orange blanket of clouds below in a magical, celestial paradise. Mitsuha sheds large tears as Taki tells her, “I came all this way to see you, which wasn’t easy since you were pretty far away.” She and the audience know that this simple statement refers to his supernatural transcendence of time and even her death to reach her.9 When Mitsuha wonders how he has done this, Taki tells her that he drank her kuchikamizake, and she is mortified, yelling, “Stupid pervert! That’s right, you were touching my boobies weren’t you!” (something we see Taki do in Mitsuha’s body several times). This outburst would have been humorous in a typical high school romance tale, but here the comedy is heightened by the contrasting context of their mystical twilight moment above the clouds. This

Figure 3.7 Taki and Mitsuha finally meet in their own bodies, across time, during twilight at the crater’s edge in your name.

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hardly seems the time or place for such pedestrian quibbles. There are lives to be saved. Nonetheless, the tone soon shifts to endearing, and they move quickly on to exchanging the symbolic red and orange cord, which, Taki remarks, she gave him before he had met her, in 2013. He gives it back to her for good fortune as she tries to save her townspeople, telling her there is still much to do as they can see the comet progressing above them. As magic hour morphs into night, they attempt to write their names on each other’s hands, so they will not forget them, but Mitsuha disappears after drawing just one line on Taki’s palm. The saddened Taki says aloud to himself, “I was planning to tell you that wherever you are in the world, I swear that I’ll find you again, no matter what. Your name is Mitsuha.” Of course, if Mitsuha cannot save the people of Itomori, she will die trying, and even the creator kami Izanagi failed to retrieve his consort Izanami from the land of the dead. Taki claims here a divinely transcendent love for Mitsuha, but can she prevent the imminent and immanent human loss that is already established history in Taki’s 2016?

Warning Systems, Politics, and the Exploding World The substantial features of the elegiac and festival modes in your name. have been explored, but its plot also places the film squarely in the apocalyptic mode. This is a disaster picture made following the massive cataclysm of 3.11. Napier opines that “the apocalyptic mode, often combined with the elegiac or even the festival, is not simply a major part of anime but is also deeply ingrained within the contemporary Japanese national identity” (249–50). The reasons for this are eloquently expressed in words of Haruki Murakami referenced in the opening of this chapter. In your name., Shinkai embraces some of the typical characteristics of the apocalyptic and omits others to communicate significant messages in the wake of Japan’s recent apocalyptic loss. In this way, and in the time-traveling plot of the film, your name. is post-apocalyptic. James Berger writes of post-apocalyptic narratives, “A disaster occurs of overwhelming, disorienting magnitude, and yet the world continues. . . . Apocalyptic writing itself is a remainder, a symptom, an aftermath of disorienting catastrophe” (6–7). Your name. is a fantasy of survival in which the human lives destroyed by natural disaster can be saved post factum; in the vernacular, the victims of the meteor are given a “do-over.” Shinkai creates a narrative that serves some of the major functions of the apocalyptic mode: to make sense of the world, to order chaos, and to attempt to work through historical traumas (Croteau 11). Postmodern Japanese identity, as Alan Wolfe contends, is profoundly shaped by “the ability to stay, survive, be reborn: the ultimate symbol of that truth is the historical experience of the atomic bomb and devastating destruction of Japan. For Japan, . . . the issue is not whether survival is possible, but how to survive in what has always been recognized as a precarious existence” (230). This sensibility has been applied to the nuclear holocaust as well as to natural disasters in Japan.10 Writing of hibakusha cinema—films made about and, in some cases, by “atomic bomb-affected people”—Donald Richie maintains that, starting in the

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 121 post-World War II years, much of the Japanese populace took an “elegiac,” mono no aware stance toward the atomic bombings, “which has remained as the single constant element in the changing interpretations of the Hiroshima symbol. From the first films on, Hiroshima was not an ‘atrocity’ but a ‘tragedy’” (“ ‘Mono’” 22). Moreover, Richie explains, The bomb, like the war, like death itself, was something over which no one had any control; something which could not be helped; what we mean by an “act of God.” The Japanese, in moments of stress if not habitually, regard life as the period of complete insecurity that it is; and the truth of this observation is graphically illustrated in a land yearly ravaged by typhoons, a country where the very earth quakes daily. The bomb, at first, was thought of as just another catastrophe in a land already overwhelmed with them. (“ ‘Mono’” 20–21) These words were written two decades before the apocalyptic anime explosion of the 1980s, wherein science fiction tropes often foregrounded dystopic nightmarescapes alluding to nuclear disaster. Hibakusha cinema with mono no aware sensibilities has persisted, as seen distinctly in writer Keiji Nakazawa’s anime Barefoot Gen (dir. Masaki Mori 1983), Imamura Shohei’s Black Rain (1989), and Akira Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August (1990). Perhaps the biggest celebrity of hibakusha cinema is Godzilla, that titanic, immortal metaphor for the atomic bomb and the kaiju (monster film) property that cannot be stopped by any force. From the first Japanese Godzilla (dir. Ishirō Honda) in 1954 to the very post-3.11 Shin Godzilla (dir. Hideaki Anno) of 2016, this symbolic, nuclear reptile keeps destroying Japanese cities and revealing the resilience and ingenuity of the Japanese people (see Tamaki 87–103; Noriega 54–74). However, far and away the most popular and highest-grossing single work of hibakusha cinema to date is Makoto Shinkai’s your name., which grossed 359 million US dollars worldwide, compared to the 78 million US dollar gross of Shin Godzilla, released in the same year (IMDbPro). The fact that the triple disaster of 3.11 included the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant also inextricably connects the 2011 natural disaster with the 1945 nuclear bombings. The radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident forced over 200,000 people to evacuate that region, and the disaster triggered uncharacteristic public protests, in person and in writing, against nuclear energy by a large number of Japanese (Parry, Ghosts xvii; Allison 186, 200). A tell-tale, microcosmic analogue can be found in your name., in that the town of Itomori, only partially destroyed, remains sealed off with caution tape and prohibitive fencing as a disaster zone when Taki arrives in 2016, three years after the meteor hit. There is no effort to rebuild, or, apparently, to keep the other two-thirds of the town functioning and populated. Itomori has been abandoned as if contaminated by radiation. However, it is Shinkai’s depictions of disaster warning systems, supernatural providence, political inertia, and the catastrophe itself that reveal his response to 3.11.

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Resonating with Richie’s words cited earlier, your name. presents an “act of kami” as the apocalyptic disaster: the comet is clearly related to the Miyamizu shrine’s god. The “body” of this kami is the tree intertwined with the rock cave in the center of the “netherworld” crater, also apparently created by a natural disaster (meteor or volcano). Additionally, the crater alludes to the atomic bomb, as seen in Akira’s futuristic depiction of the black crater where “old” Tokyo used to be. What Shinkai appears to be expressing here is that the kami of the natural world go about their cyclical business, which includes what humans view as “disaster,” but nature has no particular intention to destroy the human lives in its path. In fact, the kami in your name. create a “warning system” by empowering Mitsuha’s body-switching and time-traveling (cf. your name. novel 112). The seeming “disaster” is inevitable and out of human control; it is even awe-inspiring and beautiful. The best humans can do is respect nature, heed its warnings, and get out of its way if need be. The same natural processes and kami that bring cherry blossoms every spring and brilliantly hued autumn leaves also bring typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis, and meteors. This view is entirely in keeping with the Shinto belief in the ephemeral, processual world; the profound interconnection and interdependence of all things (musubi); the lack of division between the spiritual and the material; and the sacred potential of all sentient and insentient entities. Thus, what appears to be a “natural disaster” is not a calamity for nature but an opportunity to progress into new forms. As I have written elsewhere, “The most salient feature of the apocalyptic is transformation” (Croteau 2). In the Itomori region, a meteor hit twelve hundred years ago, which created a lovely round lake. Around this lake arose a flourishing town, which benefitted from it, supporting the lives of humans for twelve hundred years. Then, in 2013, the Itomori kami drew down another meteor to hit right beside the earlier one, and this formed a “double lake,” a larger body of water that almost appears to be an intersecting couple, an emblem of being simultaneously two and one, like Mitsuha and Taki. This lake also alludes to Nishitani’s macrocosmic “field of emptiness,” connecting all things in the limitless kū (cosmic sky), which is always reflected in the blue, sparkling waters of the lake. The kami are not punishing the people of Itomori; on the contrary, they provided a source of life for them with the lake and also a sacred locus of supernatural connection with the kami in the crater. Nature encompasses the cosmic view, such as those provided by the film from the perspective of space, far above Earth. In this way, Shinkai’s apocalyptic tale differs from a good many others. Apocalyptic narratives in diverse media typically feature the following: “a supernatural source from which a secret knowledge comes . . . often . . . through visions, dreams, . . . [or] heavenly journeys”; an “interest in otherworldly forces”; “the firm belief in divine intervention in human history, usually culminating in the end of an evil person or power”; “the restoration of a paradise on Earth . . . [including] the termination of the old world and its transformation into a new world order”; and the divine judgment of human behavior and “dispensing of rewards and punishments” in the afterlife (Stone 79–80; cf. Collins 1–32). Your name. clearly displays most of these features; however, the world Shinkai creates, in keeping with Norinaga’s Shinto worldview, has no focus on evil or righteousness, though purity and cultivating makoto no kokoro

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 123 (a sincere mindful heart) is emphasized. As demonstrated, the disaster is not a judgment or punishment wrought upon Itomori by the kami. Because Shinto has “no clear concept of past and future lives, . . . the notion of retribution based on cause and effect, as in a judgment after death, is not very prominent” (Matsumura 133). In the past few decades, Shinto scholarship has concluded that the ancient Japanese perceived kami as unpredictable and volatile, associating them closely with disasters such as fire, floods, and earthquakes; Satoshi Ito even contends that Shinto rituals were performed “for no other reason than placating the kami’s ire” (qtd. in Havens 19). However, Shinkai chooses in your name. to follow Motoori Norinaga’s earlier, perhaps romanticized vision of ancient Shinto that emphasizes the “genuine mindful heart, . . . a life-affirming responsiveness and interconnectedness,” through which one feels with and for all things sentient and insentient (Kasulis 117). The benevolent and pacific kami in this view share an empathic relationship with humanity, and this is evidenced in your name. by the salvific, supernatural warning system the kami “install” in Mitsuha and her foremothers. Norinaga asserts that the sensitive kokoro “manifest[s] more often in women than in men,” and he valorizes this “effeminate” intuition over bushido (warrior) principles of duty and reason (Ueda, Literary 204–05; Kasulis 117–18). Along with the tendency in many traditions globally to associate the spiritual with the feminine, this perspective makes it unsurprising that Shinkai chose to make the spiritual leaders female in your name. Though male priests are far more common than female ones in Shinto, there is a tradition of female shamans in Japan, and the Shinto shrine maidens (miko) were the nation’s earliest shamans; they imparted messages from the gods to the imperial government and “acted as mediums for the villagers and their kami” (Buljan and Cusack 70). Mitsuha, Shinkai’s miko, does both of these things, becoming the mouthpiece for the kami to save Itomori’s people from perishing in a kami-made natural event. She, with help from the future Taki, is a soteriological force: a messianic female, “magical girl,” and “divine child” figure, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä and Ponyo in their eponymous films (1984 and 2008, respectively) (cf. Buljan and Cusack 117–60). Significantly, she proves to be far more effective than Japan’s standard alert systems. Shinkai also uses the “feminine” world of the shrine to contrast with the “masculine” realm of politics in the film, as Mitsuha’s mayor father is shown purposely abandoning the shrine for a career in local politics. This division of Shinto and state, as it were, distances the “ancient Shinto” practiced at Miyamizu Shrine from the secular political realm that, even in little Itomori, is surrounded by rumors of corruption. In other words, your name.’s Shinto cannot be mistaken for the State Shinto that propped up ultra-nationalism in the twentieth century. From the beginning of your name., Shinkai foregrounds Japan’s ubiquitous public disaster warning systems. On the first morning we see Mitsuha wake up, we hear a female’s voice broadcasting through Itomori’s town-wide loudspeakers, greeting the citizens, and there is a low-angle long shot up at the tall pole with its speakers facing all four directions. This is a shot that will be repeated at various points during the film, especially when these speakers become the crucial means by which to order the townspeople’s evacuation. When Mitsuha turns on the television news

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that first morning, the newswoman announces that Comet Tiamat will be visible in less than a month: “We’re preparing for the celestial show of the millennium.” The wondrous, cosmic perspective regarding the comet’s arrival contains no fear of cataclysm. Throughout the film, we see clips of the television news, and all newscasts that take place before the meteor “disaster” are characterized by this awe-filled anticipation. When Taki wakes up for the last time in Mitsuha’s body, after drinking her kuchikamizake, it is the day of the meteor strike, and she/he spends the entire day mobilizing her two best friends, Tesshi (Teshigawara) and Saya (Sayaka), to employ their unique talents to save the five hundred citizens, including themselves, from a fiery death. Tesshi uses the knowledge of explosives he has garnered from his contractor father to blow up the power substation, and Saya, from a family of town broadcasters, uses her skills to hijack the loudspeaker system at the high school and confidently announce an evacuation of the town. Meanwhile, Mitsuha goes to her father, the mayor, to plead with him to evacuate Itomori, but she fails, and he declares that she has gone “crazy,” ordering her to the hospital. This is an obvious metaphor for government not listening to or respecting young people and their ideas. In these scenes, Shinkai depicts teenagers circumventing the ineffective and inadequate systems set up by (perhaps well-meaning) municipal officials; indeed, the teens end up saving the day with their carefully planned rebellion. Later, after Mitsuha and Taki have switched back into their own bodies on the crater rim at twilight, Mitsuha, with a power that only she possesses, will successfully confront and convince her father to trust her and redouble the efforts to evacuate the town to the safety of the high school baseball field. Shinkai underscores the great consequence of this mutinous moment by placing it, strangely, after we already have seen her father capitulate to her request and immediately before the meteor hits. In his portrayal of young people hijacking the town’s warning system and refusing to obey the rules of official emergency plans and government leadership, Shinkai both revises the history of the 3.11 disaster and promotes a break from the stereotype of the obedient, orderly, group-oriented Japanese. Young people here question and challenge the policies, norms, and expectations of their elders and leaders. Even Mitsuha’s priestess grandmother rejects the kami’s warning communicated through Mitsuha, but the miko perseveres and enlists her friends in her salvific cause nonetheless. As described by journalist Richard Lloyd Parry in his powerful book Ghosts of the Tsunami, there were groups of people caught in the 3.11 disaster who perished because they followed the emergency plans of their local municipalities, despite last-minute warnings of government officials and citizens who learned—some by the evidence of their own eyes—that the tsunami was monstrously larger than their warning systems had predicted (e.g., see 134–43). Perhaps the most egregious loss of life due to the failures of official leadership was the seventy-four children at Okawa Elementary School who died in the tsunami because their teachers refused to deviate from the insufficient emergency plan in the school’s manual, despite being informed that the colossal tsunami was careening toward them in time to evacuate the children to higher ground.11 The lawsuit against the school’s city and prefecture government, filed in 2014 by the families of twenty-three of the lost children, was won by the plaintiffs

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 125 in late 2016, just two months after the release of this film (Parry, Ghosts 250–55). Thus, the very public lawsuit was in the news during the two-year production of your name., and it is not difficult to deduce that the evacuation location in the film, the high school baseball field, is an uncanny rewriting, or unwriting, of the unsafe schoolyard where the Okawa students stood dutifully for nearly an hour on 3.11 until their teachers could arrive at the conclusion to follow the manual, so they marched the children directly into the tsunami wave instead of up the hill behind the school, where they most likely would have survived. In your name., Shinkai flips the historical script: the young people successfully rebel against the leaders and manuals, thereby saving the lives of five hundred people. Not surprisingly, using a natural disaster at this historical moment in Japan as the basis for a revisionist piece of entertainment stirred some controversy, but your name.’s monumental success proved that audiences worldwide welcomed the positive spin, and Shinkai went on to make his next film, Weathering With You (2019), about climate-change-related “disaster” (McLean). As previously described, the images of the comet and the meteors it births over Earth are shown many times in the film from different perspectives, including the kami’s-eye-view of space, and, each time, it is the preternatural, incandescent beauty of the natural phenomenon that overwhelms the viewer, whether film character or audience member. Thus, it is not alarming, late in the film, when we again see those lovely celestial shots of the comet and its meteors falling through the sky as if they were fireworks launched to celebrate the festival taking place that evening. However, this time, the meteor finally strikes Itomori: a blue streak flashes down and hits the shrine, and diegetic sound disappears for a moment as we see everything suddenly exploding into a red circle of flame on screen. Then the film jump-cuts backward in time to a high-angle long shot of the impact from across the lake, and the tremendous sound of the explosion finally is heard as we witness, from a farther distance and in slow motion, the infernal sight: red smoke and enormous rocks billowing up in the air, red rays of light emanating from the blast, cars flying by, and trees blasted back by the gusts of the explosion. The next high-angle shot reveals a monumental red-brown mound of smoke rising from the demolished half of Itomori Lake, and the shot pulls up slowly as the roar fades. There is no question that this imagery is modeled after other filmic images of nuclear bombs exploding and incinerating everything in their paths; it is another marker of hibakusha cinema. However, Itomori also operates as a symbol of traditional Japan, depicted as an idealized rustic Japanese village, where life proceeds in tune with the cycles of nature. The term for this is furusato, a “sentimentally charged image of a home place” (Hardacre 407). Furusato is a synecdoche for the purity of Japan and its exceptional traditions and culture, and the concept was used by the Japanese government in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century to build and maintain nationalism and imperialistic campaigns. What is most interesting about Shinkai’s use of furusato in the depiction of Itomori is that, throughout your name., the teens of the town, and Taki in Mitsuha’s body, are constantly denigrating the town as boring and old-fashioned. In the novel, Taki thinks the Miyamizus

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are “a Japanese folktale family” (111). The forested mountains surrounding Itomori are stunningly beautiful, but so are the glittering, idealized Tokyo cityscapes so often juxtaposed to that natural landscape. It is important that Mitsuha’s first goal, established at the start of the film, is to move to Tokyo and never look back. The meteor brings that dream to fruition and also frees her friends Saya and Tesshi from the obligations they feel to take over their families’ businesses rather than follow their own ikigai (purpose for living). This is another apocalyptic fulfillment in your name., the “termination of the old world and its transformation into a new world order” in the ultramodern, urban megalopolis of endless possibility that is Tokyo. Shinkai himself grew up in a small town in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, an ideal furusato landscape, and moved to Tokyo at eighteen never to return. In fact, Shinkai has said that he is Mitsuha (Bradshaw). The attitude of the director and his film accords with Jennifer Robertson’s clarification that “the recognition of a place as furusato is possible only once that place is, or is imagined as, distant, inaccessible, lost, forsaken, or disappearing” (117). Shinkai has it both ways in your name.: he celebrates the beauty and traditions of “old,” traditional Japan in his depiction of the fictional Itomori, an ideal “folktale” town, but he also has young characters enumerate the reasons why urban life is much preferable. Plus, in the end, he gets to incinerate that symbol of furusato and move his young people to the big, bright city with no regrets or guilt: there is no “home” to return to, thanks to the hand of the kami, whose grace granted them this yearned for metropolitan haven. Now, the new Tokyo-dwellers can experience mono no aware for the lost loveliness of this symbol of rural Japan. Japan is dead; long live Japan. This move to play on furusato and then explode the symbol can be seen as problematic when read in light of the 3.11 triple disaster. Mihic Tamaki argues that your name.’s success is part of the “Japan-praising boom” (Nihon raisan) that took place after 3.11, “in which the Japanese consumed products to regain confidence in their identity” (2). The 3.11 disaster took place in the rural, northern region of Tōhoku, considered by many to be rough, socio-economically disadvantaged, “backward,” and even a bit savage – a region associated with rugged fishermen and farmers, where the supernatural is embraced and there remains “a sisterhood of blind shamanesses,” who perform annual rituals on Mount Fear (Osorezan), a volcano believed to be “an entrance to the underworld” (Parry, Ghosts 53–54). The rustic locus of the disaster opened up much discussion in the country about the differences between rural and urban Japan and their denizens’ views of their respective “others.” Your name. takes up this dialectic by strongly emphasizing, or glamorizing, idealizations of the two “Japans” and juxtaposing them (Shinkai, your name. 179). The enhanced visibility of this divide led Tamaki to contend that 3.11 could be “a catalyst for destroying the myth of a homogenous Japan” and might open up new exploration of “the future of rural Japan” (10). Her insightful and negative assessment of your name. is based in her desire for a new, progressive mindset toward Japan’s rural places and people. She asserts, While presenting a strong message of hope for these two main characters in the film, Shinkai does not clearly show how this translates to hope in real-life,

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 127 post-disaster Japan. In particular, the bonds, or musubi, become much less important once the objective of the two characters has been achieved. In short, the ancient musubi traditions of the fictional town of Itomori, . . . function solely as a device for saving Mitsuha and thus lose much of their meaning once disaster has been averted by a successful evacuation of the town’s residents. (76) Tamaki believes Shinkai has instrumentalized furusato and its ancient Shinto accoutrements, using “an extremely exoticized portrayal” of traditional Japan as expedient means to achieve the uniting of the teen lovers and the salvation of five hundred rural dwellers. This is a fantastical, transcendent revision of the nearly twenty thousand lost in Tōhoku. In your name., “rural Japan” seems to be jettisoned after the soteriological goal is reached. However, as Robertson indicates, now that the symbol of furusato is distant (in space and time), seemingly inaccessible, and “disappeared,” it may be a more potent sentimental icon, an object of mono no aware. Nevertheless, rural Japan in the real world is very much alive and well, as Tamaki points out, and rendering it a bygone emblem of “old” Japan can be read as injuriously dismissive. Moreover, Tamaki concludes that your name. contributes to the “homogenous Japan” myth in that [the rural Other] is presented as an anomalous case that needs to be corrected by means of integration into mainstream Japanese culture. Shinkai ultimately presents a future Japan in which heterogeneity has been erased and happiness is found in the homogeneity of urbanised Japan. In Shinkai’s fictional universe, rural heterogeneity only remains as a source of nostalgia for “old Japan,” which is consumed for entertainment but is no longer part of contemporary Japanese identity. (77) While this certainly is one valid reading of your name., it is significant that Shinkai has claimed that “urban Japan” in the film is also idealized: “I’m not actually documenting the current Tokyo. The Tokyo you see in this movie is a stereotype, the image that Mitsuha dreams of and that I dreamt of when I was younger” (qtd. in Bradshaw 41). He goes on to say that he also strived to animate Tokyo “realistically,” depicting true locations, due to his sense of the city’s impermanence: “[W]e’ll never know how long Tokyo as we know it might last. And I think that’s something most of us Japanese people are aware of, because we’re really naturaldisaster prone, so it might just go. So yes, I actually wanted to record this Tokyo and honour its beauty” (qtd in Bradshaw 41). Both rural and urban Japan are heightened “dream-visions” in your name. because they are both ephemeral, and Shinkai’s words reveal his own mono no aware, his sense that the beauty of both Japans could be lost at any moment due to inevitable forces of nature. Directly following the meteor’s glorious destruction of Itomori, the film jumps forward eight years to 2021, and in one part of this Sehnsucht-saturated sequence, Taki

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interviews for an architecture job, telling his prospective employers that he wishes to “build [the] city’s landscape” because “even Tokyo . . . might vanish too one day.” Shinkai, like Taki, wants to build beloved landscapes because they may vanish one day; their evanescence makes the mountain towns and the gleaming cities even more magnificent and evokes a profound joy accompanied by aching love, in true mono no aware fashion. Although the apocalyptic has become synonymous with images of cataclysmic destruction, the Greek etymological roots of the word mean to uncover, disclose, or unveil (“Apocalypse”). Significantly, your name. is apocalyptic in both its focus on catastrophe and its plot structure, which carefully positions key revelations in the film in such a way as to maintain a sense of intrigue, suspense, and wonder in the audience. All of the cinematic techniques used to communicate the complex interweaving of time in this film, analyzed in the musubi section earlier, are tools to craft impactful disclosures at precisely the right moments. Thus, apocalypse is the guiding principle of your name.’s structure, and Shinkai orchestrates the ongoing revelations masterfully. In doing so, he helps the film’s viewers “feel at home with awe,” which is the goal of Shinto practice itself (Kasulis 167). However, Shinkai’s narrative also resurrects those killed in a divinely pre-destined natural event, providing an alternate history to the horrific loss of 3.11. In his work on Shinkai’s elegiac sci-fi film The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), Shaun Duke writes, To remember is to bring back a lost moment, to return to the moment of trauma to reconstruct it. Thus, the apocalyptic narrative in the anime tradition comes to concern itself both with the post-Bomb world—an age of permanent anticipation of nuclear catastrophe . . . —and with the nostalgic desire to understand, to conceptualise the wound and the suffering of the event. (392) In your name., Shinkai “re-members,” he re-assembles pieces of 3.11 and presents the awesome power of nature, the kami’s dominion, as beauty to be wondered at rather than threatening destruction to be feared. It is understandable that this could be offensive to the tens of thousands of Japanese people who lost loved ones in the 3.11 disaster. On the other hand, your name. provides an example of “struggling, magnificently” against overwhelming loss. In the final pages of the novel, representing the final moments of the film, Taki, who cannot remember what he is seeking, reflects on his incomprehensible, painful longing: “I’m fighting my way through. . . . I’m struggling against life. . . . To struggle. To live. To breathe and walk. To run. To eat. To bind, musubi. To live an ordinary life so I shed tears over the sights of a perfectly ordinary town” (170). Taki, like all the survivors in the story, is striving to heal, to find his way back to “ordinary life,” whether that be in Tokyo or a rural town like Itomori. In 2021, in sprawling Tokyo, Taki and Mitsuha cannot remember each other and have yet to encounter what or whom they are seeking, but both are fighting to live. There is more determined hope than resignation in their mono no aware. Their tearful reunion in the very last seconds of the film promises to

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 129 bring them happiness as they have at last found the one for whom they yearn. Of course, Shinkai wisely ends the film there, for romantic union, even with one’s kami-destined partner, cannot quell Sehnsucht or completely heal the trauma of losses experienced in the past or feared in the future. There is always inspiration for mono no aware. Present contentment or even joy does not put an end to longing for the past or striving toward what lies ahead. Shinkai’s message may be best expressed in Haruki Murakami’s 2011 speech about Japan in recovery: [W]e have overcome wave upon wave of natural disasters in Japan and we have come to accept them as “unavoidable things” (shigata ga nai mono). We have overcome those catastrophes as a group and it is clear we have carried on in our lives. Perhaps those experiences have influenced our aesthetic sensibility. . . . [W]e live in the fleeting and insubstantial world of mujō. This life into which we are born slips by, and soon, without exception, fades away. Faced with the overwhelming power of nature, humans are helpless. Awareness of the insubstantiality of experience is one of the core ideas of Japanese culture. But at the same time, we also have within all of us a positive mind, a respect for things that have passed away and a quiet determination to go on living with vigor in this fragile world filled with dangers. (2,7) In the wake of the unfathomable, traumatic losses of the 3.11 triple disaster in Tōhoku, the artists and authors of Japan, along with its people, have found myriad ways of coping, surviving, and healing. How does one transcend such devastation? One answer to this perennial question, or perhaps several, can be found in the beauty and wonder of Makoto Shinkai’s your name. and its cosmic skies.

Notes 1 In 2016, Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) held the record for the highest-grossing anime ever in Japan, but your name. broke that film’s global record. In 2020, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (dir. Sotozaki Haruo) broke Spirited Away’s Japanese box-office record, and, in 2021, when it was released worldwide, the film surpassed your name.’s global box-office record to become the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time. See note 1 in chapter 2. 2 See the introduction (Chapter 1) for descriptions of the different types and conceptions of ma in Japanese religion, arts, and culture. 3 In her article on your name. sites/sights in Tokyo on the website JapanTravel, Jianne Soriano includes a photo of the stairs and also a photo of a sign someone has posted on the side of a vending machine nearby, stating, “Welcome to the holy place of ‘Your Name.’!” in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. It is evident that these sites of pilgrimage (seichi junrei) are considered sacred on a global scale. In her directions to the Suga Shrine steps, Soriano explains, “[Y]ou’ll see a vending machine that welcomes you to the ‘Holy Land’ of Your Name. You know you’re near the sacred spot.” The vending machine becomes a messenger of the kami. 4 The proto-Romantic German Sturm und Drang movement in the latter half of the eighteenth century produced works in which extreme emotion was expressed, particularly in music and literature, such as Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows

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of Young Werther (1774), in which a passionate young man commits suicide because his love is unrequited. For a sophisticated analysis of the negotiation of Japanese sexual politics in Ranma ½, see Napier, Anime pp. 48–62. As the influence of this anime series is evident in the film, Napier’s analysis does shed light on your name. There is a Land of the Dead, Yomi, in Shinto lore, but this is a dark place where bodies go to rot (cf. the story of Izanagi and Izanami, summarized in note 9 below). The practice of committing suicide for the sake of Japan’s honor, as with kamikaze pilots in World War II, was sold to the Japanese by their government and military as a means by which to immediately become ancestral kami, worshipped by their living relatives for sacrificing their own lives for the glory of Japan. This was a part of the State Shinto movement cultivated to prop up the imperialist ultra-nationalism that reached its apex in the first half of the twentieth century. The musubi cords that appear throughout the film, including in this scene, also are connected to the East Asian folklore surrounding the unbreakable “red thread of fate,” sometimes referred to as the “string” or “cord” of fate. Originating in a Chinese legend, the idea is that “the gods tie an invisible red cord around the ankles of mortals, connecting those destined to meet one another or to help one another in the future” (Allvin 56). In Japan and Korea, the “red cord” is said to be tied around the pinky fingers of the two people who are destined to be lifelong romantic partners, in other words, soulmates (Ngo). Shinkai obviously had this in mind when developing the imagery of the sacred cord that Mitsuha weaves, uses as a hair tie, then gives to Taki, who then wears it as a bracelet. One could argue that the cord is the central symbol of the destined love between the protagonists and their shared purpose of preventing the death of Itomori’s citizens. The cord’s appearance in Taki’s cave vision is particularly consequential. Plus, of course, the cord is the primary symbol of the overarching concept of musubi. Regarding Japan’s seemingly preternatural, volcano-carved landscape, Jonathan Clements explains, “The map of Japan remains dotted with suspiciously round lakes and islands, or curved bays that indicate the forgotten edge of ancient craters” (22). This can be compared to the mythological story, as seen in the Kojiki and other texts, of the creator gods Izanagi and Izanami, in which Izanami dies after giving birth to the fire kami and descends into Yomi. When the grieving Izanagi travels to Yomi to attempt to retrieve his sister-wife from the land of the dead, he ultimately fails because, after being told not to look at her, he takes a torch and seeks her out, spying her maggot-ridden corpse. Whereas Izanagi meets defeat for disobeying the rules of the kami, Taki succeeds by seizing the opportunity the kami provide for him to rescue his love and five hundred Itomori residents after their deaths. This is in keeping with Shinkai’s salvific revision of the 3.11 disaster. A vivid conflation of nuclear and natural disaster is rendered hyperbolically in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), in the dream entitled “Mount Fuji in Red,” wherein six nuclear reactors explode directly behind Mt. Fuji. It appears that Mt. Fuji is erupting, but the situation is “much worse than that,” declares a mother carrying her children in the fleeing masses. Radiation is more deadly than the volcano kami Fuji-san. As discussed in the next chapter, Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) also provides visions of human devastation resulting from human rapacity and hubris. For an overview of this incident, see Parry’s article in The Guardian, “The school beneath the wave: the unimaginable tragedy of Japan’s tsunami.”

Works Cited Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Duke University Press, 2013. Allvin, Rhian Evans. “Making Connections: The Red String of Fate.” YC: Young Children, vol. 71, no. 5, 2016, pp. 53–56. www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/ycyoungchildren.71.5.53. Accessed 14 July 2021.

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 131 “Apocalypse.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1989. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Barefoot Gen. Directed by Mori Masaki, written by Keiji Nakazawa (manga and screenplay), Madhouse, 1983. Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Bradshaw, Nick. “Trading Places.” Sight and Sound, vol. 26, no. 12, 2016, pp. 40–41. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2017440089&site=edslive&scope=site. Accessed 10 January 2020. Broderick, Mick, ed. “Introduction.” Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Routledge, 2009 [1996], pp. 1–19. Buljan, Katharine, and Carole M. Cusack. Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan. Equinox Publishing, 2015. Carter, Robert E. “A Philosophic Grounding for Japanese Aesthetics.” New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, edited by Minh Nguyen, Lexington Books, 2018, pp. 3–15. Clements, Jonathan. A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shōgun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun. Tuttle Publishing, 2017. Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity. Crossroad, 1984. Croteau, Melissa. “Introduction: Beginning at the Ends.” Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations, edited by Melissa Croteau and Carolyn Jess-Cooke, McFarland and Company, 2009, pp. 1–27. Duke, Shaun. “The Multiplicities of Empire and the Libidinal Economy in Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days.” Science Fiction Film & Television, vol. 7, no. 3, 2014, pp. 387–407. doi:10.3828/sfftv.2014.22. Accessed 29 June 2020. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of Eternal Return, translated by Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 2005 [1954]. Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Kindle ed. Oxford University Press, 2016. Havens, Norman. “Shinto.” Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, edited by Paul L. Swanson and Clark Chilson, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006, pp. 14–37. IMDbPro. “your name.” https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt5311514/boxoffice. Accessed 29 July 2020. Interstellar. Dir. by Christopher Nolan, written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, Paramount Pictures, 2014. Isozaki, Arata. “Space-Time in Japan—MA.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 12–53. Kasulis, Thomas P. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Kenkō, Yoshida. Essays in Idleness. Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki, by Yoshida Kenkō and Kamo no Chōmei, translated, edited, and introduction by Meredith McKinney, Penguin Books, 2013, pp. 21–140. Kermode, Mark. “Your Name review—a beautiful out-of-body experience.” The Guardian, 20 November 2016. www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/20/your-name-reviewmakoto-shinkai. Accessed 29 June 2020. Kurosawa, Akira, dir. and writer. Dreams [Yume]. Criterion Collection, 2016 [1990]. Matsumoto, Shigeru. Motoori Norinaga, 1730–1801. Harvard University Press, 1970. Matsumura, Kazuo. “Ancient Japan and Religion.” Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, edited by Paul L. Swanson and Clark Chilson, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006, pp. 131–143. Matsuoka, Seigow. “Aspects of Kami.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 56–57.

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McKinney, Meredith, translated and introduction. Yoshida Kenkō and Kamo no Chōmei: Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki. Penguin Books, 2013. McLean, Thomas J. “Changing Climate for Japanese Animation.” Variety, 15 January 2020, pp. 133–134. Murakami, Haruki. “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer,” translated by Emanuel Pastreich. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 9, no. 29, 2011, pp. 1–8. https://apjjf. org/-Murakami-Haruki/3571/article.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2020. Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ngo, Hope. “The Truth About the Red String of Fate.” The List, 10 December 2019. www. thelist.com/178524/the-truth-about-the-red-string-of-fate/. Accessed 14 July 2021. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness, translated with an introduction by Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press, 1982. Noriega, Chon A. “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When Them! is U.S.” Hibakūsha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, Routledge, 2009 [1996], pp. 54–74. Norinaga, Motoori. “On Mono no Aware.” 1763. The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, pp. 172–194. Parry, Richard Lloyd. Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. Picador, 2017. Parry, Richard Lloyd. “The School Beneath the Wave: The Unimaginable Tragedy of Japan’s Tsunami.” The Guardian, 24 August 2017. www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ aug/24/the-school-beneath-the-wave-the-unimaginable-tragedy-of-japans-tsunami. Accessed 11 July 2020. Richie, Donald. A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Stone Bridge Press, 2007. Richie, Donald. “ ‘Mono no Aware’: Hiroshima in Film.” Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by Mick Broderick, Routledge, 2009 [1961], pp. 20–37. Robertson, Jennifer. “It Takes a Village: Internationalization and Nostalgia in Postwar Japan.” Mirrors of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 110–129. Scheibe, Susanne, Alexandra M. Freund, and Paul B. Bates. “Toward a Developmental Psychology of Sehnsucht (Life Longings): The Optimal (Utopian) Life.” Developmental Psychology, vol. 43, no. 3, 2007, pp. 778–795. DOI:10.1037/0012–1649.43.3.778. Accessed 10 July 2020. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Da Capo Press, 1988 [1972]. Shinkai, Makoto. A Sky Longing for Memories: The Art of Makoto Shinkai, translated by Maya Rosewood, Kodansha USA Publishing, 2015. Shinkai, Makoto. “Interview with Makoto Shinkai.” your name. Blu-ray disc. Dir. and written by Makoto Shinkai, Toho Co. and CoMix Wave Films, 2016. Shinkai, Makoto. your name, translated by Taylor Engel. Yen On, 2016. Soriano, Jianne. “Your Name: Real-Life Locations in Tokyo.” JapanTravel, 18 August 2020. https://en.japantravel.com/tokyo/your-name-real-life-locations/45058. Accessed 10 February 2021. Stone, Jon R. “A Fire in the Sky: ‘Apocalyptic’ Themes on the Silver Screen.” God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, edited by Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, Routledge, 2001, pp. 65–82.

Makoto Shinkai’s your name 133 Tamaki, Mihic. Re-Imagining Japan after Fukushima. Australian National University Press, 2020. Tan, Matthew John Paul. “Being Someplace Else: Theological Virtues in the Anime of Makoto Shinkai.” Religions, vol. 11, no. 109, 2020, pp. 1–8. doi:10.3390/rel11030109. Accessed 20 June 2020. Taylor-Foster, Kim. “ ‘Your Name’ Creator Is Approving Scripts for JJ Abrams Remake.” Fandom, 14 January 2020. www.fandom.com/articles/your-name-jj-abrams-remake. Accessed 7 June 2020. Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1991. Ueda, Makoto. “Mono no aware.” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Kodansha, 1983. Wolfe, Alan. “Suicide and the Japanese Postmodern: A Postnarrative Paradigm?” Postmodernism and Japan, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, Duke University Press, 1989, pp. 215–233. your name. Dir. and written by Makoto Shinkai, music by Radwimps, Toho Co. and CoMix Wave Films, 2016.

4

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran Downward Transcendence and Nō Boundaries in a Wicked World

This is the way of the world! Men live not for joy but for sorrow, not for peace but for suffering. —Tango in Ran (1985) In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. —Aldous Huxley, “Downward Transcendence” (24)

In September of 1923, shortly after the Great Kantō Earthquake, Heigo Kurosawa took his thirteen-year-old younger brother, Akira, to see the devastation around Tokyo. The powerful earthquake and consequent fires that ravaged Tokyo resulted in the deaths of over 150,000 people and displacement of over half the residents of Tokyo (Goto-Jones 76). On top of this, due to pervasive xenophobia, Koreans in Japan were blamed for the disaster, which resulted in 6,000 of them being rounded up and massacred in the days after one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history (Spitznas 12). In his autobiography, Akira Kurosawa remembers thinking, “This must be the end of the world” (50). He describes a nauseatingly red, “burned landscape . . . as far as the eye could see,” punctuated by “every kind of corpse imaginable,” from which “[n]o corner of the landscape was free”; grotesquely, “In some places the piles of corpses formed little mountains” (52–53). The young Kurosawa thought that “the lake of blood they say exists in Buddhist hell couldn’t possibly be as bad as this” (53). When he and his brother were the only living creatures to be seen in this annihilated nightmare-scape, Kurosawa felt infinitesimal “in all the vastness. Or else we too were dead and were standing at the gates of hell” (53). The young Akira slept soundly the night they returned from this “horrifying excursion,” which surprised him greatly, so he asked his older brother how this could be. Heigo explained, “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of” (54). Akira then understood: “It had been an expedition to conquer fear” (54). Renowned Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa spent fifty years, from 1943 to 1993, making films that attempt to look at life and its complexity “straight on,”

DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057-4

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and many of the thirty-one films he directed, edited, and co-wrote can be read as “expeditions to conquer fear.” However, none of his films forces us to stare into the potential for humans to create hell on earth quite as formidably as one of his final masterpieces, Ran (1985). Although Kurosawa may not fit into the most conservative definitions of an auteur due to the diversity of his work, as argued by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (53–68), even a cursory survey of Kurosawa’s oeuvre reveals his consistent didacticism. He witnessed the rise of militarism and ultranationalism in Japan and lived with their ruinous outcomes. Therefore, it is not surprising that Kurosawa uses violence in his films to emphasize that, despite the brutality in the world, humans, and perhaps nations, have the capacity to choose to take responsibility for the well-being of others rather than pursuing their own ambitions for power and wealth. Kurosawa’s work often has been praised for its humanism, its affirmation that the human will can make a positive difference in the world when individuals choose to serve others and take responsibility for a community. This can be seen clearly in films throughout his oeuvre, as evidenced by his very first film, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and his final one, Madadayo (1993), which both center on teachers inspiring students toward an enlightened understanding of existence. Interestingly, while Kurosawa often uses Buddhist and Shinto symbols and aesthetics to refer to or express this enlightenment—such as the lotus flower that evokes and symbolizes the young protagonist’s awakening in Sanshiro Sugata—it is a secular ethical message of selflessness and sacrifice Kurosawa communicates. The superb Ikiru (1952) and Red Beard (1965) portray two of the most nuanced and poignant humanistic narratives ever to be filmed. Conversely, one does not have to go deeply into his canon to discover the darkness and pessimism that pervade a number of Kurosawa’s works. These films portray an unrelentingly bleak world, allowing no hope for humankind. Indeed, the film that brought Japanese cinema to the world’s attention, Kurosawa’s Rashōmon (1950), is undeniably tragic, telling over and over the tale of a rape and murder, yet it ends with a humble man walking into the dawn with an orphaned infant in his arms.1 It is this combination of grim pessimism punctuated with glimmers of hope that has led scholars to surmise that Kurosawa possesses a “unique brand of skeptical humanism” (Shields 279). Indeed, the filmmaker might well be described as a posthumanist, one who “show[s] ‘care’ for the human, humanness, humanity but also embrace[s] the new plurality and the new questions that are put to humanism, anti-humanism, posthumanism, even transhumanism alike: questions of human survival in late modern, global, techno-scientific hypercapitalist societies” (Herbrechter 4–5). “Above all,” argues Stefan Herbrechter, posthumanism “wants to confront humanism with its ‘specters’—the inhuman, the superhuman, and the nonhuman in all its invented, constructed or actual forms” (5). This posthumanist perspective—which challenges ideals of ethical and existential humanism as well as religious ideologies—offers insight into Kurosawa’s films that seem to allow no light in at all. Two films, in particular, Throne of Blood (1958) and Ran (1985), employ spectral and sacred elements from Japanese Nō theater to interrogate

136 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran human nature and unveil its propensity for evil. In both the revelatory and cataclysmic senses, they are truly apocalyptic. Throne of Blood and Ran, made at opposite ends of his career, offer unblinking views of a world corrupted by human violence and greed, leaving no escape even for those who are unfailingly good, enlightened, and pure. The downward transcendence of bloodthirsty tyrants in Throne of Blood and Ran takes down everyone and everything around them in their descent into hell on earth.2 It is, of course, no accident that three of the darkest Kurosawa films are adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and Ran, which are adaptations of Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, respectively. Perhaps we can blame the Stygian nature of these powerful films on Shakespeare, but this does not explain the calamitous and despairing diegeses of some of his other films, such as Record of a Living Being (1955) or Kagemusha (1980). It is a commonplace in Kurosawa scholarship to claim that his later films are tenebrific and apocalyptic, that Kurosawa becomes darker as he grows older (cf. Geist). However, there are two points that contradict this assertion: first, he makes deeply pessimistic films starting in the 1950s, as previously noted, which is fairly early in his directorial career; second, his final two films, Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (1993), are optimistic texts dealing with forgiveness, contentment, and compassion. In addition to being spread throughout his career, Kurosawa’s darkest films fall into both of the film genres he produced, the gendai-geki—films set after the Meiji Restoration in 1868—and jidai-geki, or period films. These points notwithstanding, Kurosawa’s choice to adapt a widely recognized narrative of another, particularly a canonical Western author like Shakespeare, could offer the filmmaker and his audiences more distance from the diegetic horror. Kurosawa also achieves this effect by employing formal Japanese Nō theater elements in Throne of Blood and Ran. In addition to Shakespeare, Kurosawa was a great admirer of Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose work The Idiot he adapted in 1951. He praised the Russian luminary for being the author “who writes most honestly about human existence” (qtd. in Richie, Films 81). Kurosawa declared that Dostoevsky displays “the kind of gentleness that makes you want to avert your eyes when you see something really dreadful, really tragic. . . . And then he refuses to turn his eyes away; he, too, looks; he, too, suffers” (qtd. in Richie, Films 81). Once again, Kurosawa returns to this idea of not turning away from that which horrifies. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, Kurosawa did not find the gentleness of Dostoevsky, but he did find the powerful, unflinching gaze that refuses to look away, particularly in King Lear, which he “adored” because he believed it was Shakespeare’s most “cosmic” play (Tessier 20). Writing about King Lear, Andy Mousley avers that Shakespeare’s work evokes “a caring posthumanist scepticism, a scepticism which not only questions our investments in the human but also generates concern, to the point of angst, about the human condition” (108). The brutality and beauty of Ran majestically depict and evoke this trepidation about humanity and its (im)possible future. In Ran, as in Lear, there is no “ ‘humanist’ celebration” of personal “freedom” or “agency” in the absence of supernatural coherence or purpose (Mousley 108); there is only

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the revelation of man as a “poor, bare, forked animal” (Shakespeare, King Lear 3.4.107–08). It was Ran, his King Lear adaptation, that Kurosawa intended to be the crowning achievement of his career, the film he claimed to be his “best” work, and it was through Ran that he aimed to communicate his final statement about the cosmos (Richie, Films 214). In stark contrast to the postwar Throne of Blood, Ran was made at the height of Japan’s “Miracle Economy,” when the country was riding high as the second-strongest economy on the planet. Ran is a cautionary tale for a world in the midst of a perilous Cold War stretching over nearly four decades, but it is also a condemnation of the rapacious consumer culture of 1970s and 1980s Japan and a warning against growing exceptionalism and its enticement to change the Japanese Constitution such that Japan could once again be a global military power. Both of the films Kurosawa made in the 1980s, Kagemusha and Ran, depict theatrically heightened Sengoku jidai worlds, wherein bloody slaughter proclaims the steep price of extreme clannish, or nationalistic, devotion. Indeed, Kurosawa is a director who makes statements. His work is famously didactic, though he believed that the messages in his films are not “very obvious” (qtd. in Cardullo 57). However, even a random, limited sample of Kurosawa’s oeuvre would reveal that he carefully imbues his work with philosophical, one might say moral, lessons about the nature and responsibilities of humanity. S. A. Thornton, in her book The Japanese Period Film, actually calls Kurosawa “an old-style Confucian lecturer,” who promotes samurai ideals, although it is clear that he challenges those principles as well (124). Regarding his personal religious beliefs, if he had any, Kurosawa always kept silent, but he encouraged those who wanted to know more about him to seek him out in his films, insisting in his autobiography, “There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself” (189), and declaring, “My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something” (192). As an auteur who co-wrote and edited every film he made, as well as involving himself intimately with their production design and music, Kurosawa remarkably integrated all aspects of his productions such that every detail of his cinema serves to illustrate and illuminate the essence of Kurosawa’s worldview, which was richly complex and dynamic over the fifty years of his career. However, salient patterns can be traced, as James Mark Shields observes: “Taken as a whole, Kurosawa’s films display a deep and abiding humanism, yet one that refuses to get lost in lofty ideals or otherworldly realms. It is a humanism that pushes on in spite of the facts, including, most importantly, the blurred lines that exist between right and wrong, good and evil, friend and foe, heaven and hell” (283). Evident here is the posthumanist interrogation of more mainstream humanistic views, such as faith in human rationality or goodness. Asian film scholar Stephen Teo, like Shields, recognizes that Kurosawa’s moral messaging only “superficially conforms” to the expression of humanistic ideals, and Teo goes further to assert that there is an essential dialectic between didacticism and violence in Kurosawa’s work: it is clear that most of his films use violence (of various kinds) as a counterpoint to human compassion (17–20). This points to

138 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran the fact that, despite the blurring of distinctions between good and evil in Kurosawa’s work, there is no Buddhist denial of dualism, which posits that there are no essential differences. This doctrine pervades the medieval Japanese Nō drama the director so loved and whose aesthetics he emulated in The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945), Throne of Blood, Kagemusha, and Ran. Nō was the first type of dramatic theater in Japan, arising in the fourteenth century to become popular entertainment for the aristocratic and samurai classes. The history and traditions of Nō theater are connected closely to hierophany and sacred space. Preceding Nō, there were sarugaku, performances staged in front of temples on festival days (e.g., mime, acrobatics, songs), and dengaku, or Shinto “field performances,” for which “an area of field was roped off” as “sacred space,” called a himorogi, into which a “god was invited to descend . . . to bless the land in a fertility ritual that celebrates the relationship between humanity and the spirit world” (Collick 166). As elements of these ancient practices evolved into medieval Nō theater, its themes, structure, and style emerged from, and merged with, the prevailing syncretic Buddhist and Shinto traditions. Like Greek and English plays, Nō developed from a type of “miracle play”; in Japan, this meant the rituals of “worship of the Shinto deities and of Buddha,” and they were first enacted in temple gardens or on “dry riverbeds adjoining temples” (Pound and Fenollosa 60). By the fifteenth century, purpose-built theater spaces had been created for Nō performances, in which there was a square acting space, including areas for a chorus and instrumental musicians, as well as a bridge from it that led to a dressing room and also served as acting space. The Nō stage mirrors the space roped off for the earlier theophanic field rituals (himorogi or kekkai); it is sacred space representing a microcosm, or center, of the world (axis mundi), where the natural and supernatural meet. This structure can be seen graphically in the opening scenes of both Throne of Blood and Ran, but with a difference, as will be explored. The liminality of the Nō space also is underscored by the bridge to the dressing room, a transitional space, or threshold ma, marking the connection between the phenomenal and spiritual worlds and serving as a hashi between diegetic and nondiegetic space-time. With its roots in ancient ritual, it is not surprising that Nō theater is profoundly didactic: its characters and narratives embody ethical and doctrinal principles of the dominant syncretic Buddhist-Shinto belief system during its artistic apex in medieval Japan. Thus, Kurosawa’s use of Nō aesthetics came freighted with moral messaging, some of which the director purposely undermined. Kurosawa’s treatment of the doctrine of mujō is illustrative. Stephen Prince, in his monograph on Kurosawa, argues that “one of the dialectics informing Kurosawa’s works is a struggle between a belief in the materialist process—that human beings make their own world and can change it—and an emphasis on dissolution, decay, and impermanence as fundamental truths of human life” (Warrior’s 124). Of course, in Buddhist doctrine, impermanence (mujō) is simply the nature of all phenomena; it is neither good nor bad. Indeed, the acceptance of mujō is considered a step toward enlightenment and a source of peace and contentment, as conveyed by the concept of mono no aware, discussed throughout this book. In the context

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of Japanese cinema, Richie describes mono no aware as the “essence of Japanese tradition,” which encompasses “experiencing the basic nature of existence [mujō], savoring the comforts of being in harmony with the cycles of the universe, an acceptance of adversity, and an appreciation of the inevitable” (Richie, Hundred 63).3 Kurosawa elegantly portrays the beauty of this type of mono no aware in Ikiru (1952) and Madadayo (1993), both early and late in his career. Therefore, while Prince perceives the tension between faith in the human will to act compassionately in the world and the reality of human cruelty, suffering, and destruction, he fails to recognize that, for Kurosawa, belief in impermanence does not negate human agency. Humans should not be resigned to the merciless ways of the world; we can strive to do and be better. In Kurosawa’s films, dissolution and decay are the hellish result of humanity’s selfish drive to violently destroy others for their own gain, but this ruination is not necessarily inevitable. Though Kurosawa is not a Buddhist, his positive attitude toward mujō, embracing life’s ephemerality with sweet sadness and tranquil resignation, reflects one type of Japanese cultural response to monumental losses of war and natural disaster stretching back through the fourteenthcentury epic Tale of the Heike, dealing with the twelfth-century civil wars. This response to larger-scale trauma also can be seen on the microcosmic level in films like Ikiru. Who could forget Watanabe’s lovely death on a child’s swing in the park he built, his legacy of compassion? Watanabe’s realization of his personal impermanence, his incurable cancer, moves him to improve the lives of others. Conversely, the dark worlds we see in films like Throne of Blood and Ran are hopeless precisely because they are permanent; their “prescription” of violent cycles allows no potential for enlightenment. For Kurosawa, enlightenment means transcending the self, as in Buddhist and Shinto concepts of interconnectivity; for him, however, the crux of transcendence is to renounce self-centered desires, not in order to acquire an auspicious rebirth or become an ancestral kami but to serve others in this world, to take responsibility for another person or a community (though not always the expected group in Confucian terms, e.g., Red Beard). Despite the ambivalence and evanescence of life, he believes in a this-worldly enlightenment. Shields rightly contends, “One of the ironies of Kurosawan enlightenment is that it entails the knowledge that the lines between good and evil are blurred, and thus compassion—while still a virtue—may not lead to happiness, at least in any worldly sense” (283). In other words, acting compassionately toward others must be its own reward in a universe where the vicious often overcome the virtuous. This returns us to the concept of nondualism, as it is connected to mujō and expressed in the Mahāyāna Buddhist teaching on emptiness (Skt. sūnyata). Although much of Kurosawa’s work conveys that impermanence is a fact of life, it also is clear he believed there to be a difference between evil and virtue; in other words, he rejected radical nondualism. The material world may be processual and ephemeral, but what one chooses to do in this life matters here and now. This means that Kurosawa’s messaging also departs from Pure Land Buddhism’s belief in individual karma and the rewards of faithful ritual. In Ran, for example, Amida

140 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran (Amitabha), the Buddha of Infinite Light, is a prominent symbolic presence, but Kurosawa was not interested in notions of accruing positive karma to earn a salvific afterlife, such as the heavenly paradise sought by Pure Land Buddhists who worship Amida. Nor was he concerned with the doctrine of nondualism as emptiness, which could be realized through “sudden awakening [enlightenment],” particularly in Zen traditions. Both Pure Land and Zen Buddhist teachings are prevalent in Nō theater. Stephen Prince also reminds us that Kurosawa “both affirms and rejects the principles of Zen” (“Zen” 227): while Kurosawa shared the Buddhist view that existence in this world is defined by “universal suffering” in an “eternal cycle of pain” (see Buddha’s First Noble Truth), he did not believe the Buddhist idea that human will or desire is the cause of that suffering and, therefore, should be replaced by nonattachment (“Zen” 226; see Buddha’s Second and Third Noble Truths). Instead, Kurosawa’s work bespeaks the compelling need for individuals to transcend the unending cycles of violence that plague this world by taking an active role. The path to this sort of enlightenment always is depicted as fraught with thorny obstacles, beset by malignant forces both internal and external, and the rewards for virtue are often uncertain or, in his most pessimistic films, denied entirely. Kurosawa communicates positive versions of his message through narratives of compassionate engagement with individuals or communities, stories portraying hope, qualified and flawed as it may be. Nevertheless, in his darker films, he depicts terrible, hellish worlds where there is no escape from the horror of people’s unceasing violence against each other. Ran is the most harrowing of those films, and an examination of Throne of Blood, a film possessing many of the same themes and aesthetic inspirations but made nearly thirty years before, reveals that Kurosawa never abandoned these perspectives; rather, he distilled them into an epic imploring humanity to cease its cycles of violence. By offering cosmic perspectives on humanity’s ephemerality while depicting the dire ramifications of the evil that men do, Kurosawa abides in the Middle Path, using Buddhist and Shinto aesthetics and iconography as expedient means (upaya) to convey an urgent message. In Throne of Blood and Ran, Kurosawa gives us realism and spectrality, wild nature and man-made order, and frenetic movement and uncanny stillness, and he unites these dichotomous elements masterfully in these cinematic texts to demonstrate the consequences of human violence. Befitting this core theme, Kurosawa sets both Throne of Blood and Ran in sixteenth-century Japan, during the Age of the Civil Wars (Sengoku jidai) (Prince, Warrior’s 204). This was an era of battling warlords, internecine struggles, murder, and treachery. The lack of a central political government ruling the nation caused a descent into chaos. Kurosawa set four of his films during this period, clearly sensing a connection between his own historical moment and this century of upheaval.4 Kurosawa himself noted that most samurai films are set in the largely peaceful Tokugawa period (1603–1867), but he found the earlier, more turbulent transitional era more compelling (Prince, Warrior’s 204–05). Stephen Prince argues that, in his Sengoku jidai films, Kurosawa creates an era more bloody than medieval Japan, giving us “battles filtered through his perceptions as a twentieth-century artist well acquainted with the large-scale slaughters of his

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own time. The sense of apocalypse in the films is not of the sixteenth century but of now” (“Shakespeare” 2). Thus, Kurosawa uses the trappings of the Sengoku jidai and of Nō theater to distance viewers from the horrors of human violence in the twentieth century, but he also uses them to create disturbing spectacles that drive home the message that humans must resist wreaking destruction on others. These films are cautionary tales for a violent world. There are no examples of triumphant compassion in Throne of Blood or Ran. In the former, only Miki, the film’s analogue to Macbeth’s Banquo, displays virtue. Of course, when Miki puts faith in his old friend Washizu (the evil Macbeth figure), he is murdered by Washizu’s assassins. In both Throne of Blood and Ran, order is not established in the end. In Jan Kott’s words, “the world is not healed” (152). Rather, there is a promise of endless human destruction, repeating in samsaric cycles what always has been and ever shall be, as long as people seek their own personal gain at the expense of others. Kurosawa completely jettisons Shakespeare’s movement in Macbeth from divinely sanctioned monarch to unnatural, bloody usurper back to righteous ruler. Throne of Blood possesses a climate of perpetual cataclysm from which there is no hope of escape. However, Kurosawa’s overarching humanism and didacticism lead to the conclusion that this film functions as a cautionary tale: the infernal world of Throne of Blood may not be alterable, but it is used as a canvas or stage, allowing viewers to witness the rules of karma, according to Kurosawa, in order to inspire them to behave differently. In this way, the film reveals the director’s (skeptical) optimism that humans are capable of changing: the bleak destiny of humanity is only inevitable if evil, self-serving values persist unabated. When Donald Richie was on the set of Throne of Blood during its shooting, he asked Kurosawa what this film “would mean. He answered, ‘I keep saying the same thing over and over again. Why—I ask—is it that human beings cannot get along with each other, why can’t they live with each other with more good will?’ . . . Throne of Blood, he added, was to show several of the reasons” (Films 119). Richie insightfully discerns that one of these reasons is “that people . . . learn the rules of the world and then, unfortunately, believe them,” which “naturally precludes a belief in goodness” (Films 119). It takes great power of will and effort to unlearn these ruthless rules of success and survival and—to invoke what has become a Gandhian cliché—to be the change you want to see in the world, as the protagonist Watanabe does in Ikiru. However, Kurosawa’s choice to make Throne of Blood, Ran, and his other dark films illustrates his conviction that people have the potential to be moved to break the cycles of violence and destruction.

Labyrinths, Cosmic Trees, and Sacred Space: Hierophany in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) sets itself apart as consecrated space from its first moments: the film opens and closes with a chorus of male voices chanting about the violence and vanity of man, who is in this earthly world for but a moment yet arrogantly and bloodily pursues his own ambitions. Both scenes feature thick mists blanketing the ruins of a castle, a visual illustration of the

142 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran Buddhist doctrine being sung, underlining the circular, mandala-like structure of this film and echoing the many circular patterns depicted within it. The diegesis of the film guides us through this labyrinth of death, ending exactly where we began. After defeating the army of their Great Lord’s enemy, the warriors Washizu and Miki, Kurosawa’s Macbeth and Banquo figures, encounter a spirit in the forest who foretells that Washizu will ascend to be the Great Lord but Miki’s heirs will inherit the “throne.” Washizu, encouraged by his Machiavellian wife, Lady Asaji, kills the Great Lord while he is staying in Washizu’s fortress and blames the Lord’s guards. (It is an important point that the Great Lord whom Washizu murders also killed his Great Lord to attain his position.) Washizu then ascends to the role of Great Lord, and he and Asaji move into Spider’s Web Castle. After Asaji announces she is pregnant, Washizu hires murderers to kill Miki and his son, but the son survives. Washizu, still disturbed, seeks out a second encounter with the forest spirit in which he is told that he will remain undefeated until Spider’s Web Forest rises up against Spider’s Web Castle. Assuming this is impossible, Washizu is now confident and defiant against his ever-increasing number of opponents. His world spirals further into chaos when Lady Asaji miscarries their unborn child and shortly goes mad, trying to wash the invisible blood off her hands. Meanwhile, Miki’s son and enemies of the Great Lord amass an army to unseat Washizu. This army cuts large boughs from the trees of Spider’s Web Forest and advances on the castle, at which point Washizu’s own soldiers, having been told of the spirit’s prophecy, turn on him in an unforgettable finale that leaves him pierced dramatically by a fusillade of arrows.5 The film then ends as it began, with long shots of the misty landscape where Spider’s Web Castle once stood, accompanied by the chanting of Buddhist doctrine. Scholars generally agree that Throne of Blood depicts a “closed circle,” a world in which the warrior protagonist, Washizu (played by the inimitable Toshirō Mifune), is inevitably bound to his fate of vaulting ambition, ruthless violence, and ultimate destruction. The Japanese title of the film, Kumonosu-jō, literally translates to “Castle of the Spider’s Web,” expressing the theme of entrapment, being irretrievably caught in a web. Donald Richie avers that this is precisely why Kurosawa chose to use the distinct conventions of Japanese Nō theater in Throne of Blood, resulting in a formalist, self-reflexive cinematic style that communicates his themes through heightened symbolism (Films 119). This juxtaposes with the austere realism of Yasujirō Ozu’s post-World War II films, which, Paul Schrader argues, vividly evokes the sacred through “transcendental style” rather than religious content (17–55). However, Kurosawa’s direct depiction of Shinto and Buddhist signifiers, often in Nō contexts, along with his alternation between kinesis and stasis, marking moments of ma, elevate Kurosawa’s didactic message to the sacred realm in the film. Richie explains that “with the Nō, Kurosawa suggests that the rite, the ritual, man’s idea of the world, the rigid, the formal, the pattern of life endlessly the same—that this is the opposite of the free, the human” (Films 119). Richie’s assertion suggests that Kurosawa uses the rigid forms of Nō to embody humanity’s relentless pursuit of power, which leads them into an endless spiral of downward transcendence, a descent into spiritual and physical perdition.

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True human liberation would be to escape these cataclysmic patterns. At the same time, Kurosawa’s evocative use of syncretic religious imagery and principles in Throne of Blood—as seen vividly in its opening and closing and the haunting yamauba episodes—communicates that there is hope for the transcendence of violence, a rising above the hell of mutually assured destruction. Kurosawa communicates his message most powerfully through his vivid evocation of sacred space throughout Throne of Blood, which is accomplished mainly by integrating visual and aural elements of traditional Nō theater. Several scholars—notably Richie, Prince, and Keiko McDonald—have written about the ways in which Kurosawa used Nō theater in Throne of Blood and Ran, but this study also will examine how these ritualistic Nō techniques designate sacred spaces in which both upward and downward transcendence become possible for protagonists and viewers. Mircea Eliade maintains that hierophanies, or encounters with the spiritual, are extraordinarily diverse and constantly evolving but that each hierophany “expresses some modality of the sacred” (Patterns 10). Kurosawa uses various aspects of mise-en-scène, including his many emulations of Nō theater, to delineate sacred spaces throughout Throne of Blood, as well as designating the entire film as a sacred space, thereby effectively embedding these sacred spaces within each other, like the design of a Buddhist mandala. Regarding the significance of context, Eliade notes, “Every manifestation of the sacred takes place in some historical situation. Even the most personal and transcendent mystical experiences are affected by the age in which they occur” (Eliade, Patterns 2). Both the setting of Throne of Blood in the Sengoku jidai—as the civil wars were raging and traditional samurai culture was waning—and the traumatic post-World War II era, in which the film was made, deeply inform the hierophanies and sacred spaces we find in the film. As previously noted, Throne of Blood opens on a misty plain in the mountains. The mists represent the hazy “mists of time,” impermanence, and the Shinto notion of kami permeating a spiritually charged environment. Even before the first shot fades into view, we hear the high-pitched shriek of the Nō flute, the fue, and the distinctive Nō drumbeat. The first image, a long shot of the barren landscape with its dark volcanic soil, demonstrates the potency of filming these scenes at the top of Mount Fuji, Japan’s most sacred site, a location on which Kurosawa insisted. The mood of this mise-en-scène is reflected in the chorus of male voices chanting over these images: Look upon the ruins Of the castle of delusion Haunted only now By the spirits Of those who perished A scene of carnage Born of consuming desire Never changing Now and throughout eternity.

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Figure 4.1 The sacred space demarcated in the opening of Throne of Blood. Source: (Throne of Blood 1957).

During this chant, the camera pans over to reveal the graves of warriors, which now seem forgotten. Then, there is a cut to a distant long shot of a memorial pillar surrounded by a low, square fence, followed by an extreme close-up of the top of the post, battered and eroded with age, and a slow movement down that pillar revealing the words painted in black: “Here stood Spider’s Web Castle.” The Buddhist doctrine chanted is embodied by the mists blowing through the frame as well as the markers of sacred space: the mountain, the graves, and the fenced-in memorial column. The fenced space marks a himorogi, or kekkai in Buddhist terms, and the pillar serves as its yorishiro, with the camera tracing the movement of the kami descending into the framed space. Perhaps Kurosawa is the kami entering into the sacred space of the film frame, orchestrating our journey (michiyuki) through this world.6 The viewer is drawn into this consecrated space as the audience member of a Nō play is initiated into the five-play cycle, with a primary piece about a deity. However, Kurosawa treats this with irony, as Nō “god plays” invoke a deity to descend and bestow divine blessings of protection and provision, presenting a “world of innocence” (Ueda, Old Pine xviii), but this opening ushers us into a tale of downward transcendence, of a man who courts his own destruction by defying the well-known but little-heeded principles sung forth here. The final shot of this sequence returns to the first desolate landscape shot,

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echoing the circular shape of the film as whole, again, circles within circles. As a viscous mist blows through the frame, moving from left to right, loud wind can be heard, and we are being blown backward in time. When the mist clears, Spider’s Web Castle appears in the center, at the base of the surrounding hills, and we enter into the story of the high-ranking samurai Washizu, who is one of the spirits who haunts this bleak place as recompense for his “carnage” and “burning desire.” The memorial pillar marking the location of Spider’s Web Castle, and thus reminding us of the futility of human ambition and violence, is the most obvious marking of sacred space, and it encompasses the film. The pillar signifies “a break-through from plane to plane” in both time and space (ma): it is an axis mundi, “an opening . . . either upward (the divine world) or downward (the underworld, the world of the dead). The three cosmic levels have been put in communication” (Eliade, Sacred 36). There are multiple concepts of hell in Mahāyāna Buddhism, but the most common in Japan holds that there are 128 burning hells and eight cold hells, which are located on or beneath mountains, in landscapes that are spiritual and real, sometimes both simultaneously (Hirasawa 2–3). The column memorializing the Castle of the Spider’s Web, not surprisingly, marks a visual opening for the viewer into a hellscape of humanity’s making. Like the gory Buddhist hell scrolls from the Heian period forward, wherein the gruesome punishment fits the crime, Throne of Blood shows the lay people, the audience, what will happen to them if they, and the world, do not change their avaricious and cutthroat ways.7 Thus, this “opening” downward that is the film and takes place in the film is a hierophanic ma, a framed space (kekkai) in which to contemplate spiritual and physical disintegration through image and story. The column is a “cosmic pillar”—which also can be embodied by a tree, another crucial symbol in the film—representing “the very center of the universe,” a threshold of the material and spiritual worlds through which sacred, eternal wisdom might pass (Sacred 36–37). The film itself is this sort of threshold (hashi), and the column signifies our entrance into this space. The pillar’s appearance on Mt. Fuji is also crucial, marking it as one sacred space within another, once again mirroring the mandala-like structure of the film. The word mandala means circle, and a mandala is “a series of circles, which may or may not be concentric, inscribed in a square” (Eliade, Patterns 373). Eliade observes that in Buddhist practice, “the mandala is both an imago mundi and a symbolic pantheon,” and rites involving mandalas can be seen as “equivalent” to rituals of circumambulation and labyrinths (373). As with other hierophanic figures, mandalas symbolically represent “the whole universe,” including the heavenly and underworld realms. “In one sense, every one of them reproduces the cosmic mountain, [and] is, in other words, held to be built at the center of the world” (Eliade, Patterns 373). In Throne of Blood, the cosmic mountain of Mt. Fuji consecrates the entirety of the film as sacred space. Randall Nadeau notes, “Most religious traditions describe a sacred mountain, where the gods reveal reality to humanity. . . . Mt. Fuji is not only the principal symbol of [Japan], but also the most sacred,” in both Shinto and Buddhist worldviews (113). Nadeau also argues that the Japanese often create “concentric patterns of enclosure” when

146 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran designating sacred spaces (112). Kurosawa presents precisely these patterns in the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of Throne of Blood, and he, being the “god” of the film (his nickname is “the Emperor,” after all), reveals the reality of human destiny when lust for power runs rampant. In the misty, mystical opening sequence of Throne of Blood, the audience is taken across the Nō bridge and into the interior sacred space of the Washizu narrative. Though major studies of Kurosawa’s work often ignore the iconic mountain’s sacred significance, it is clear Kurosawa considered Mt. Fuji and its black volcanic soil integral to the spiritually heightened, Nō-infused mise-en-scène of the darkest jidai-geki films he made, Throne of Blood, Kagemusha, and Ran. In Kurosawa’s work, Mt. Fuji is a mythical, hierophanic space, from whose vertiginous slopes he imparts tales warning of karmic destiny that reaps dire results in this world and reverberates into humanity’s future. From the heights of Mt. Fuji, one might fall precipitously into the infamous hells at its base (Tyler 41). In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa set out to make a stylized film, eschewing the conventional cinematic realism prevalent in Japanese films of that era. As in the heavily didactic Nō drama, there is much that resembles the allegorical, medieval English morality play in this film. Donald Richie avers, “It is perhaps because he is here exclusively concerned with limitation, negation, death, that Kurosawa— for the first time—created a formal film. He himself called it an ‘experiment’” (Films 115). In this experiment, he attempted to make a film using brazenly non-realistic theatrical elements from Nō, such as having Asaji’s and sometimes Washizu’s face made up, or configured, to look like particular masks used in Nō, and confining Asaji’s movements to the slow, minimal gestures of many female Nō characters (Zambrano; Collick 166–81). Ana Laura Zambrano has argued that Kurosawa’s “unreal” aesthetic in Throne of Blood owes a great deal to the ghostly world of Nō. In fact, Nō drama can be classified “according to the level of reality presented in a given play” (36). There is genzai, in which “only the tangible, ‘real’ world is presented,” and “mugen, or phantasmal Nō,” in which “reality is more complex: it is a blend of natural and supernatural planes of experience. Kurosawa, of course, takes his cue from the latter in Throne of Blood. A meeting of the two ‘realities’ is a staple ingredient of the phantasmal Nō drama” (36). This is an excellent way to explain Kurosawa’s approach to the diegetic world of this film. To maintain realism, he insisted on constructing the massive set for Spider’s Web Castle “high up on Fuji” with appropriately aged wood, claiming, “the real life of any film lies just in its being as true as possible to appearances” (qtd. in Richie, Films 123). Kurosawa was famously perfectionistic about the authenticity of all elements of his mise-en-scène. This might seem contradictory in the ritualistic, Nō-inspired world of Throne of Blood, a film comprised of sacred space, but this uncanny combination of the real and the spectral, as Zambrano points out, is itself a Nō convention, and it is, perhaps, the reason this film is considered a cinematic masterpiece, as the realism heightens the haunting impact of the phantasmal. This combination of “realities” can be seen most strikingly in the orchestration of the scene early in the film, in which the battle-worn Washizu and Miki ride vigorously through the Spider’s Web Forest searching for a way out of the

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tangled, confounding natural labyrinth of trees. They are on their way to meet the Great Lord at Spider’s Web Castle, but they instead encounter a forest spirit. The sequence begins with the two warriors, wearing full battle armor, riding their horses through a landscape that is both natural, a dense forest, and supernatural: it is a haven for ghosts and evil spirits that traps soldiers in its sylvan clutches by presenting an unnavigable maze of shadowy, skeletal trunks and branches. The labyrinth of the Spider’s Web Forest is another key metaphor in the film. The mystifying forest, with its massive old-growth pines, shot in a forest on Mt. Fuji, connects us once again to the idea of the cosmic tree, or kami tree, symbolizing a central point in the universe that serves as a threshold for the powers of heaven and hell. It seems inevitable that Washizu and Miki will encounter a transcendent being in this hierophanic space. Eliade reminds us that one of the functions of labyrinths is to defend a “center,” some “magico-religious space,” and that labyrinths have served a similar military function, to defend against “ ‘evil’, hostile spirits [powers] and death” (Patterns 381).8 Indeed, when Washizu and Miki stop their horses and realize they have been riding in circles, Miki declares, “The infamous Spider’s Web Forest. Stretching out like a spider’s web, protecting Spider’s Web Castle against all foes.” Washizu proclaims that this is “ridiculous” because “surely we know this forest well,” but the two clearly are caught in its net. Labyrinths also serve as trials, and to reach the center or goal of such a labyrinth is “equivalent to an initiation, a ‘heroic’ or ‘mystical’ conquest of immortality” (Eliade, Patterns 381). In Throne of Blood, Washizu and Miki’s first scene in Spider’s Web Forest is presented as an ironic “heroic conquest” from the start. The two valiant warriors are returning from a victorious battle, yet they are lost in a forest they presume to know well, which protects Spider’s Web Castle and their Great Lord, who occupies it. (This foreshadows Washizu’s treasonous murder of the Great Lord, who, it turns out, does need to be protected from Washizu.) When the two men reach the sacred center of the forest/labyrinth, they discover the mountain spirit, Yamauba, who presents them with Buddhist dogma echoing the chant that opens and closes the film, as well as prophecies of their future, as do the witches of Macbeth. Although Yamauba is the metaphorical “monster” guarding the “center,” she cannot be defeated by these mortals. Rather, she gives them the treasure she is guarding—transcendent wisdom—but this is a gift Washizu will not, or cannot, apprehend rightly, and it contains a fundamental truth that, like the spirit, he cannot destroy. Washizu fails this initiation rite. He does not learn “how to enter the domains of death without getting lost” (Eliade, Patterns 381). Instead, by choosing to ignore her wisdom and repeat the cycles of violence, Washizu guarantees himself a type of damned immortality, both in the men who come after and relive his bloody trajectory and by returning as a ghost, as is so common in Nō plays, every time this film is seen. A closer look at this pivotal forest scene reveals that it strategically uncovers the core of the film’s message while revealing the foremost hierophanic space, the spiritually charged center, of the concentric sacred spaces in the film. As in Nō warrior plays, the second in the five-play cycle, this scene opens with ghosts of warriors past: Washizu and Miki in the misty distance, charging toward the

148 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran camera through the forest as rain pours down upon them and thunderclaps punctuate the scene. A Nō fue and drum remind us that we are entering a phantasmal space. The two men stop in a full shot revealing the consternation on their faces. Washizu looks up, and we are given a point-of-view shot of the dark trees hovering above him with sunlight streaming through the branches while rain falls relentlessly. Kurosawa thus visually communicates Macbeth’s proclamation, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen,” directly before Washizu declares that he has never seen such bizarre weather (Shakespeare, Macbeth 1.3.38). The chiaroscuro play of light and shadow is eloquent. The men immediately resume their frantic journey, and Kurosawa gives us an Eisensteinian collage of quick shots following the men in various ways, though always from a distance and behind the web of trees, which serve as a “screen” between viewers and the subjects of the shot (cf. Donaldson 74–76). In some shots, the camera pans from a fixed spot, following the horses’ forward movement; in others, the camera tracks more closely beside the swiftly moving men, the trees in the foreground of the shot whirring by in a blur. The shots occur from diverse angles from shot to shot as well. One aspect of this frenzied montage that previously has not been discussed is Kurosawa’s use of jump cuts to compress time and capture the crazed rush. Jump cuts serve as a michiyuki form of ma—an elision of time that sutures together two separate temporal “edges” (hashi)—highlighting the director’s orchestration of the characters’ and viewers’ journey through the film. This “avant-garde” editing is smoothed over (or sewn together) by the sound of the horses’ hooves pounding the earth, which continues without temporal breakage throughout this montage. The disjunction between visual and aural tracks creates dissonance and anxiousness in the viewer; we, too, are lost in this labyrinth. When Washizu and Miki stop and realize they have been traveling in circles, they hear an eerie cackle that seems to be mocking them. The two men know they have heard an “evil spirit” and declare that they will “conquer it,” racing off with weapons drawn, emitting a battle cry. When they locate a strangely illuminated hut, we see a long shot from behind and above the warriors, displaying a large tree standing before the hut in the center of the frame, blocking our view. This tree is an analogue of the holy “Manifestation Pine” painted in the center of the back wall of every Nō stage, and this yorishiro reminds us that we are entering the core of sacred space, where the kami dwells, as we begin to hear soft chanting. Finally, the whole of the fragile reed hut is revealed, a reminder of the kekkai framing the film, and the warriors find a ghostly old woman with white hair, in a humble white gown, squatting on the ground and spinning thread from a smaller spool to a larger one as she chants orthodox Buddhist doctrine. Her stark white hair and gown, brightly illuminated in this dark forest, express both Buddhism’s association of white with death and the spectral and Shinto’s use of white to represent spiritual purity. She is a multivalent figure, transcending dualistic divisions of vice and virtue. All is suddenly still and quiet as she sings: Men’s lives are as meaningless As the lives of insects The terrible folly

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Of such suffering A man lives but As briefly as a flower Destined all too soon To decay into the stink of flesh Humanity strives [they step closer to spirit] All its days To sear its own flesh [cut to spirit] In the flames of base desire. As Jack Jorgens notes, there is a sharp juxtaposition between the warriors, armed to the teeth, and the female spirit, who seems “tantalizingly defenseless” in her “soft robe . . . [sitting] alone in a flimsy stick hut seemingly held together by spider’s webs, armed only with words, laughter and unshakeable self-possession” (169). She does not need to look up at the two men as she chants this ancient wisdom because “there is nothing there she has not seen before. The human condition never changes. Man never learns” (Jorgens 169). Keiko I. McDonald connects this forest spirit scene, featuring the telltale thatched hut and spinning wheel, to a specific Nō play, written by the master of Nō, Zeami (1363–1443), entitled Black Mound (in Japanese, both Kurozuka and Adachigahara

Figure 4.2 In Throne of Blood, Samurai Washizu (Toshirō Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki) face the Yamauba (Chieko Naniwa) in her spindly hut in Spider’s Web Forest.

150 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran are used) (129). Kurosawa, who had seen the play, clearly emulates it in the two scenes with the forest spirit, Yamauba, whose name in Japanese literally means “old woman of the mountains.” Yamauba, like many Shinto spirits, is a product of Buddhist-Shinto syncretism (honji-suijaku), which is a prevailing characteristic of Nō plays. Royall Tyler explains, “The Buddhism of Noh is a Buddhism which admits stones, plants, trees, humans, spirits, gods, and Buddhas into an open brotherhood of the numinous” (39). Yamauba is just such a spirit. She is neither good nor evil; she is an element of nature. As examined earlier in this book in regard to Yubaba and Zeniba in Spirited Away (dir. Hayao Miyazaki 2001), a yamauba is a form of the ubiquitous crone figure. In Japanese folklore, yamauba can be seen as demonic or beneficent, and, in Black Mound, she is shown to be both; whereas in the Nō play bearing her name, Yamamba (an alternate spelling), she is presented as a melancholy old spirit ceaselessly making her rounds in the mountains to maintain the cycle of the seasons, the patterns of the phenomenal world (the world of becoming). From a Shinto perspective, she is the ancient mother of the utsuroi form of ma, the markers of the changing seasons—cherry blossoms, the cry of cicadas, copper-colored leaves, snow—reminding all that we exist in a ceaseless, processual world (cf. Isozaki 14–15). This is why, from a Buddhist standpoint, she is considered the embodiment of “ignorant attachment”; as the perpetuator of earthly cycles, yamauba represents the perseverance of harmful desire that chains one to endless reincarnation (samsara) into this illusory existence. In this sense, she is the perfect creature to confront Washizu with his own ambition and karma-bound destiny. The various translations of her name, ranging from “Mountain Witch” to “Granny Mountains,” express the ambivalence of yamauba as a figure, and Kurosawa plays on this, having her “preach” Buddhist precepts, as she does in both Black Mound and Yamamba, while presenting Washizu, who considers her an evil spirit, with the tempting prophecy of his rise to ultimate earthly power. Significantly, Kurosawa gave his main actors in the film Nō masks to emulate in their performances, and he had his Yamauba in this first spirit scene made up to resemble the yaseonna (old lady) mask, which is used in the first act of Black Mound, wherein wandering monks encounter the ghostly, humble woman and entreat her to put them up in her hut for the night. Her face is wizened and hollow, but she is an innocuous figure. However, in the second act of Black Mound, typical of the “supernatural Nō,” the fifth type of play in the cycle, the spiritual being is revealed: the yamauba now wears the demonic, horned hannya mask, betraying her penchant for consuming human flesh. In Throne of Blood, during Washizu’s second interaction with Yamauba—when he seeks her out in the forest much later to ask for guidance in facing his enemies—she is made up to look like the yamauba mask, which is used only in her eponymous play; this mask expresses a positive, though formidable, transcendent quality. In other words, Kurosawa chooses to present his Yamauba not as an evil spirit but as a powerful, emblematic natural force, representing, as she does in her two supernatural Nō plays, “the accumulated dust of worldly attachment, obsessions, feelings, karma-bound destiny,” and all that binds man to the illusion that anything substantial can be gained through cruelty and violence (Shimazaki and Comee 30). Though she symbolizes the presence of these destructive drives, she specifically warns Washizu against pursuing his ruthless ambition.

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Yamauba is a rich symbolic figure in syncretic Buddhist-Shinto mythology, and Kurosawa uses her in a sophisticated way to make a point that contrasts strikingly with traditional Buddhist doctrine: the director illustrates a terrestrial principle, that violence in this world begets more bloody brutality, on and on in a never-ending pattern that plagues not the single soul with repeated cycles of existence but all of humankind with ongoing destruction and desolation in the world we all share. The allure of power and wealth always has and always will entangle humankind in its strong web of illusion. There is no escape except choosing to abjure its temptations, at least to some degree. The circular paths on which Washizu and Miki ride so frantically before encountering Yamauba and the subsequent continuation of their hapless search for an exit from the tangled web turn out to be a type of perverse, neurotic reiteration of the meditative Buddhist rituals of circumambulation and the repetition of the nembutsu, the constant chanting of the name of Amida Buddha, who grants access to the Pure Land after death. However, these warriors are trapped in the cycle of samsara because they survive by their destruction of others. Their perpetual captivity in the spider’s web is not an object lesson concerning the achievement of individual enlightenment but a warning of the wages of humanity’s sins against each other. The hierophany of Yamauba, in her insubstantial hut, represents the most sacred of centers in this film; she is the crux of the revelation in Throne of Blood. The import of her calm wisdom is underscored by the lengthening of the shots in this scene, particularly the shots of her, which stretch from eight to nearly thirty-five seconds in length, quite a shift from the frenetic shots and jump cuts depicting the warriors’ deranged journey through the forest. The men strive toward their goals via violence and vigorous pursuit, but the tranquil forest spirit represents the knowledge that these strivings get humans nowhere but strapped to the ineluctable spinning wheel of death and the rebirth of further misery. This is vividly depicted by the piles of skeletal remains of slaughtered warriors discovered by Washizu and Miki behind Yamauba’s vanished hut (another allusion to Black Mound, the title indicating the heaps of corpses eaten by the spirit). In this film, Yamauba is the axis mundi, the deity who descends into the kekkai, the sacred space connecting the human with the celestial and the infernal, with the potential for upward and downward transcendence. Washizu chooses to descend into hellish butchery. The second Yamauba scene in Spider’s Web Forest, Washizu’s interactions with his Nō-inspired Lady Asaji, the phantasmal banquet scene, and, finally, the sequence depicting the cosmic forest streaming toward Spider’s Web Castle in the denouement, all of these can be explored meaningfully through the lens of sacred space and hierophany. However, as Throne of Blood’s highly structured use of Nō elements to portray Buddhist and Shinto imagery and ideas has been established, we will move on to the hellish apex of Ran, made in the time period with which this book is most concerned. Throne of Blood depicts a circular, closed system in which karmic rules apply and are expressed through Japanese aesthetics, avantgarde filmic elements, and the symbology of Nō theater. Kurosawa uses these components again in Ran, but, nearly thirty years later, the karmic boundaries have been obliterated. Kurosawa’s ideology as it manifests in particular elements of Throne of Blood demonstrates that this dark, formal film is not a hopeless treatise on the irredeemable nature of humanity; rather, as we have observed, this film

152 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran asks why people struggle to treat each other with compassion and empathy and offers some answers to that perennial query. Considered in the context of Kurosawa’s prodigious oeuvre, Throne of Blood can be seen as a call to more humane action. The auteur himself contended that “the essential evil in human nature” needs to be “exorcised” (qtd. in Hirano 57). Throne of Blood, in its consecrated, spectral space, attempts to do just this by depicting the human causes of suffering and destruction in our world.

Wicked Humans and Weeping Buddhas: (Post)Humanism and Hell in Kurosawa’s Ran This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (201)

Ran (1985) was a passion project for Kurosawa. He worked on the script for nearly a decade before he could gather the funding for this epic undertaking, which ultimately came from a French financer.9 The Japanese title Ran can be translated several ways, but here it refers to chaos, confusion, rebellion, disintegration, and desolation, both macrocosmic—in the body politic and the “great globe itself”— and microcosmic—in the family and the human soul. These themes, of course, are found in the tragedy of King Lear, the narrative of which can be traced in Ran,10 but Kurosawa was first inspired by an episode in medieval Japanese history, the “legend of Motonari Mōri [1497–1571], whose three sons are admired in Japan as the ideal of family loyalty” (Goodwin 196). Kurosawa took directly from this story, as James Goodwin notes, the episode in the first scene of the film in which the Great Lord Hidetora tries to teach his three sons an object lesson about strength in unity by giving each one an arrow and telling him to break it, which each does easily (196). Then, Hidetora hands each a bundle of three arrows and asks them to break the three together, which cannot be done in the legend, nor can it be done by Hidetora’s two eldest sons. Nonetheless, the youngest, Saburo, splits them apart with his knee. This demonstrates the irony of Motonari Mōri’s well-known “political maxim that a leader should not trust anyone, particularly not family members,” despite his own family being a model of fidelity (Goodwin 196). Kurosawa embraces the seeming contradictions in this history. Goodwin rightly notes that “[t]hough plot elements, important incidents, and central metaphors are drawn from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the textual treatment of adapted material is governed by Kurosawa’s original conception of an inversion to Japanese ideals of family and political loyalty” (197). Ran is a majestic pageant, replete with symbols and abstractions ironically designating unity, balance, and Buddhist nonattachment in a world collapsing under the weight of human ambition. Here, icons have lost their power to cohere and now serve only to deconstruct or mock the ideals they represent. In Ran, Kurosawa illustrates that the inverted history is the most honest about human existence; it is the truth that must be faced.

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As previously discussed, Kurosawa aptly sets Ran’s narrative in sixteenthcentury Japan, during the Sengoku jidai, when bloody civil wars plunged the nation into chaos. Kurosawa clearly sensed a resonance between the Japan of the first half of the twentieth century and this volatile, vicious century of upheaval. In keeping with this era’s culture and with his Motonari Mōri source, Kurosawa transforms Lear’s three daughters into sons. Ran opens with a poetically filmed scene of a boar hunt in the grassy mountains surrounding Mt. Fuji. After the brutal Great Lord of the region, Hidetora Ichimonji, has felled an old boar, a metaphor for himself, he proceeds to gather his sons and two local warlords, Fujimaki and Ayabe, and announces that he is handing over his power to his oldest son, Taro. He instructs his younger sons, Jiro and Saburo, to support their brother’s rule and thereby defend the honor and dominance of the Ichimonji family. When the youngest son voices his disapproval of his father’s decision, Saburo is banished, along with Tango, a loyal lord who defends Saburo. As in Shakespeare’s play, when Hidetora goes to live with his eldest son in the First Castle, his son and daughter-in-law—the wicked, vengeful Lady Kaede—show him and his entourage profound disrespect, so he moves on to Jiro’s Second Castle, where his devoutly Buddhist daughterin-law Sué receives him with honor, but his son’s contempt leads him to depart in anger. After some frustrating meandering, realizing his desperate straits, he decides to stay in the Third Castle, which is empty due to Saburo’s banishment. Taro’s and Jiro’s soldiers surround his retinue there and wage a bloody battle against Hidetora, slaughtering everyone with him, warriors and concubines alike, in a gory, infernal spectacle. In the midst of this, Jiro’s advisor murders Taro so that Jiro can take the role of Great Lord. Remarkably, Hidetora survives this savagery, his attempts at seppuku having failed, but it pushes him into madness, emerging from the conflagration of the Third Castle to wander like a ghost on the stormy volcanic plains.

Figure 4.3 In Ran (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1985), the great warrior Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) survives the battle and conflagration at Third Castle and departs in madness.

154 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran His fool, Kyoami, and Tango find him there, and they retreat from the storm into a small, poor hut, which they discover is inhabited by Lady Sué’s brother, Tsurumaru. Many years before, Hidetora had killed Tsurumaru’s parents and gouged out his eyes in exchange for allowing Tsurumaru to live. When Hidetora discovers the identity of their humble host, he flees in terror, thinking his sins are haunting him. Wandering again in the open, Hidetora’s madness increases as Kyoami tries to care for him while they take shelter in the ruins of Azusa Castle, the seat of Sué and Tsurumaru’s family, which Hidetora had destroyed many years before. The wreckage he created now engulfs him, representing the ruination of his life: following the principle of karmic retribution, the perpetrator has become the victim. Meanwhile, the widowed Lady Kaede, whose family also was annihilated by Hidetora, seduces her brother-in-law Jiro and manipulates him in her quest to exterminate the entire Ichimonji clan. Saburo, who has taken refuge with Fujimaki, hears of his father’s fate and madness, returns, and tries to save Hidetora, inadvertently sparking a battle between Fujimaki’s and Jiro’s troops, which allows Ayabe to launch a surprise attack on the First Castle. The implacable violence is spiraling into utter chaos. When Saburo finally finds Hidetora on the dark plains, they enjoy a poignant reunion, very like that between Lear and Cordelia, in which Hidetora’s wits are restored. However, their happiness is short-lived, as Saburo is shot when he and Hidetora are riding away from the destruction of the Ichimonjiowned region. Hidetora dies of heartbreak, hunched woefully over Saburo’s body. Lady Sué is assassinated by Jiro’s henchmen, sent by Lady Kaede. In the final images of the film, we see the small, solitary figure of blind Tsurumaru on the ruined ramparts of Azusa Castle, inching toward a precipice, a symbol of doomed humanity.

Figure 4.4 Hidetora grieves over his dead son Saburo (Daisuke Ryū) on the volcanic plain, with the fool Kyoami (Peter) and loyal samurai Tango (Masayuki Yui) looking on in horror in Ran.

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Figure 4.5 The blind Tsurumaru (Takeshi Nomura) stumbling on the edge of doom at the end of Ran.

This monumental three-hour epic is told visually and aurally through symbol and metaphor, or “sign” and “essence” in the words of Jan Kott (147), much like the Nō theater that inspired it, and, as in Nō, Kurosawa purposely departs from realism in order to confront viewers with a truth about humanity. The director stated that he allowed this film to “ripen” in his mind for years, until it became “simpler” and “clearer” (qtd. in Watanabe 14), distilled into a “morality play” in which a distantiated audience is “looking down upon the folly of men” as it views human events from the position of impotent heavenly deities (Richie, Films 219). Befitting Kurosawa’s inversion of the Motonari Mōri legend and his transformation of Lear into a bloody tyrant, the director takes the ritualistic, extremely formal Nō theater—created to entertain, comfort, and indoctrinate the samurai class— and subverts it by breaking apart its structures on several levels. In this way, he undermines Nō’s feudalistic and religious worldview, revealing the calamitous consequences of its philosophies. Ran graphically demonstrates that violence wrought by feudal warriors leads only to disintegration, suffering, and annihilation in a world where no hope can be placed in a posthumous paradise or karmic reincarnation. Writing of his absorption in Nō theater and theory during World War II, Kurosawa affirms he is proud that Japan has “a very special esthetic world of its own,” explaining that it “led him to a better understanding” of himself, but he also acknowledges the connection between Nō and Japanese ultra-nationalism: “In the midst of the war it was the encouragement of the militaristic national policies that led us to a fuller appreciation of traditions and arts, but this political sponsorship is not necessary” (148). In other words, Kurosawa recognized that traditional Japanese aesthetics, as epitomized in Nō, had been used to create a

156 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran sense of nihonjinron, essential Japaneseness, which was instrumentalized to promote extreme nationalism and imperialism, leading up to and persisting through nearly fifteen years of Japan waging war on other nations (1931–1945). However, he contends that using the forms and concepts of traditional Japanese aesthetics need not promote bellicose exceptionalism, which he demonstrates vividly in Ran. In his monograph Picturing Japaneseness, Darrell William Davis analyzes the “monumental style” in Japanese films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, positing that this cinematic style used classic Japanese aesthetics to galvanize a sacrificial devotion to the nation during the war: “These films enact a canonization of history, an emphasis on indigenous art forms and design, and a corresponding technical repertoire of long takes and long shots, very slow camera movements, and a highly ceremonial manner of blocking, acting, and set design” (6). This style attempted to “transform Japanese tradition from a cultural legacy into a sacrament,” with its “uncompromising rigor and severe moral geometry” (Davis 6). It is clear that the values of Nō aesthetics were emulated in monumental films. Davis argues that Kurosawa challenges the propagandistic message of these films by using this style ironically in his last two jidai-geki epics, Kagemusha and Ran. However, while “Kagemusha exposes the spuriousness of monumental evocations of history. . . . Ran deforms [monumental style], attenuating and inflating it into a carnivalesque ritual unmoored from its sacramental provenance” (237). The exposure of ultra-nationalistic ideals through ironizing the monumental style in Kagemusha carries on in Ran, but it is augmented by Kurosawa’s breaking open and destabilization of Nō conventions, which denude Nō’s sacredness by emptying its powerful symbols of religious and nationalistic significance. Ran’s ironizing of Nō symbols and forms critiques the cycles of human destruction that dominated Japanese history, and indeed world history, in the first half of the twentieth century. Eric Dodson-Robinson astutely argues that the film depicts history itself as karmic: The characterization of Hidetora . . . as victim-agent on Ran’s karmic wheel . . . [implies] a simple but powerful message about the violent construction of national identity, with universal significance but clear specific implications for postwar Japan: that in the karmic cycle of history, violence against the other is violence that fragments self and nation. (250) While Nō plays preach individual karma and tell tales of warriors and others redeemed from ghastly torment, Kurosawa’s Ran shows that even the innocent, such as Saburo and Sué, suffer for the nation’s irrepressible warmongering. The karmic cause-and-effect logic does not work for these characters in a world of uncontained chaos. Indeed, Ran does not present us with the closed, mandalashaped structure of Throne of Blood, which frames its hellish action with a Buddhist chorus that chants the film’s moral message. Kurosawa carefully contains the diabolical, “bloody deeds” of Throne’s characters in concentric layers of sacred space. In Ran, however, as Stephen Prince asserts, “the frame is burst. Hell

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is everywhere” (Warrior’s 289). Donald Richie notes the prevalence of circular or spiral forms in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, both in the overall structure of his filmic narratives and within his mises-en-scène, and he notes that Ran deviates from this pattern: its “compositions . . . consist largely of broken circles and unstable triangles” (232). The formal structures of Nō are broken apart. In Ran, Kurosawa shows us that the center no longer holds; all is chaos. Several scholars have written about the ways in which Kurosawa implemented elements of Nō theater,11 but what is of most interest here is Kurosawa’s explosion of Nō’s formal boundaries, which begins in Ran’s opening scene. Having completed the hunt, Hidetora and his party share a feast while sitting formally, each according to his rank, inside a rectangular enclosure on top of an open hill, where Hidetora plans to stage his abdication, an act of solemnity. This enclosure is formed by walls of tall bunting prominently featuring the Ichimonji family crest, a golden insignia of a full sun above a crescent moon, a common Buddhist symbol of unity (clearly used ironically throughout the film). The sun also represents Japan itself, the land of the rising sun, wherein the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu is fabled to be the progenitor of the Emperor’s ancestral line. This bounded space emulates the himorogi of ancient Shinto ritual, delimiting a ma in space-time into which the kami descends. The enclosure also reflects what this sacred space evolved into: the symbolic hierophanic area of the Nō central stage. Of course, the framed space also reminds viewers of the constructed ma in space-time that is Ran itself, with Kurosawa, once again, being the invisible kami empowering the ephemeral phenomena passing through the frame. In Hidetora’s enclosure, instead of proceeding with the ceremony, the old warrior invites his fool, Kyoami, to sing a song from kyōgen, the comical interludes performed between Nō dramas, after which Hidetora falls asleep. (It is significant that Kyoami is played by Peter, a cross-dressing personality in Japan, so the character expresses a transcendence of gender boundaries.) During the performance, Kyoami is prevented from completing the humorous song and dance number by an offended Saburo, who sees the song as a crude allegory of Hidetora’s predatory nature. The kyōgen is out of place here, as it disrupts the ritual flow and tone of the Nō dramatic line and potentially erodes the puissant, dignified façade of the warrior at the center of this story, Hidetora. This deviant insertion of kyōgen elements in this epic tragedy via Kyoami persists through the rest of the film, reminding us of the absurdity of the violent samurai code and its devastating effects. After Hidetora nods off, his embarrassed sons and guests leave the enclosure. As they await his waking, the Great Lord erupts through the enclosure’s borders, terrified by a dream he has had of an open, empty wilderness. Kathy Howlett avers that, in breaking out of this “sacred space,” Hidetora “literally bursts outside the frame of the samurai enclosure,” exploding the boundaries of the Nō performance space as well as the figurative ones of the samurai codes (121). This places the viewer “at once outside of samurai ritual and remote from it,” so we experience “the ‘negative inversion’ of samurai ritual and form” (Howlett 122). Later in the film, when Hidetora has entered the blind Tsurumaru’s hut to take shelter from a terrible storm, the mad old man breaks through one of the hut’s

158 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran flimsy walls to escape from the guilt his victim represents to him, once again bursting out of an enclosure, but this time rushing out onto a barren plain, perhaps resembling the empty wilderness of his earlier nightmare. What Hidetora does not understand is that there are no boundaries for hellishness and destruction; one cannot break away from these in our pandemoniac world. This also is evidenced by the many shots of monumental castle gates in the film, the opening and closing of which samurai warriors desperately demand but to no avail. Salvation and protection are impossible; infernality lies both inside and outside the physical structures, as it dwells in human souls. In Japanese Buddhist hell scrolls, Caroline Hirasawa points out, “[e]ach of the main hells . . . is contained behind an imposing gate” (9), and Kurosawa repeats that imagery here, as he does in Throne of Blood, revealing that perdition is here in the land of the living. In the scene in which Hidetora breaks through the wall of Tsurumaru’s hut, the pitiful young man’s hovel is another example of centralized sacred space wherein a supernatural power resides, but that power could be dangerous, beneficent, or both, as with Yamauba in her spindly hut in Throne of Blood. The emblematic figures of Yamauba and Tsurumaru wield spiritual power that cannot be evaded. Tsurumaru’s character is adapted from two blind young men in Nō: Shuntokumaru in Yoroboshi (meaning lowly blind beggar) and Semimaru in the play named after him. It is significant that the five groups of Nō plays—those of gods, warriors, women, frenzy or madness, and demons—would be performed in strict order on a traditional performance day. Interestingly, Yoroboshi and Semimaru fall into the same subcategory of the fourth group, called kyōran-mono; kyō meaning “mad” and ran meaning “disorder,” as in the title of this film (Shimazaki, Restless 40). The complex connection between blindness and madness that can be seen in Yoroboshi, Semimaru, and King Lear is skillfully woven into Ran, in which tragedy and trauma can cause madness and blindness (figurative and literal), and madness can be perceived as an appropriate response to horrors of this world.12 However, as John Collick asserts, “Hidetora’s madness and Tsurumaru’s sightless retreat from the world (both of which are traditionally associated with spiritual transcendence and reconciliation) are wholly inappropriate weapons against the tragic violence of feudal Japan” (186). In both Yoroboshi and Semimaru, the young men have been cruelly sent away by their fathers and abandoned, but, in keeping with the rule that kyōran-mono end happily, Shuntoku-maru ends up joyfully reunited with his penitent father (Shimazaki, Restless 47). Semimaru, on the other hand, is reunited with his mad sister Sakagami for a short period, as Tsurumaru is with his sister Sué, and then they part in great sorrow, a denouement that is unique in the kyōran-mono group. The only comfort for Semimaru is his strong Buddhist faith, which does not dispel the gloomy tone. One prominent scholar has called Semimaru “perhaps the most tragic play of the entire Nō repertory” (Keene 23), which certainly makes it an apropos intertext for Ran. This highlights the fact that, like this remarkably despondent Nō piece, Ran rejects the formal logic of the kyōran-mono by refusing to take solace in human reunion but rather ending with the stark extreme long shot of the helpless, solitary figure of blind Tsurumaru,

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standing among the ruins of his family’s castle, as the preternatural (one might say nuclear) orange sunset fades behind him. It is not surprising that Kurosawa refers primarily to the fourth group Nō plays in Ran, as the first three groups—god, warrior, and woman plays—are the most formal and prescribed, while the zatsu, or miscellaneous Nō, of the fourth group has the greatest diversity in regard to content, in that it includes both “visional/ supernatural” and “realistic” plays, and these plays’ protagonists (or shite) are of a wide variety of types, such as deities, demons, ghosts, mad people, samurai, and street artists. In addition to the two kyōran-mono discussed earlier, Ran alludes to the fourth Nō plays Dōjō-ji and Funa Benkei (which can function as a fourth or fifth group Nō), as well as The Killing Stone (Sesshōseki), a fifth Nō piece about a woman possessed by a murderous fox spirit that Kurosawa connects directly to Lady Kaede.13 Regarding Nō, Kurosawa’s inspiration in Ran comes primarily from the less structured fourth group, which, along with the fifth group Nō, carries the zatsu label with its connotation of being “unpurified of worldly things” (Shimazaki, Troubled 2). The fourth Nō falls in the phase of the Nō sequence in which “the performance has broken into greater complexity” (Shimazaki, Troubled 2), so Kurosawa has been inspired by the least “contained” type of Nō in form and content in this film; plus, he subverts even that by depicting Hidetora breaking out of spaces that are analogous to designated performance areas, exploding boundaries to depict disintegration. While most fourth Nō are realistic (genzai) pieces, including Yoroboshi and Semimaru, Kurosawa portrays a bleak, non-realistic world populated by a phantasmal, post-apocalyptic Hidetora, and a spectral, gender-liminal Tsurumaru, who rejects belief in Amida Buddha, both despite and because of his despair. The director turns Nō “realism” into a ghost world, more mugen (phantasmal) than genzai. In addition, the five-play Nō sequence, when performed in traditional order, presents a meta-narrative of human redemption, “delineat[ing] man in innocence, fall, repentance, redemption, and final glory” (Ueda, Old Pine xxi), but Kurosawa leaves us in the typical fourth Nō realization that “hell exists in our own world” without resolving this crisis with the fifth Nō ritual defeat of a supernatural evil (Ueda, Old Pine xx). There is no deus ex machina, no power beyond this world that can help us. In Ran, humans are responsible for the evil that rules the world. Just after the Great Lord dies, Kurosawa puts exactly these words in the mouth of Hidetora’s loyal retainer, Tango, as he chides the fool Kyoami for railing against the deities, who “kill us for their sport” (Shakespeare, King Lear 4.1.37). Tango rebukes the enraged fool: Stop it! Do not curse the gods. It is they who weep. In every age they’ve watched us tread the path of evil, unable to live without killing each other. They can’t save us from ourselves. Stop crying! This is the way of the world! Men live not for joy but for sorrow, not for peace but for suffering. Kurosawa directly states Ran’s bleak theology here. Prince argues that, whereas Kurosawa’s earlier films contained critiques of social and cultural problems,

160 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran “metaphysics has appeared” in his later films: “What was once a materialist program of reform has become instead a transcendental lament” (Warrior’s 289). Prince, among others, has connected this shift in worldview to changes in Kurosawa’s cinematic style in Ran, particularly a pulling back of the camera, distancing the viewer from the hostile human world. This “strategy of withdrawal” results in a plethora of long shots and long takes in the film, along with far fewer close-ups (Warrior’s 289). Several scholars have noted Kurosawa’s stated desire to present this cinematic narrative from the perspective of the “gods” (Richie, Films 214; Geist 29). In one interview, Kurosawa declared, “[S]ome of the essential scenes of this film are based on my wondering how God and Buddha, if they actually exist, perceive this human life, this mankind stuck in the same behavior patterns” (qtd. in Prince, Warrior’s 284–85). The distancing of the camera in Ran operates in conjunction with the cinematically incongruous Nō elements, which display powerful signifiers ripped from their signifieds, to achieve a distantiation of the audience. One remarkable example is the stunning long shots of massive cumulonimbus clouds throughout the film that remind us that we are watching from above, mournful but impotent to stop the madness. As in traditional Japanese aesthetics, the clouds in these kū shots represent the presence of the gods—kami and Buddhas—but none of these can save humans from themselves. This point of view, literally and figuratively, aligns well with the concept of posthumanism, as the term itself indicates a distancing and defamiliarization of the human and, indeed, a critique of humanism (Herbrechter 4). The most poignant example of this is the gruesome battle scene at the Third Castle, the cinematography and editing of which puts us in the position of the gods gazing down in horror and despair. In the screenplay, Kurosawa, who is usually sparing in his descriptions in scripts, describes the horrifying, monstrous scene in vivid, metaphorically and religiously loaded language: A terrible scroll of Hell is shown depicting the fall of the castle. There are no real sounds as the scroll unfolds like a daytime nightmare. It is a scene of human evildoing, the way of the demonic Asura, as seen by the Buddha in tears. The music superimposed on these pictures is, like the Buddha’s heart, measured in beats of profound anguish, the chanting of a melody full of sorrow that begins like sobbing and rises gradually as it is repeated, like karmic cycles, then finally sounds like the wailing of countless Buddhas. (46, my emphasis) Hell is seen and heard. Viewers are assailed by the bright crimson Technicolor blood inundating the screen, festooning piles of freshly killed bodies. During several minutes of this lengthy battle scene, all diegetic sound disappears and is replaced by a tempestuous, discordant symphonic score that Kurosawa commissioned Toru Takemitsu to write, dictating that it should resemble and “go beyond” Gustav Mahler’s bittersweet composition The Song of the Earth, which shares many dark themes with Ran. Kurosawa told Takemitsu that, like the

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cinematographic point of view, “The music, too, must come from the sky!” (qtd. in Tessier 20). Musicologist Kendra Leonard connects the disturbing undulations of this score to the harrowing scene it accompanies, as it expresses both the weeping of the celestial onlookers (the audience) and Hidetora’s state of mind: “Represented by a never resolving seventh-scale degree, Hidetora’s search for suicide, meaning, or stability is futile; quite literally, he cannot reach the ‘final’” (110). Thus, Takemitsu’s score gives us another broken circle that is not redeemed by a resolution. The director himself—hearkening back to his traumatic exposure to cataclysm as a child and his many close encounters with destruction during World War II—claimed that what he created was “all based on memory” and admitted that graphic violence scared him, even in his own films. He opined, “Maybe it is my vivid memory and unblinking gaze that makes me frightened of it. Or maybe it’s my fear that compels me to stare straight on” (A.K.). It is clear in all the grisly details of this sequence, visual and aural, that the grief of these imagined watching, weeping Buddhas mirrors the seventy-five-year-old Kurosawa’s pain as he reflects on the inhuman, grotesque destruction of life perpetrated by mankind. Immense disagreement abounds in the readings of the humanist and transcendent content of Ran, and the film demands this sort of reading. The overwhelmingly dark and apocalyptic nature of the film has inspired many scholars to assert that its salient sacred elements ironically underscore the hopelessness of a world where cycles of human violence proceed endlessly, while a few argue that these same elements convey the potential for redemption in a bleak world. John Collick, for instance, contends that in Ran’s last shots—featuring Tsurumaru dropping a scroll of Amida Buddha to the rocks below as he wavers on the precipice of doom—we see Kurosawa optimistically “suggesting that engagement with reality is preferable to spiritual escapism,” offering a Nietzschean reading (186).

Figure 4.6 During Ran’s last moments, a close-up of the impotent Amida Buddha scroll dropped by Tsurumaru as he teeters on the precipice.

162 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran This is despite the fact that Kurosawa’s final word in the screenplay is “Wretchedness!” (106). Kenneth Nordin performs a detailed analysis of the Buddhist symbolism in Ran and concludes that these symbols, taken together, “point to the Buddhist path of enlightenment” and “stand as powerful counterpoints to the chaos and destruction upon which the movie is built” (242). Kurosawa’s own statements about the film, both in and outside of his screenplay, have been used to support both of those positions. In a New York Times interview, Kurosawa claims Hidetora is on a journey toward transcendence: “Forced ultimately to confront the consequences of his misdeeds, [Hidetora] is driven mad. But only by confronting his evil head-on can he transcend it and begin to struggle toward virtue” (qtd. in Grilli 60).14 Shortly after the release of Ran, Kurosawa explained in another interview that, when he was younger, he believed his films could make a genuine impact on larger social issues, but, now older and wiser, he has changed his mind: I believe that the world would not change even if I made a direct statement. . . . Moreover, the world will not change unless we steadily change human nature itself and our very way of thinking. We have to exorcise the essential evil in human nature, rather than presenting concrete solutions to problems or directly depicting social problems. Therefore, my films might have become more philosophical. (qtd. in Hirano 57) Several scholars, including Donald Richie, Stephen Prince, and Kathe Geist, have discussed the pessimism of Kurosawa’s late work, but Andrew Spitznas has argued that Kurosawa’s work from 1965 on—when he began to make fewer films and to struggle to find financing—bears the marks of Kurosawa’s traumatic experiences, particularly in their fluctuation between utter dejection and faith in humanity.15 Spitznas explains that survivors of trauma often lose their ability to trust in other people or in one’s ability to effect meaningful change in one’s own life or surroundings. . . . Recovery from trauma often involves a lifelong battle between a sense of effective agency and the death grip of powerlessness. [In] Kurosawa’s late films, this type of oscillation between hope and despair in his work, so common in the life of trauma survivors, . . . become[s] evident. (14) This perceptive reading of Kurosawa’s late work effectively explains the divergence of the filmmaker’s own views about Ran, which he believed to be “less pessimistic” and “less tragic” than King Lear because “Hidetora reflects on his past and regrets it” (qtd. in Goodwin 212). (One certainly could argue that Lear does, too, though he is not depicted as the bloodthirsty tyrant Hidetora is.) Kurosawa intimates, here, that there is hope for humanity, or at least for an individual human, who can look honestly at the past, take responsibility for it, and move forward. This resonates with existential and ethical humanism; however, in Ran,

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survival is not the focus and humans are not fundamentally good, nor is human evil the fault of a corrupt system. Instead, humans make choices, but the freedom to choose is not an unadulterated good either. Nothing is pure; all boundaries are broken. The liminality and contingency of this situation are expressed in Mousley’s posthumanist declaration, “If the human is lost, then we feel it as a loss or as a freedom or both” (112). There is certainly truth in Spitznas’s assertion, “The theology of Ran wavers, as it does for many trauma survivors, between an angry atheism and a belief in a weeping God who is largely powerless to change humanity’s course” (24). However, this combination of rage and despondence does not erase the potential for transcendence that one sees in the characters of Saburo, Tango, Sué, and Kyoami, who all look directly at the truth—albeit through very different lenses—yet choose to ignore the rules of the ruthless world, acting sacrificially instead to protect and preserve the life and dignity of others. Even the wicked Hidetora, Kurosawa contends, transcends evil by confronting his own viciousness “head-on.” In the great director’s diegesis, there is no upward or downward transcendence in the sense of a movement toward a supernatural heaven or hell. As evoked so often in the screenplay and in the imagery of the film, hell is here. Thornton has argued that in Japanese historical epics, “Buddhism . . . lends meaning and significance to the battlefield itself: it is a picture of hell; it is meant to horrify people and turn them to religion” (155), but Kurosawa employs visions of the Buddhist netherworld for a different purpose. Donald Richie affirms that Ran’s “didactic message” is that life, indeed, is a hopeless “tragedy,” but understanding this “is enough. We do not need to be freed from this truth, . . . because it is eternal and we must live with it forever” (219). Ran, in all its beauty and horror, tells us that we have the power not to turn away from suffering. We can choose to face the inevitable hells on earth and look at them straight on, without being swallowed or destroyed by them; but this courage will not “save” us, nor will it make us heroes. However, it does have the potential to inspire us to be more human(e). The various modes of distantiation and abstraction in Ran help us comprehend the significance of this tragic pageant and, perhaps, lead us to recognize that “we are ‘not yet’ completely and irreversibly ‘post’-human” (Mousley 108). If there is any hope attached to this film, it is most likely to be located in the viewer rather than the thing itself. Watching from a distance, we may gain the courage to refuse to feed the fires of violence and human degradation. The potential to conquer fear in this life lies in that brave gaze.

Madadayo, a Final Word Kuroawa’s last film, Madadayo (1993), meaning “not ready yet,” gives us an entirely different perspective on the world from Throne of Blood and Ran. This “not yet” is a reference to a child’s game resembling hide-and-seek, and it indicates the protagonist’s playful attitude toward death, his not being ready just yet to leave this life behind. The globally esteemed director was in his eighties when he made this film and would depart this life five years later. Madadayo is Kurosawa’s

164 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran incandescent swan song and a swing back toward hope. He had lived through the Great Kantō Earthquake and its aftermath, the rise of ultra-nationalist fervor, nearly fifteen years of brutal wars, the atomic holocaust on Japanese soil, and the nation’s healing and renaissance into an economic superpower. By the early 1990s, it was clear Japan was undergoing another cataclysmic shift. The worldwide economic recession had hit Japan particularly hard, badly damaging the financial and corporate systems that had sustained its “Economic Miracle”: the “bubble” had burst. The Japanese people were facing precarity in all aspects of their lives. This crisis of Japanese life and identity was met with the rise of a new “popular” discourse of nationalism (Ko 19). Kurosawa turns, at this point, from harrowing warnings toward transcending trauma in his final two films, reminding Japan and the world that dark days can be illuminated with compassion. The many Buddhist and Shinto allusions in Madadayo point toward grace and peace rather than enmity and destruction. The film is set in Tokyo and stretches from midwar 1943 into the early 1960s. The plot centers on a character modeled closely after the beloved German literature professor and writer Hyakken Uchida (1889– 1971), who “bravely refused to join the Society for Patriotism through Literature, a militarist organization,” while Japan was in the grip of ultra-nationalism (Spitznas 35; cf. Yoshimoto 221). This sensei’s passion for literature and for life inspires his students and creates a loving community around him that reveals the best of human nature. The aging Sensei (meaning professor, as he is called in the film) is almost childlike in his imaginative engagement with the world. He sees and feels wonder and has the gift of transmitting it to others. Sensei embodies scholar Motoori Norinaga’s more expansive concept of mono no aware as any experience of strong emotion, in other words, what is felt by a person with a genuine, sensitive kokoro (mindful heart) (Ueda, Literary 202–03). Norinaga’s idealization of this “feminine” emotional capacity to engage authentically with the world can be found in the Sensei’s quick joy in a simple song and his heartbroken weeping after his adored cat goes missing (Ueda, Literary 204–05). When Sensei’s house is bombed by the Americans during the war, he and his wife escape with almost nothing, but he has taken with him one small volume, Kamo no Chōmei’s classic Hōjōki, the thirteenth-century Buddhist’s contemplation of his ascetic life lived in a humble hut in the mountains. Fittingly, Sensei and his wife happen upon a tiny shack beside an utterly bombed-out mansion, and they settle there for over a year, appreciating and feeling the seasons, for better and for worse, as they never have before. This is shown in one of the most beautiful passages in any Kurosawa film: a montage of the seasons passing in a consistent procession of matching long shots capturing the little hut and its inhabitants as they live their lives in tandem with the movements of nature (utsuroi). This montage also replaces diegetic sound with orchestral music, but, this time, it is Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico (The Harmonic Inspiration) which, like his famed masterpiece The Four Seasons, expresses the fluidity and movement of time with its shifting tempo and mood. Kurosawa uses the Larghetto portion of Concerto No. 9 in D Major, which moves elegantly between major and minor melodic lines, emulating the vicissitudes of life itself, but it always returns to its

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Figure 4.7 In Madadayo (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1993), Kurosawa directly references the Hōjōki in this montage of Sensei (Tatsuo Matsumura) and his wife (Kyōko Kagawa) peacefully experiencing four seasons in their tiny hut, with ruins of a wall and fence in the foreground.

major key, the positive resolution. Like Chōmei, Sensei abides in his hut, contemplating the impermanence of life, but, unlike the ascetic, Sensei savors the joys and sorrows of life, humble though they may be, rather than concluding that these emotions are signifiers of ignorant attachment. Mujō may be the reality of life, ever slipping through our hands, but investing care and passion in the beings and things of this world is not only preferable but crucial. Sensei’s genuine emotion and revelry in the small pleasures of life, the wonder of it all, is a type of compassion, a feeling with all beings, nature, and objects around him, which generates compassion and kindness in others as well. These are powerful sources of healing. Unlike in Throne of Blood and Ran, Kurosawa elides the major cataclysmic events in Madadayo; for instance, we are not shown the terror of Sensei’s home being obliterated by fire dropped from the sky and the desperation of a narrow escape. Instead, we see moments of daily life, contentment, friendship, and community. Nonetheless, Kurosawa never lets us forget about the destruction of much of Tokyo, as jagged, charred ruins are often visible in the backdrop of shots of Sensei’s hut and, later, shots of the home his former students lovingly have built for him. Kurosawa vividly shows survival and rebirth from the ashes of annihilation, but it is the sustaining relationships and rhythms of life he is interested in here. The striking beauty of Madadayo is not in monumental structures or Technicolor hellscapes; it is in quiet and convivial moments of connection and human generosity. Madadayo ends inside a dream in our seventy-seven-year-old protagonist’s sleeping mind, in his kokoro. He is a child in a field of tall stacks of wheat playing hide-and-seek with other children, and he yells out, “Not ready yet!” The camera

166 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran tilts up into the sunset, where the obviously painted sky is adorned with bright pink and purple clouds, resembling those on which Amida Buddha descends to take the deceased to paradise. This time, the formalist references to Buddhism are positive, affirming karmic virtue, but the message is still focused on the land of the living. The film ends in this lovely, imaginary twilit sky, another example of the aesthetics of kū discussed in this book, symbolizing the interconnection and interdependence of all things. It is a ma of hope. As examined in this chapter, Kurosawa’s darkest films graphically communicate that hellish downward transcendence is created by humans and is inflicted on the guilty and innocent alike. However, he also illustrates in Madadayo that upward transcendence can be achieved in life by being sensitive to the world around you, engaging your imagination, actively showing compassion, inspiring generosity and kindness, and even just delighting in the small things. Cautionary tales, like hell scrolls, are meant to steer us in a more salubrious and enlightened direction. Madadayo directly points us toward this alternative path. Love, compassion, gratitude, and creativity are salvific, transcendent powers, even in a world teeming with human hells. Kurosawa sensei teaches us this.

Notes 1 In Paradoxical Japaneseness, Andrew Dorman argues, “A major element of Rashomon’s international success was its apparent difference, its exoticism. The film’s popularity would, in turn, encourage the Japanese industry to emphasize cultural specificity, often in the form of historical dramas” (138; cf. 171–79). This marketable and potentially prestigious version of Japaneseness, purveyed at Western film festivals and art film venues, has led most Western viewers to perceive Akira Kurosawa as a maker of samurai films, though at least half of his films are gendai-geki and have nothing to do with samurai. 2 Much of the introductory portion of this chapter and the analysis of Ran were first published by the author under the title “Wicked Humans and Weeping Buddhas: (Post) Humanism and Hell in Kurosawa’s Ran,” in Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear, edited by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Cambridge University Press, 2019), see pp. 47–61. A revised version is reproduced here with permission of the Licensor. 3 Richie’s definition, in this instance, includes “comfort” and pleasure but does not seem to take into account Motoori Norinaga’s assertion that mono no aware applies to all types of strong emotion, including those with, potentially, no trace of resignation, such as joy or love (“Mono” 184–85). See the introduction for an extended discussion of mono no aware. 4 The other two Kurosawa films set in the Sengoku jidai are Seven Samurai (1954) and Kagemusha (1980). Kenji Mizoguchi also sets his 1953 masterpiece Ugetsu during this period, which is fitting for what could be considered an anti-samurai film. 5 The image of Washizu’s body riddled with arrows is reminiscent of the many artistic images of Saint Sebastian, particularly in Renaissance paintings, which may be a stroke of irony, in that Sebastian is the patron saint of soldiers. 6 For a more detailed description of the meaning and demarcation of sacred space in Shinto tradition, see the bullet-pointed paragraph on “Himorogi, yorishiro, and shimenawa” in this book’s introduction (pp. 44–45). 7 In her excellent piece on Japanese hells, Hirasawa writes that “as hell increasingly passed into the public domain during the Edo period, dynamic, transcendent responses

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to hell ideology flourished in the print culture produced and avidly consumed by lay commoners” (2). She notes that hell’s “familiarity” spawned subversive and “spirited appropriations” of hell imagery (2), and Kurosawa’s Sengoku jidai films qualify as latter-day appropriations of these hell traditions. Ran is the most graphically hell-laden of his films (cf. Collick 183–84). Tokyo (Edo) itself is laid out in a labyrinthine structure in order to protect the shōgun’s seat of power, the central castle complex. This development started at the beginning of the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868), also called the Edo Period for this reason. Amy Stanley explains that “the shogun who planned Edo had chosen to fortify his headquarters from the inside”: rather than erect walls around the city, he created “a system of moats and mazelike, gated streets to block the approach to his castle. He had made the plan of the city its armor” (68). Ironically, the Japanese were loath to invest in the film because of Kurosawa’s employment of uniquely Japanese elements, such as those of Nō theater, which were “increasingly read in Japan as the strategic imprinting of an exoticised stamp of token Japaneseness, . . . with an eye to the international market” (Buchanan 85). Therefore, this sumptuous film—an “apocalypse song” staged in Japan but dealing with global trauma of the twentieth century—was packaged as an international art film, as was all of Kurosawa’s late work, but this seems quite fitting for the cosmic scope of Ran (cf. Wilmington 6–9). Several scholars have examined the specific connections between the narratives of Ran and King Lear. See, for instance, James Goodwin’s treatment of the film in Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema and Eric Dodson-Robinson’s article on Ran. There are a number of fine treatments of Nō elements in Throne of Blood and Ran, most notably those by Keiko I. McDonald, Donald Richie, Stephen Prince, and John Collick. This is also a prominent theme in Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955), made thirty years before Ran. Discussions of these and the other Nō plays referenced in Ran can be found in McDonald and Dodson-Robinson. In an essay on spirituality and aging in Ran, scholar Kip Jones, whose background is in gerontology and social psychology, argues that Hidetora undergoes the process of “gerotranscendence,” which is defined as “a shift in meta-perspective, from a materialistic and pragmatic view of the world to a more cosmic and transcendent one” (4). This shift can take place as one grows into old age and looks back on life, leading to a reassessment of worldview and relationships. Jones’s list of ten “gerotranscendent themes” in Ran is compelling (5–6), though my analysis does not fully align with his. We do agree that “the film is itself a lesson in transcendence—but a dark one” (6). Prince, for instance, asserts, “A resurgent pessimism in the late works [of Kurosawa] rushed in . . . and reconstituted human character as a structure of evil and life as a transient and predestined dance of darkness” (Warrior’s 289). This ignores the optimism of the director’s final two films, Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (1993). For another nuanced analysis of Kurosawa’s later films that does not align with the pessimistic “late style” theory supported by the scholars named here, excepting Spitznas, see M. Gail Hamner’s exceptional book Imaging Religion in Film, especially pages 39–47.

Works Cited A.K. Directed by Chris Marker, documentary on Disc 2 of Ran, Criterion Collection, 2005 [1985]. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Mariner Books, 2019, pp. 196–209. Buchanan, Judith. Shakespeare on Film. Pearson Longman, 2005.

168 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran Cardullo, Bert. World Directors in Dialogue: Conversations on Cinema. Scarecrow Press, 2011. Collick, John. Shakespeare, Cinema and Society. Manchester University Press, 1989. Davis, Darrell William. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film. Columbia University Press, 1996. Dodson-Robinson, Eric. “Karma, Revenge, Apocalypse: Ran’s Violent Victim-Agent Through Japanese and Western Contexts.” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 233–255. Donaldson, Peter S. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. Unwin Hyman, 1990. Dorman, Andrew. Paradoxical Japaneseness: Cultural Representation in 21st Century Japanese Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed, University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1958]. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, 1987 [1957]. Geist, Kathe. “Late Kurosawa: Kagemusha and Ran.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, vol. 12, no. 1, 1992, pp. 26–36. Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Goto-Jones, Christopher. Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009. Grilli, Peter. “Kurosawa Directs a Cinematic Lear.” Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, edited by James Goodwin, G. K. Hall, 1994 [1985], p. 60. Hamner, M. Gail. Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Herbrechter, Stefan. “Introduction—Shakespeare Ever After.” Posthumanist Shakespeares, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 1–19. Hirano, Kyoko. “Making Films for All the People.” Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, edited by James Goodwin, G. K. Hall, 1994 [1986], pp. 57–58. Hirasawa, Caroline. “The Inflatable, Collapsible Kingdom of Retribution: A Primer on Japanese Hell Imagery and Imagination.” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 63, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–50. www.jstor.org/stable/20535182. Accessed 8 July 2021. Howlett, Kathy M. Framing Shakespeare on Film. Ohio University Press, 2000. Huxley, Aldous. “Downward Transcendence (1952).” Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931–1963), edited by Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer, Stonehill Publishing Company, 1977, pp. 22–25. Isozaki, Arata. “Space-Time in Japan—MA.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 12–53. Jones, Kip. “The Spiritual Dimension: AGerotranscendental Take on Akira Kurosawa’s Film ‘Ran.’” International Association of Gerontology, 34th EBSSRS Symposium on Ageing and Diversity, 31 August 2002, Bergen, Norway. Conference Presentation. Academia. edu. www.academia.edu/2570483/The_Spiritual_Dimension_a_gerotranscendental_ take_on_Akira_Kurosawas_film_Ran. Accessed 5 February 2016. Jorgens, Jack. “Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood: Washizu and Miki Meet the Forest Spirit.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, 1983, pp. 167–173. http://search-ebscohostcom.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.43797316 &site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 10 February 2015. Keene, Donald, ed. Twenty Plays of the Nō Theater. Columbia University Press, 1970.

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Ko, Mika. Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness. Routledge, 2010. Kott, Jan. The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition, translated by Daniela Miedzyrzeck and Lillian Vallee, Northwestern University Press, 1987. Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography, translated by Audie E. Bock, Random House, 1983. Kurosawa, Akira, Hideo Oguni, and Ide Masato. Ran [screenplay]. Shambala, 1986. Leonard, Kendra Preston. Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations. Scarecrow Press, 2009. Madadayo. Directed and written by Akira Kurosawa, based on the literary works of Hyakken Uchida, Daiei Co., Ltd./Dentsu Inc./Kurosawa Production Inc., 1993. McDonald, Keiko I. Japanese Classical Theater in Films. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. Mousley, Andy. “Care, Scepticism and Speaking in the Plural: Posthumanisms and Humanisms in King Lear.” Posthumanist Shakespeares, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 97–113. Nadeau, Randall L. “Dimensions of Sacred Space in Japanese Popular Culture.” Intercultural Communication Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1996, pp. 109–114. Nordin, Kenneth D. “Buddhist Symbolism in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran: A Counterpoint to Human Chaos.” Asian Cinema, vol. 16, no. 2, 2005, pp. 242–254. Norinaga, Motoori. “On Mono no Aware.” The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007 [1763], pp. 172–194. Pound, Ezra, and Ernest Fenollosa. The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan. New Directions, 1959. Prince, Stephen. “Shakespeare Transposed.” Throne of Blood [DVD Booklet]. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Criterion, 2003. Prince, Stephen. The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, revised and expanded ed., Princeton University Press, 1999. Prince, Stephen. “Zen and Selfhood: Patterns of Eastern Thought in Kurosawa’s Films.” Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa, edited by James Goodwin, G. K. Hall, 1994, pp. 225–235. Ran. Directed and edited by Akira Kurosawa, screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide, performances by Tatsuya Nakadai, Mieko Hirada, Jinpachi Nezu, and Peter, Criterion Collection, 2005 [1985]. Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, revised ed., Kodansha International, 2005. Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 3rd ed., expanded and updated, University of California Press, 1998. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Da Capo Press, 1988 [1972]. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shields, James Mark. “Kurosawa, Akira (1910–1998).” Encyclopedia of Religion and Film, edited by Eric Michael Mazur, ABC-CLIO, 2011. Shimazaki, Chifumi. Restless Spirits from Japanese Nō Plays of the Fourth Group. Cornell University Press, 1995.

170 Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran Shimazaki, Chifumi. Troubled Souls from Japanese Nō Plays of the Fourth Group. Cornell University Press, 1998. Shimazaki, Chifumi, and Stephen Comee. Supernatural Beings from Japanese Nō Plays of the Fifth Group: Parallel Translations with Running Commentary. Cornell University Press, 2013. Spirited Away. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2001. Spitznas, Andrew. “The Flayed Hare: Trauma and Hope in the Late Films of Kurosawa.” Faith and Spirituality in the Masters of World Cinema, edited by Kenneth R. Morefield, Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 11–41. Stanley, Amy. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World. Scribner, 2020. Teo, Stephen. The Asian Cinema Experience: Styles, Spaces, Theory. Routledge, 2013. Tessier, Max. “Interview with Toru Takemitsu.” Ran [DVD Booklet], directed by Akira Kurosawa, Criterion Collection, 2005 [1985]. Thornton, S. A. The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis. McFarland, 2007. Throne of Blood. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, performances by Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minoru Chiaki, Chieko Naniwa, and Takashi Shimura, Criterion Collection, 2003 [1957]. Tyler, Royall. “Buddhism in Noh.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 19–52. www.jstor.org/stable/30234528. Accessed 21 November 2015. Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1991. Ueda, Makoto. The Old Pine Tree and Other Noh Plays, translated by Makoto Ueda, University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Watanabe, Kiyoshi. “Interview with Akira Kurosawa on Ran.” Ran [DVD Booklet], directed by Akira Kurosawa, Criterion, 2005, pp. 10–17. Wilmington, Michael. “Apocalypse Song.” Ran [DVD Booklet], directed by Akira Kurosawa, Criterion, 2005, pp. 6–9. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Duke University Press, 2000. Zambrano, Ana Laura. “Throne of Blood: Kurosawa’s Macbeth.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 3, 1974, pp. 262–274. http://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=6899544&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 4 February 2016.

5

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life and I Wish Creating Space for Everyday Transcendence

Our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again. —G.K. Chesterton1

Filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has been much noted for depicting imagery of the everyday lives of ordinary people in contemporary Japan. This penchant for the quotidian and the skill with which it is portrayed were developed early in his career, which began after his graduation from Waseda University in 1987, when he signed on with TV Man Union, the first independent television production company in Japan. Kore-eda aspired to be a filmmaker, but, at this point, Japan’s studio system had collapsed and even independent filmmaking seemed to be stalled (Mes and Sharp 206). As Japan’s “Economic Miracle”—stretching from the late 1950s into the early 1990s—escalated into one of the most epic financial “bubbles” in world history, Kore-eda honed his craft and eventually began sneaking around behind his bosses’ backs to complete his first documentary, Lessons from a Calf (1991). Luckily for him, his bosses were impressed with the end result and immediately promoted him to the role of director. Kore-eda finally was able to create the sort of “experimental and challenging films that he had been hoping to work on,” starting with However . . . In the Time of Government Aid Cuts in the same year (Mes and Sharp 206; Ehrlich’s translation). A few years before, in 1989, the Showa emperor Hirohito had stepped down, ushering in the precarious Heisei era, and Japan’s hopes of having a democratic neighbor in China had been crushed in Tiananmen Square. Moreover, between 1989 and 1991, the “miraculous” economic bubble burst: the Japanese stock market, the Nikkei 225 Index, dropped to an all-time low and real estate values took a precipitous plunge (Ravina 165). Japanese companies and banks went from extreme wealth to fighting for survival. It is in this moment of jarring national loss and metamorphosis that Kore-eda emerged as a unique kind of storyteller. In these first two documentaries, he established the foci that would continue to appear in his documentaries and narrative films to the present: the details of everyday life, the importance and complexity of human relationships (with family, friends, and colleagues), the significance of memory, and the pathways to surviving and DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057-5

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transcending profound loss. This chapter explores two of Kore-eda’s fiction films, After Life (Wandafuru raifu, 1998) and I Wish (Kiseki, 2011), through the lenses of recent philosophies of everyday aesthetics and the overarching concept of ma, the Japanese notion of space-time confluence and structuring intervals. It is consequential that these two films were made in the period between the “twin disasters” of 1995—the Great Hanshin Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo’s gas attack on the Tokyo subway—and the devastation of 3.11, which marked another series of significant shifts in Japanese cultural consciousness.2

Tales of True Loss and Immanent Transcendence Kore-eda’s first documentary, Lessons from a Calf, documents a class of elementary school children for over two years as they raise a calf they named Laura, caring for her every day and working as a group to maintain her well-being. In cinéma-vérité style, Kore-eda focuses on the mundane tasks the children must perform and also on the rituals they develop, such as writing poetry about and group singing to Laura (Nolletti, Jr., “Kore-eda’s” 150). Arthur Nolletti, Jr., explains the children’s learning process: “We see their hard work and industry, their unwavering commitment, their ability to work together, their evident joy and sense of discovery—in short, their growing independence” (150). However, the most important lessons learned come from loss: first, the death of Laura’s calf and then losing Laura herself when she must be returned to the farmer, as the children move up to middle school. This inaugural film for Kore-eda displays his extraordinary attention to the lives of children, which is vividly evident in his narrative films Nobody Knows (2004) and I Wish (2011). However, Lessons from a Calf also showcases his desire to challenge the boundaries between documentary and narrative film. He uses freeze frames throughout the documentary to remind viewers that this vérité is mediated, signaling his own creative presence as a filmmaker. Nolletti points out that Kore-eda’s “freeze frames can serve as temporal transitions; they also by definition literally stop time. In this latter function, events in the film are transformed into memories before our eyes . . . [and] are endowed with meaning that transcends their ‘story’ value” (“Kore-eda’s” 153). Indeed, Kore-eda has expressed that he is more interested in capturing the reality of human emotions and details of everyday life than constructing a conventional, cause-and-effect narrative (Schilling 11, 14). In 1991’s However . . ., Kore-eda shifts to a darker subject, examining the suicide of an official overseeing Japan’s Social Welfare Bureau, who also had been connected to a pollution cover-up scandal; he had become deeply disturbed by his role in denying benefits to so many people, one of whom had committed suicide herself. Kore-eda took care in shaping this documentary so as not to sensationalize or polemicize: he wanted to tell the human story (Mes and Sharp 207). He went on to make five more documentaries over the next three years, including an exploration of the films of Taiwanese art film directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, who are clearly inspirations for Kore-eda’s own work. These years were Kore-eda’s training ground, wherein he was allowed to push beyond the

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boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking. It is not surprising, then, that when he arrived at the point where he was able to make a narrative feature film, he would be challenging filmic conventions in this arena as well. Kore-eda’s first fiction film, Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari, 1995), debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in 1995, where he won the Best Director prize, and from there it traveled to the Toronto International Film Festival and over two dozen other international festivals, winning a raft of prestigious awards. It was an unmitigated success in the global art film circuit. Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp assert that, with Maborosi’s success, “Kore-eda more or less singlehandedly brought about the birth of the arthouse genre in Japan in the mid-‘90s” (211). This was followed shortly by the success of work by several other Japanese filmmakers in the international festival circuit, something that had not happened since the surge of international attention in the 1950s. In 1997, for instance, Shōhei Imamura, a veteran of the 1960s Japanese New Wave, and young director Naomi Kawase both won major awards at the Cannes International Film Festival, while Takeshi Kitano took the Golden Lion at Venice International Film Festival. Japanese journalists dubbed this trend the “Renaissance of Japanese Cinema” and the “New Japanese New Wave” (Yomota 176; Mes and Sharp 208). These labels applied mainly to the surge of young independent directors from the latter 1990s into the 2000s, including Kore-eda, Kawase, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Shinji Aoyama, Makoto Shinozaki, and Gō Rijū, among others. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who also got his start in television in the 1980s, is a bit older than most of the members of this group and exists on its fringes. He also was (and still is) a regular participant in international festivals, starting with his break-out film Cure (1997), which screened at Cannes; however, his distinctive approaches to the psychological thriller, horror, and science fiction genres (sometimes all three at once, as with Before We Vanish [2017]) set him apart as an artist who experiments with “Western” genres in Japanese contexts. The rise of these independent filmmakers during the 1990s reveals the discontent, struggles, and fears of the Japanese as they faced the post-bubble economy and the precarity it has intensified.3 The profound changes in Japan during the Heisei period (1989– 2019) inspired the flowering and flourishing of Japanese independent filmmakers, of which Hirokazu Kore-eda has been a crucial and enduring part, as indicated by his winning of the Palm d’Or at the 2018 Cannes International Film Festival. The film that won this award, Shoplifters, focuses on an ersatz family, a ragtag collection of multigenerational “losers,” impoverished and hustling to survive. It is Kore-eda’s most complex and unsettling film to date, pushing viewers to question what differentiates a “real” from an illusory family and a healthy/loving family relationship from an abusive/exploitative one. All this is seen through the eyes of children, adults, and an elderly person, plus from the perspective of the Japanese government, who must step in at the end to dissolve this “dream” of a family. Any notion of transcendence seems far from this disturbing denouement. To understand the conceptions surrounding Kore-eda as a filmmaker and the reception of his films more generally, investigating the responses to his first film is key. Maborosi took the critics and scholars by storm because of its stark contrast

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to current mainstream cinema of any country. It tells the story of a young, lowermiddle-class Osaka woman, Yumiko, whose seemingly happy husband kills himself when their son is just a few months old. She remarries five years later to a kind man on the northern Japanese coast, and, in this tiny fishing village, she both begins a peaceful, pleasant new life and finds empty spaces, in physical space and time, wherein she cannot escape haunting questions about her loss: Why did her husband take his own life? Could she have stopped him? Kore-eda is most interested in observing her grief and renewal, as they circle around and interpenetrate each other, rather than explaining what is going on in her mind, resulting in a visual style that echoes this process: a very dark mise-en-scène in which no artificial lighting is used; long takes; static shots, including pillow shots; extended periods of silence; and muted tones throughout. Unlike the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kore-eda’s work, right out of the gate, was read as quintessentially “Japanese,” and Western journalists “champion[ed] his evocation of the Japanese film masters” of the 1950s, particularly Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi (McKim 72).4 As discussed in the introduction to this book, Maborosi also inspired distinguished scholars of Japanese film, such as Donald Richie, David Desser, and Keiko I. McDonald, to examine in some detail the relationship between Kore-eda’s first feature film and Yasujirō Ozu’s postWorld War II work, his “mature style.”5 While Richie and McDonald remark on the similarities of style and subject matter, they also push back against the journalistic reviewers’ pervasive claims that Kore-eda is directly emulating Ozu (cf. Richie, “Kore-eda’s”; McDonald). Desser, on the other hand, opens his essay on Maborosi with the assertion that, beyond its text and contexts, “any understanding and appreciation” of the film “must also take into account a particular intertext: the films of Yosujirō Ozu” (“Imagination” 273). He goes on to explore this connection in a rigorous and nuanced way, elaborating on other important cinematic influences on Kore-eda and this film, such as several Japanese films of the latter 1990s that focus on grief, death, and alienation, as well as European art films, including the contemporaneous Three Colors: Blue (dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski 1993) and the celebrated work of Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni (274–76). Desser admits that Kore-eda’s most immediate influence, especially in regard to his frequent use of static long takes, is international art cinema star Hou Hsiaohsien, about whom Kore-eda had made a 1993 documentary (281).6 Nevertheless, Desser’s core argument revolves around Kore-eda’s connection to Ozu, insisting that the cinephilia of several directors of the 1990s “New Japanese New Wave” is “too clear to ignore and thus we may claim that the turn to Ozu on the part of Kore-eda is a deliberate strategy” (277). He elaborates, “[T]hat combination of tatami-level shots, (relative) lack of camera movement, the focus on rooms recently emptied of their subjects, does indeed typify the rarefied world of Ozu . . . . [Stylistically,] most of the major narrational principles favored by Ozu are reproduced in Kore-eda’s film” (280). What Desser overlooks is the overwhelming visual and emotional darkness in the film, as well as the irruption of the phantasmal in Maborosi’s denouement, when Yumiko appears to be drawn toward a

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burning funeral pyre on a rock jetty, a figment of her tortured mind. Ozu’s work brilliantly captures the everyday lives of middle-class Japanese in his understated shomin-geki (family melodramas), but the surface of his phenomenal world is never pierced by the materialization on screen of the supernatural or imaginary. In contrast, Kore-eda’s second narrative film, After Life (1998), is set entirely in a supernatural world, a waystation between death and the afterlife, despite its shabby, mundane mise-en-scène. His later adaptation from a manga, Air Doll (2009), in which a sex doll comes to life in modern-day Tokyo, falls into the fantasy genre while it explores the rise in Heisei Japan of a “relationless society” (muen shakai, cf. Allison 8). Thus, while some of Kore-eda’s work resembles that of Ozu in regard to stylistic choices and themes dealing with changing conceptions and experiences of family in contemporary Japan (though their historical moments are very different indeed), Kore-eda has embraced quite diverse approaches to film form and genre, unlike the later work of Ozu, of which so much has been written by cinema critics and scholars. Still, both Ozu and Kore-eda have made films during periods of national crises in Japan, one following World War II and the other after the “economic bubble” burst, ushering in the “Lost Years” of precarity that stretch to the present. Both directors, in film after film, closely examine the ways in which people transcend profound loss by focusing on the details of everyday life, but the differing ways they portray that human and spiritual transcendence, starting with their disparate filmmaking processes, must be considered. Ozu’s “mature” style, developed after World War II, was purposely anti-dramatic and minimalist, and, to maintain this consistently, “[e]verything was rigidly controlled”; for instance, he worked with only one cameraman during this time, usually worked with the same crew and cast, and was notorious for pushing his actors not to act at all, demanding take after take until the performance was subtle enough for his liking (Richie, Hundred 119, 122). This sort of strict regulation of all aspects of the filmmaking process, some might argue, reflects the image of Japanese hierarchical society, with Ozu as the Confucian father. However, Akira Kurosawa, whose films differ greatly from Ozu’s, was similarly known for exacting expectations and perfectionism, which earned him the famous nickname “Emperor,” meant to be pejorative. The rigorous reputations of Ozu and Kurosawa, therefore, appear to result from their own dictatorial tendencies rather than any “Japanese” proclivity for social verticality. Kore-eda, on the other hand, brings his documentary sensibilities to the making of his fiction films, but he does this differently in each project, shifting his style to coordinate meaningfully with the subjects (both human and topical) of his narratives. Marc Yamada notes, “There is always a scenario that guides [Kore-eda’s] production[s]—in the form of a fully developed script, a collection of scenes, or even just a story arc—yet it is one that allows room for improvisation and change” (6). In making Distance (2001), his third fiction film, Kore-eda had the actors improvise their dialogue throughout the process, in the style of John Cassavetes or Wong Kar-Wai. As the film deals with a fictional religious cult that perpetrates a gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very like Aum Shinrikyo, the actors

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were encouraged to express their personal reactions to this profoundly disturbing tragedy. Kore-eda values being responsive to the actors, explaining, “[W]hen I come to the set and I’m observing the atmosphere and watching the actors, I’ll say, ‘Let’s do the scene this way,’ even though it’s not in the script” (Schilling 14). Nothing could be further from Ozu’s tightly controlled filmmaking process, in which actors are his props, than Kore-eda’s fluid, interactive approach. Their career trajectories also reflect core differences: Ozu apprenticed at and then worked for a major studio making genre pictures starting in the late 1920s, while Kore-eda started in television in the 1980s, post-studio era, working on documentaries until he could begin his fiction filmmaking career. This started with three films—Maborosi, After Life, and Distance—which met with great admiration on the international film festival circuit, rather than with domestic audiences, largely due to their experimental qualities. As will be explored, Kore-eda’s flexible, responsive, and ever-evolving approach to filmmaking renders his process and work fertile ground for examining the diverse ways ma, that multidimensional concept of space-time flow, can be applied to cinema. As opposed to the films previously covered in this book, Kore-eda’s After Life and I Wish do not overtly display religious imagery, with the brief exception of ema (wish plaques) appearing in I Wish. However, in keeping with arguments regarding “transcendental style,” a spiritual depth can be perceived in these films through their formal elements and predominant themes, as expressed through cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène (including eloquent symbolism), and sound, as well as character development and narrative. The lack of a definitive religious presence in these films means that the transcendence could be categorized as a “human” type of survival and overcoming, such as the experience of “wholeness within brokenness” that Robert K. Johnston calls small-T “transcendence” (243). However, these films also portray spiritual “Transcendence,” whereby characters experience or encounter the numinous, the mystery that “lies beyond the natural but . . . gives meaning to it”; this “Transcendent is disclosed through the material of reality, but in such a way as to manifest a reality that does not only belong to this world” (Johnston 242, 249). Germane here, of course, is Paul Schrader’s perspective that cinematic images and sounds of everyday life can function as a “prelude to the moment of redemption, when ordinary reality is transcended” (Transc. 42). In many of Kore-eda’s films, however, characters and viewers discover that spiritual redemption might be found in the ordinary itself, or rather how we perceive it. In regard to the sacred and the quotidian, Jeffrey Pence argues that the discourse of “the spiritual . . . mediates between these otherwise opposed realms of transcendence and everydayness” (40). Spiritual is a more apt term for the way Kore-eda orchestrates images of the everyday in such a way that imbues them with sacred and transcendental qualities. Marc Yamada elucidates this point in his skillful application of Buddhist concepts to After Life and I Wish: “[B]oth [films] thematize the process of finding release from the illusionary and self-centered thoughts that can entangle individuals in the experiences of the material world and their own egocentric desires” (3). However, this salvific “release” is achieved by a trans-descendence, a movement “to the ground” of the immanent world, to use

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Nishitani’s concept, instead of a “rising above” (Nishitani 304). The characters in these films transcend their illusions by looking more deeply at their own everyday experiences—examining their material realities and the human relationships grown within them—and “awakening to the home-ground of self and other” in a new way (Davis 234). Vivian Sobchack asserts that this strategy of “transcendence in immanence” sublimates an ecstatic depiction of transcendence “in the affective materiality of existence,” wherein “the transcendent is not reduced to literal content, material forms, and visibility but, rather, expansively emerges from them in an amplified sense of something ‘else’ rather than something ‘other’” (200). As the main characters in After Life and I Wish develop a new vision of their relationships with people and things within their worlds, the spectators also have an opportunity to look more deeply and sense the spiritual dimension in the everyday on screen, a perception that could transcend the film-viewing experience by entering into one’s quotidian life.

Everyday Aesthetics: Defamiliarizing the Familiar and Appreciating the Ordinary This chapter opens up the cinematic “everyday” in new directions, examining Kore-eda’s work through recent approaches in the field of everyday aesthetics as well as conceptions of ma more secular and architectural in orientation than those employed in previous chapters. The philosophical field of everyday aesthetics has grown to prominence as a sub-discipline of aesthetics largely in the past three decades. Its establishment was ushered in by the late twentieth-century revival of interest in nature and the environment, particularly in Anglophone aesthetics, and the postmodern widening of the scope of academic study to popular culture. Everyday aesthetics also is a response to the primary focus on the fine arts in Western aesthetics which dominated most of the twentieth century (Saito, “Aesthetics” Intro.). Preeminent scholar of everyday aesthetics Yuriko Saito contends that this growing branch of philosophy “aims to give due regard to the entirety of people’s multi-faceted aesthetic life, including various ingredients of everyday life: artifacts of daily use, chores around the house, interactions with other people, and quotidian activities such as eating, walking, and bathing” (“Aesthetics” Intro.). Saito argues that the everyday aesthetics discourse currently emerging “should be considered as restoring aesthetics to its original task: investigating the nature of experiences gained through sensory perception and sensibility” (Aesthetics 1). This phenomenological aspect of everyday aesthetics connects us back to Vivian Sobchack’s insight, discussed in this book’s introduction, that film viewing amplifies our sensory experience because viewers are aware of the sensations of their own bodies while they are vicariously feeling “through” the characters on screen. Thus, when filmmakers portray everyday experiences, objects, and structures on screen, spectators simultaneously experience these as “everyday” and as distanced from themselves: an illuminated pageant of shadows (or digital pixels) with the potential to help viewers perceive aesthetic significance in their own quotidian experiences.

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The source turned to most frequently in this chapter regarding everyday aesthetics is the aforementioned Yuriko Saito, a native Japanese scholar who taught philosophy at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design from 1981 to 2018. In addition to her highly respected publications, Saito’s active and long-term role in a creative, design-focused environment and her attention to the diverse approaches to everyday aesthetics in the West and the East make her an invaluable source in this study. Significantly, she observes that there are cultures, including those of Japan and China, that have very longstanding aesthetic traditions, appearing in fine arts, performance arts, and handicrafts, which also permeate most aspects of everyday life. “Japanese aesthetics,” Saito avers, “cannot be separated from the everyday. . . . [T]here is a prevailing aesthetic sensibility that permeates everyday objects and activities such as cooking, packaging, and seasonal celebration” (Everyday 3). She believes that it is the everyday objects and phenomena that “embody Japanese aesthetics most eloquently, which in turn sharpens people’s aesthetic sensibility and nurtures aesthetic appreciation of the mundane” (Everyday 3). Although the objects we live with every day, in our globalized world, often are made elsewhere and transcend national boundaries in their market appeal, the choice and arrangement of objects and spaces are culturally rooted (though not dictated). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s diegeses all take place in Japan, with the exception of the Parisian setting of The Truth (2019), and most of them focus on middle- to lower-class families in their home environments. Thus, his camera often captures the sights, smells, and tactile sensations of everyday life, including the domestic images he returns to film after film, particularly the family dining together (often shot at the tatami-level associated with Ozu), the steamy inner-sanctum of the bath, and the activity of cooking in the kitchen. Perhaps the most pleasurably sensuous moments in any Kore-eda film take place in Still Walking (2008), wherein there are many close-ups of Japanese comfort food sizzling in pans and the hands of two generations of a family chopping vegetables while cooking. The sounds, the colors, the steam rising from hot pans, all inevitably make the viewer’s mouth water and convey a warm sense of home and family. The fact that the Yokoyama family in this film is commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the death of their oldest son throws this warmth and beauty into relief: loss and grief co-exist with joy and love, one of Kore-eda’s key themes. The intimate moments of sensory savoring in his films reflect Saito’s observation that “the Japanese tradition, with its hyper aesthetic sensibility toward various aspects of our daily lives, is useful in directing our aesthetic lives to embrace diversity and encourage mindful living” (“Everyday” 150–51). Indeed, one of the central aims of everyday aesthetics is to encourage a greater attentiveness to our quotidian experiences, helping us to appreciate them. One important shift in everyday aesthetics that has taken place in the past decade is a move away from envisioning the field as separate from the aesthetics of fine art. Scholars of everyday aesthetics have successfully advocated for a shift toward “conceiving [of] everyday aesthetics as a continuation of aesthetics discourse that had previously been focused on art” (Saito, “Aesthetics” sec. 8).

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Saito’s critical perspectives on the purpose of everyday aesthetics reveal where film fits into the field. She asserts that everyday aesthetics should fruitfully [account] for the ways in which everyday life and art interact and form a continuous, ongoing flux of a person’s embodied experience of the lived world. Popular and socially engaged forms of art permeate people’s everyday life more than ever and there is no reason not to consider experiencing them as a pervasive dimension of their lived world. Ultimately, the nature of art is open and dynamic and is very much an integral part of people’s life, and everyday aesthetics is better served by considering the continuity between art and everyday. (“Aesthetics” sec. 8) Looking at relationships between cinematic texts and the everyday aesthetics of our lives is part of this exploration. Film and other audio-visual media are an increasingly large component of our daily experience as so many of us carry phones with video screens. Cinema, with its many intertextual incarnations (e.g., Hollywood, art film, Bollywood, jidai-geki), falls somewhere between the everyday and art, and individual films exist in myriad places along the fine art–popular/everyday entertainment continuum. As Saito contends, everyday aesthetics endeavors to explore “the totality of our aesthetic engagement with the world, which includes art, nature, and [the] everyday,” and film encompass all three, especially the work of Kore-eda, which specifically foregrounds these elements (“Aesthetics” sec. 8). Indeed, the goals of everyday aesthetics are also those of cinema: “encouraging openness by sharing others’ experiences, viewing the world from perspectives different from one’s own, and enlarging one’s horizon and vision” (Saito, “Aesthetics” sec. 7). While film puts everyday experience into a “frame”—as fine art is often framed literally or figuratively in a museum—it is experienced in spaces of everyday life, including the movie theater and, increasingly, in our homes, offices, and even on public transport. However, in viewing images of the everyday on the framed screen, we are brought closer to our own experiences, arguably, than in a superhero movie, which may depict spectacular transcendence but may not encourage us to see our own mundane experiences and the objects that populate our personal mises-en-scène in a new way. In seeing and experiencing our phenomenal world anew, our aesthetic perspective on the everyday might be shifted. One of the main foci of everyday aesthetics is “blurring the distinction between art and life,” something Japanese aesthetics has been doing for over a millennium (Saito, “Aesthetics” sec. 8). Kore-eda has been doing something very comparable in cinematic worlds with his experiments in breaching the boundaries between documentary and fiction film. He explains, “I hope that, if anything, my films can break down some of the fences that have been artificially created to distinguish between fiction and documentary. I hope my movies can be fence-sitters” (qtd. in Mes and Sharp 209). His films occupy an open, in-between space, a ma, wherein differences are bridged and categorical boundaries are shown to be permeable and unstable.

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Two major juxtaposing approaches to everyday aesthetics can be productively applicable to the cinematic arts: the concept of experiencing the familiar as extraordinary and that of experiencing the ordinary as familiar. As examined in this book’s introduction, the idea that film defamiliarizes the everyday for viewers stretches back to the early days of film theory and has continued into the present, with perspectives like those of Paul Schrader in his 2018 “Rethinking [of] Transcendental Style.” When film foregrounds its manipulation of space and time, as in “slow film,” the everyday is defamiliarized, and this estrangement of the ordinary in film has been read as pointing toward the sacred, the “transcendent,” according to Schrader and Michael Bird, among others. Though philosophers of everyday aesthetics tend not to speak of transcendence in those terms, Saito does discuss connections between Japanese Buddhist doctrine, particularly that of Zen, and aesthetics (e.g., Aesthetics 81–87). Moreover, prominent everyday aesthetics scholar Thomas Leddy, in his book The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (2012), propounds the notion that “an aesthetic property is one in which the aesthetic object takes on ‘aura’ within experience” (128). Deriving his thought from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Leddy describes aura as “a phenomenological characteristic of an object experienced [which is] attended with pleasure or with some combination of pain and pleasure”; he clarifies that this characteristic “is not in the object as an external thing” but is perceived through “the object-as-experienced” (128–29). Inevitably, Thomas Leddy admits, his use of aura will be compared to Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that mechanically reproducible arts, such as film, have lost the cultic or sacred aura that attends upon singular artworks (129). However, Leddy stipulates that while he is using aura differently, he also is taking a “hint” from Benjamin’s brief reference to a “natural aura” (129–30). Benjamin writes, “We define the aura as the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (669). Leddy argues that this “definition emphasizes a kind of psychological distance, a bracketing of the object from practical concerns” (130), and this distancing or framing of the “object” experienced inspires an “aesthetic attitude” conducive to appreciating the everyday as aesthetic (or at least aesthetically significant) (131). Of course, the very fact that film spectators are necessarily distant from the physical screen image, whether in a theater or staring at a phone, and that this screen has edges, a frame, puts film in the category of auratic, at least by Leddy’s definition, if not entirely by Benjamin’s. Nonetheless, as Jeffrey Pence argues, cinema maintains a tenacious interest in Benjaminian aura: “[T]wentieth-century film has evidenced a committed pursuit of the auratic—an investment in representations of reality that seem phenomenologically if not materially singular, redolent of ontological associations directly linked to traditions of spiritual aspiration that Benjamin sought to marginalize as cultic” (38). Significantly, Kristi McKim cites the same Benjamin passage as Leddy in her analysis of Kore-eda’s After Life, in which she argues that spectators of the film experience its “aura” when they identify with, or “adopt,”

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its renderings of “time and sensation,” a process whereby intimacy is accentuated “amid a heightened distance” (87). Furthermore, Kore-eda’s signature pillow shots often feature images of nature, including its shadows. These appear in his documentary films—such as the cutaways of flora shadows in Without Memory (1996), representing the subject’s inability to solidify new memories—as well as in his fiction films, like those in the dusky Distance or lyrical Still Walking. These plein-air pillow shots are reminiscent of Benjamin’s concept of “natural aura.” Although aura and transcendence are not identical concepts, inasmuch as both refer to a thing or object “going beyond itself” and stretching toward the ineffable and numinous, the connection is evident. Yuriko Saito, while perceiving the value in the “defamiliarization” model of everyday aesthetics, points out that it contains an inherent paradox: “to experience and appreciate the everyday as something standing out is to negate the very everydayness that needs to be captured and appreciated” (Aesthetics 21). In addition, if one were to experience all quotidian things and tasks in a sensorially intense manner, how would that conduce to achieving all the practicalities of everyday life? Meditating on the beauty of a pot does not necessarily help one finish making a meal. Indeed, if all everyday experiences and objects were aesthetic by Leddy’s definition (i.e. auratic), there would be no difference between ordinary and auratic experiences. Saito promotes a “balance between such intense experience and the mundane,” and she asserts that “paying attention and bringing background to the foreground is simply making something invisible visible and is necessary for any kind of aesthetic experience, whether of the extraordinary or of the ordinary” (Aesthetics 21, 24). Attentiveness and awareness can result in feeling satisfied or pleased with an everyday aesthetic experience without the estrangement of defamiliarization. Experiencing the everyday as ordinary, whether it is pleasant, dull, or even disgusting, “characterizes the texture and rhythm of everyday life; it does not render everyday life character-less” (Saito, Aesthetics 26–27). The notion of appreciating the familiar as ordinary, of feeling its texture, resonates with Schrader’s reflections on the “boring” nature of slow films. He contends that their pace builds anticipation in the viewer, an active affect, and that it allows time to “look around” in the image (“Rethinking” 20). The same could be said of everyday activities such as cleaning, a process that gives one time to anticipate the satisfaction of the (soon-to-be) clean object or space; it also allows one to examine the immediate context or positionality of the environment or object. Not all of Koreeda’s films are “slow,” in Schrader’s usage, but they do pay attention to everyday things and places in such a way that their ordinariness is understood, and perhaps felt, via techniques such as repeated images and delayed cuts. Thus, because film is always already at a distance from the viewer, it could be claimed that everyday images on the screen are experienced “extraordinarily,” but the treatment of these everyday images in the film and the identification of the viewer with characters, as Sobchack notes, can encourage experiencing the everyday as ordinary. As Yuriko Saito’s philosophy of everyday aesthetics is rooted in her Japanese heritage but expands to examine aspects of the concept globally, so it is with the world-renowned Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, whose international career has

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spanned over sixty years. Up to this point in the book, ma has been discussed mainly in regard to its overtly spiritual applications and its ancient significance: the open sacred space (himorogi) into which kami would descend during Shinto field rituals. This chapter looks more closely at the everyday aspects of ma, particularly as presented in Isozaki’s groundbreaking essay for the original “MA: Space-Time in Japan” exhibition in New York City in 1979, as elaborated on in the introduction to this book. Isozaki posits that the concept of ma has established the “unique spatial perception of the Japanese [which] has created a particularized sense of daily life” (13), a claim echoed by Saito. Although ma is rooted in ancient religio-aesthetics, Isozaki argues that it also is an approach to space-time that can be used in diverse contexts today, both artistically and culturally. He presents and promotes ma as a vital, fecund aesthetic concept with multifarious applications. The strong, inescapable connection between ma and everyday life is elucidated by environmental studies scholar David Orr, who avers that designed objects and environments “structure what we see, how we move, what we eat, our sense of time and space, how we relate to each other, our sense of security, and how we experience the particular places in which we live,” and, in this way, “they structure how we think” (31). Orr’s perspective on the reciprocal impact of the spaces in which we live and the structuration of our mental and emotional perception can be connected to the michiyuki form of ma, the idea that guiding spatial elements orchestrate the movement and interludes of our journeys, whether through life, physical spaces, or cinematic texts (Isozaki 17). Similarly, Yuriko Saito argues that “everyday aesthetic responses often guide people’s actions in the most direct way” (“Aesthetics” sec. 9). Put quite simply, the spaces we inhabit, physical and virtual, shape our worldview and motivate our choices and movements. The following exploration of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life and I Wish will employ the more quotidian ma concepts defined in detail in this book’s introduction—hashi, michiyuki, susabi, utsushimi, and utsuroi—which reflect how ma appears and functions in everyday spaces and experiences. However, as Isozaki makes clear, these types of ma are ineluctably related to their sacred, Shinto roots in himorogi and its syncretic counterpart kekkai. In these films, the boundaries between sacred and secular are ultimately permeable.

Movement, Stasis, and Ma in After Life There is nothing you can see that is not a flower There is nothing you can think that is not the moon. Learn how to listen as things speak for themselves.

—Bashō7 —Bashō (17)

After Life (1998), Kore-eda’s second fiction film, was the first he made after Japan’s twin disasters of 1995, and, appropriately, it looks back from this perspective on

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the tumultuous twentieth century via the memories of its characters. The film is set in a “waystation” between human life and the afterlife, a ma space wherein the recently deceased are asked to choose one memory from life that they want to take with them into eternity. The deceased, referred to as “clients,” make this decision with the help of counselors, who then collaborate with the clients to make a short film of each memory, and, finally, the memory-films are screened, after which the clients vanish into their eternal future. All of this takes place within one week: new clients arrive on Monday, choose their memories by Wednesday evening, make their films on Friday, and screen the films on Saturday. Sundays seem to be the designated day of rest for counselors, although that is not what takes place in the one-week span of After Life. The film proceeds from one Monday morning to the next Monday morning, emulating the shape of samsara’s cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, marking this waystation as a sacred space-time in which a series of rituals take place on a weekly rotation. From this plot description, one might expect that the film’s mise-en-scène would be celestial. Instead, Kore-eda creates a metaphysical waystation that looks like a dilapidated middle school. The exterior and interior of this institutional brick building could be anywhere in the living world, and there are no visual markers of specific religions in the film. This is a spiritual microcosm in a quotidian habitat: the transcendent within the immanent. Here, the capacity of cinema to immortalize human experience makes film itself the vehicle of transcendence. After Life follows the experiences of a handful of clients as they work through this weeklong process, focusing on the relationships between clients and their counselors and between the counselors themselves. In an interesting twist, the counselors are former clients who could or would not choose one memory to take with them into eternity, and they have various motivations for remaining in this limbo. The narrative pays special attention to two younger counselors, Mochizuki and Shiori, as the former is assigned to counsel Watanabe, the man who married Mochizuki’s former fiancé, Kyoko. Mochizuki died in 1943, fighting in World War II, and has not been able to find a happy memory in his short twenty-two years of life, even after more than fifty years as a counselor in the network of waystations (he mentions he has worked in several). Shiori has been at the waystation only for a year, after dying in her late teens, and is being trained by Mochizuki, with whom she clearly is in love. In this momentous week, Mochizuki finally will choose a memory, but in an unconventional way, and Shiori will learn that love entails caring for others, helping them transcend what is obstructing their progress. Indeed, this waystation is a place for growth and learning. However, the building’s shabbiness reflects a matter-of-fact or even negative orientation toward the deteriorating nature of everyday objects rather than the romanticized attitude toward decay and aging of traditional wabi-sabi aesthetics. Like wabi-sabi, though, this worn everydayness bespeaks impermanence (mujō); it is part of a spiritual landscape that souls pass through on their road into eternity. Kore-eda is focused on movement toward a type of redemption through actively making choices; this is not about a Buddhist sort of resignation to the vicissitudes of life, as is attributed to Ozu’s work. Thus, the strange world of After Life is ma: an interval or stop in the

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midst of an ongoing journey, and Kore-eda is most interested in this in-between space, as no information is provided regarding what comes after this weeklong ma. Though this film’s supernatural setting and intensely self-reflexive focus on film are highly unusual in Kore-eda’s oeuvre, its core themes of the complexity of human relationships, memory, and overcoming loss resonate in all of his fiction films and most of his documentaries. Indeed, memory, community, and film itself are significant means of transcendence in his work. While Kore-eda’s sundry approaches to transcendence in After Life depart from the stylistic austerity and concluding mood of quiet resignation Schrader extols in Ozu’s later films, scholars such as David Desser and Marc Yamada have compared After Life to Ozu’s work in ways that connect back to Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film (cf. Desser, “After”; Yamada 9–10). The most overt connections between Kore-eda’s first two narrative films and Schrader’s earlier vision of transcendental style have been made by Desser, who writes that it “is tempting to see the Ozu intertext in Maborosi through the lens of Paul Schrader’s influential, yet often criticized [1972 book]” (“Imagination” 277–78). Desser goes on to summarize Schrader’s three phases of the transcendental style—the everyday, disparity culminating in decisive action, and transcending stasis—and applies this structure effectively to Maborosi’s plot and style (278–80). When later writing about After Life, Desser titled the article “After Life: History, Memory, Trauma and the Transcendent,” an obvious reference to Schrader, though his name does not appear in this piece. Here, Desser offers several illuminating perspectives on the film and also returns, perhaps with less devotion, to the comparison with Ozu and connection to traditional Japanese aesthetics (58–61). However, as has been noted, Kore-eda definitively departs from “Schraderian” transcendental style in After Life by creating a metaphysical diegetic world, even while the aesthetic of the mise-en-scène is realistic. One might describe After Life as a type of magical realism, a supernatural fable, or a fantasy. Kore-eda would not return to this sort of diegesis again until Air Doll in 2009, with its sex doll protagonist coming to life in modern-day Tokyo. Although depictions of the supernatural on screen certainly fall outside the pale of Schrader’s original concept, his 2018 “Rethinking” introduction names Andrei Tarkovsky as the “fulcrum” of change on the way from “transcendental style” to slow cinema (6). In Schrader’s new diagram, Tarkovsky’s work forms the “ring” that divides “theatrical filmmakers” from “art environment” filmmakers (“Rethinking” 32). Schrader’s emphasis has shifted from the sparse realism he championed in the 1972 text, as in Bresson and Ozu, to the dilatory treatment of time: “Tarkovsky stands in a line of documentary observers of life,” such as “contemplative stylists” like Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, Schrader argues (“Rethinking” 7–8). Tarkovsky’s primary goal is time itself: to create “meditative” space that requires a viewer to be present with the image (8). This purposeful slowing of time is paired with “documentary realism,” but the realistic aesthetic can be accompanied by supernatural events or fantastical settings, such as the iconic levitation scene in The Mirror (Tarkovsky 1975) or the space station in Solaris (Tarkovsky 1972). Schrader’s 2017 film First Reformed, which he wrote and directed, includes a few

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fantastical scenes in emulation of Tarkovsky, and he describes First Reformed as his first attempt at “transcendental style.” Therefore, Kore-eda’s otherworldly setting in After Life does fit into Schrader’s updated, more time-focused vision of transcendental style. However, as will be explored, the film juxtaposes stillness with kinesis throughout, highlighting movement across or through edges, giving the sense of utsuroi, markers of change, through a variety of techniques and forms. The acclaimed and prolific Japanese cultural critic Inuhiko Yomota has asserted that Kore-eda’s first two films “tried to cast a new light on Japanese views of life and death,” but it “remains unclear . . . whether this will end up either as an internalized form of Orientalism or as the crystallization of metaphysical searching” (185). Yomota appears to be responding, here, to the work of Schrader, Richie, and Desser. It seems that this eminent Japanese scholar perceives a connection between Kore-eda’s early fiction films and essentializing ideas in Anglophone writing on Japanese cinema. Furthermore, whereas many Western critics and scholars place Kore-eda’s work in the flexible but relatively consistent, auteurfriendly category of “international art film” in the realist vein, Yomota complains, “Kore’eda Hirokazu seems to change style and genre with every film . . . [a]s though filled with the ambition of answering the question of what cinema is” (198–99). Observing from a Japanese perspective, Yomota discerns the inconsistency of Kore-eda’s work. He also is listening to Kore-eda himself, who said in a 2010 interview, “I’m still asking what a film should be, but I’m trying to make films looking at the people in front of me, at the emotions in front of me, without preconceptions” (qtd. in Schilling 11–12). Kore-eda’s goal is to be responsive to the human and historical contexts around him and to change as he grows as an artist and person. In the same interview, when probed about his work’s relationship to that of Ozu and Mikio Naruse, he asserts, “For me it’s best if my films reflect changes in my personal life and my view of life in general. I’m not making movies looking at other movies. Instead, I’m looking at my own times and my own situation and making films based on all that” (13). Thus, it is not surprising, nor is it difficult to see, that his work is more diverse than he is often given credit for by Anglophone critics and scholars. Perhaps this can be attributed to the temptation to squeeze a gifted filmmaker’s work into an auteur-shaped container. It may be easy to ignore the fantastical Air Doll, the revisionist film noir The Third Murder (2017), and Hana (2006), a lighthearted period film that challenges, even mocks, chanbara conventions. Less easy to dismiss is the major shift that happens after Kore-eda’s first three films, which are visually darker and temporally slower than the films that come after. Maborosi, After Life, and Distance are much more in line with Schrader’s original and updated definitions of transcendental style, following in the footsteps of Victor Erice, Theo Angelopoulos, and Tarkovsky. Kore-eda states that his fourth film, Nobody Knows (2005), which was to that point his most commercially successful, was a “breakthrough” for him: In the three films I made before this one, I was much more interested in pursuing the methodology of film, which in the abstract is very important.

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Thus, Yomota hit the nail on the head: Kore-eda’s early fiction films were experimental explorations of what film could be and do, and his films since have been directly responsive to his subject matter, contexts, and actors. (Notably, nothing could be further from Ozu’s approach.) This also draws attention to the fact that his first three fiction films, although they have “slowness” and realistic aesthetics in common, are very different experiments in and with filmmaking, and, in that sense, they are all films about film (cf. Schilling 11). However, After Life is the only one of them that overtly portrays and demystifies the process of filmmaking at the same time it explores its power. Not until The Truth in 2019 would Kore-eda again explore this theme directly. Furthermore, it is the only film set in an entirely imaginary world, a spiritual realm. Despite their experimental use of darkness, stillness, and silence, Kore-eda’s first three fiction films all have human warmth at their core as they explore how to overcome deep loss. Jonathan Ellis contends, “It is precisely this warmth that is the key to Kore-eda’s aesthetic, a way of looking at the world that burns off ideological and national stereotypes” (34). Kore-eda focuses on genuine human pathos, a responsive mono no aware as the profound heart of things. This is at least partially a result of his approach to documentary filmmaking: “With documentary, my stance is just to be there with the subject, passively listening, waiting until the subject wants to speak. . . . I’ve come to realize recently that listening is more difficult than talking, and that bending an ear to a companion’s feelings and thoughts is becoming a lost art” (Ehrlich and Kishi 40). This listening stance is crucial to Kore-eda’s process in making After Life, and it shapes the film’s aesthetic structure: the film demands a listening ear. In the first three days of the film’s narrative time, Monday through Wednesday, Kore-eda uses the common documentary talking-heads set-up—a still, frontal medium shot centered on one person speaking directly to the camera—to present the clients verbally sifting through their memories, telling their stories in their own time. There is no soundtrack music to influence the viewers’ sense of time. Only barely perceptible jump cuts in the midst of shots that are generally over thirty seconds each (sometimes considerably longer) control the space-time journey, our michiyuki. The camera puts the viewer in the position of the interviewer, whose job it is to listen to and help the client choose an eternal memory. Kore-eda, true to his documentary roots, interviewed nearly five hundred people in preparation for this film, asking them all the same question: Which single memory would you take with you into eternity? Some of those interviewed were actors cast in the film and others were non-actors who ended up in the film because of the poignancy of their stories (Desser, “After” 52). Kore-eda’s responsiveness to the stories he heard and then included in the film could be connected to the Buddhist concept of “skillful” or “expedient means” (upaya), what Buddhism

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scholar Peter Hershock has called “responsive virtuosity,” referring playfully both to virtue and keen ability (Chan 152–53). The parable most often used to illustrate upaya is that of the burning house in the Lotus Sutra, in which a father draws his children out of their burning home by promising them different things that suit their desires, such as toys or pets (Hershock, Chan 148–49). The father understands that the truth will not spur the children to move away from the flames that would consume them, so salvation must come from a carefully crafted promise, an attractive mirage. Marc Yamada skillfully applies the concept of upaya to both After Life and I Wish, contending that the idea “highlights the interdependence between fiction and spiritual meaning, suggesting that artifice is not other to truth but can be used to inspire believers to follow the Buddhist path and gain a deeper understanding of their experiences” (4). Yamada believes Kore-eda’s films encourage “detachment from an egocentric perspective,” which “is realized through both the artless realism of documentary and the imagination of fiction” (4–5). Though I would not characterize filmmaking of any kind as “artless,” the crux of Yamada’s point is well taken: crafting and viewing stories—thus filmmaking and film viewing—are skillful means to transcend self-focus and move toward virtuous action aimed at caring for and feeling with others. After Life and I Wish supersede simplistic definitions of documentary and fiction film and depict a transcendence of the soul (literally in the first, figuratively in the second), which involves rituals of passage whereby characters spiritually rise above their existential malaise, allowing them to see wonder in the world, to recognize their connection to others, and to move forward. As argued, Koreeda’s career itself is about movement and responsiveness to people and moments; in that sense, it is about mono no aware, a profound emotional resonance, as Motoori Norinaga describes, rather than the concept’s later association primarily with sadness, which several writers identify with Ozu’s work. In addition, Norinaga argues that everyday aesthetics, including nature, is not only powerful but also should move us emotionally, which Yuriko Saito points out is one of the major goals of everyday aesthetics. Norinaga writes, To know mono no aware is to discern the power and essence, not just of the moon and the cherry blossoms, but of every single thing existing in this world, and to be stirred by each of them, so as to rejoice at happy occasions, to be charmed by what one should consider charming, to be saddened by sad occurrences, and to love what should be loved. Therefore, people who know mono no aware have a heart; those who do not are heartless. (“Mono” 185) Attentiveness to quotidian things is both a crucial cause and result of mono no aware, which leads to experiencing life deeply with one’s heart and mind (kokoro). In After Life, the dead learn to do this by making a memory, an event experienced with the senses, into a film, which distances the memory through cinematic externalization but, as Sobchack asserts, also allows them to feel it more deeply, to identify with themselves. Being responsive to the movement of emotion is key.

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Indeed, being responsive to the images on screen is empathy training, not resignation training. Kore-eda has declared, “The movies I hope to make start to grow inside you after the closing credits. In a way, they start the minute the movie is over” (qtd. in Eagan). Just as the clients’ short films transport their souls into their future existence, wherein they will relive their filmed memory, the film After Life replays in the viewer’s mind, posing questions about our own memories and how we value relationships, things, and experiences that are all too easy to take for granted. As Kristi McKim explains, “After Life understands cinema as memory (which keeps and loses) and the act of spectatorship as transcendence” (78). To implant his fertile films in viewers’ minds, Kore-eda creates various types of gaps, ma, in his works that force the viewer to think, but strong identification with characters and powerful imagery also inspire memorable emotion. These emotions in the viewer are not usually evoked by a climactic event, such as a soaring romantic moment enhanced with overwhelming musical cues; instead, generally, emotion and empathy are built through the everyday, as can be seen in the memories After Life’s clients choose to make into films. Kore-eda wants to make you think and to feel, and this is a potentially transformative journey that starts with the film but does not end with it. After Life contains diverse types of ma: temporal empty spaces, such as long takes characterized by stillness and silence; visual negative space, as in extreme long shots, interstitial black screens, and kū shots; unanswered questions regarding the nature of this waystation and the eternity following; the causes of death for nearly all of the characters; and the parts of the clients’ stories skipped over with jump cuts. Some of these examples of ma ask viewers to ruminate in and/or look more closely at the filmic image, such as pillow shots and empty black screens, while the purposely unanswered questions force viewers to build their own imagined “bridges” (hashi) to fill the gaps in the story. McKim argues that Kore-eda’s “style and theme” in this film mirror what Desser describes as Ozu’s “strategy of narrative ellipsis, . . . the ignoring of the climactic moments in favor of dailiness and the small epiphanies of life” (McKim 79; Desser, Eros 18–19). Desser also directly opines that Kore-eda is emulating Ozu with this tactic in Maborosi (“Imagination” 281). Conversely, Keiko I. McDonald makes distinctions between Kore-eda and Ozu, contending that Kore-eda’s “gift for simplicity lies with visual images and diegetic sounds used as signifiers, inviting us to puzzle them out,” thereby creating physical and metaphorical obfuscation that ignites cogitation, quite unlike Ozu’s illuminated clarity (216). It is evident that Kore-eda is a filmmaker of “structuring absences”: in other words, ma. Dennis Lim, examining the dead son at the center of Still Walking, connects these “structuring absences” to “the departed loved ones in Maborosi and Distance” and “to the offscreen specter of missing parents in Nobody Knows . . . , about four young siblings left to fend for themselves” (5). One could add to this list the actual air in the body of Air Doll’s protagonist, the departed father in Our Little Sister (2015), and the missing biological family members connected to the pseudo-family in Shoplifters (2018). In all of these cases, the journeys of the characters are shaped by what is not there— structuring absences, michiyuki forms of ma, orchestrate their paths.

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In After Life, symbols representing these absences saturate the film, such as pillow shots, a pair of benches whereon characters alive and dead come together and part, the tools of cinematic special effects (e.g., artificial lighting, cotton used for clouds, fans for wind), and the gaps in the clients’ memories that must be filled with filmic confabulation. Pence elaborates on the efficacy and functions of cinematic ellipses in form and narrative: In both aesthetics and ethics, . . . indeterminacy may generate interest, affective involvement, and new possibilities for thought. Our interpretive responses in these instances can be seen to replenish more everyday experience by renovating the individual’s capacities for thought and action. I am concerned here principally with dilemmas of choice making at the edge of our understanding of what beauty and justice might be. (40, my emphasis) This is particularly apposite to Kore-eda’s work, which focuses on everyday aesthetics, especially defamiliarizing the familiar, and specifically to After Life, which is about making choices in order to move forward with a new appreciation for and comprehension of life itself. The diegetic world of this film, the waystation and its environs, is itself a ma, an in-between space or pause that shapes the characters’ next steps. If Kore-eda has his wish, the film itself might serve as that type of ma for its viewers as well. This ma is both structural and spiritual. Pence posits an “understanding [of] the spiritual as the mediating interval between the finite and the infinite, . . . the critical interval between the ethical and the ineffable” (42–43, my emphasis). The waystation is, quite literally, a mediating (and mediated) interval that renders the ineffable, the afterlife, visible. In this sense, the waystation can be compared to the Buddhist idea of the enlightened “Middle Path”: “a healing restoration of the normally excluded middle ground between ‘is’ and ‘is-not,’ between cause and effect, mind and matter, self and other, and independence and dependence” (Hershock, Chan 11). This nondualistic view of reality allows one to look up at the ultimate and down at the material world, in keeping with Nishitani’s concept of trans-descendence. Kore-eda gives us a very earthy depiction of a spiritual world that is a hashi to “the other side,” whatever that might be. This is purposely left a mystery. It reflects what Sobchack calls a “figural strategy,” which “presents the transcendent and the transcendental not only as immaterial but also as ultimately ungraspable through and in immanence. Thus films . . . sublimate transcendence as an apprehended figural gap in visual representation, . . . constituted through editorial ellipses [and] visible ‘openness’” (202). After Life’s many types of figural gaps make room for the transcendent but also inspire the understanding that we always are editing versions of our lives and ourselves in memories and dreams (asleep and awake). With the proliferation of social media, this insight is even more significant now than it was in 1998. The plot of After Life foregrounds the worldmaking properties of memory. Slippery and ephemeral though they may be, memories powerfully shape our

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identity, and so do our everyday experiences. Saito points out that “artifacts and built environments . . . exert an inordinate amount of influence in our lives. By creating them and interacting with them, we are all participating in the project of world-making on a daily basis” (Everyday 205). Thus, we create our own misesen-scène; although, like filmmakers, the environments we create must conform to our limited resources and collaboration with stakeholders generally is required. This plays out in front of our eyes in After Life, as the counselors pull together the materials and equipment to re-create their clients’ memories. S. Brent Plate asserts that “myths and rituals operate like films” insomuch as they “participate in the larger processes of worldmaking” (8). Everyday activities also are ritualistic: they take place repeatedly as part of a set schedule, underscored in this film by its marked Monday to Monday time span; each day is announced in the morning with a title overlay naming the day. One of the chief strategies of slow cinema is repetition of images and sounds, which control the viewers’ movement through the space-time of a film, often drawing attention to ignored quotidian details that could be experienced as extraordinary. Anthropologist Mary Douglas notes that “a ritual provides a frame. The marked off time or place alerts a special kind of expectancy” (78). This is a precise description of the ancient Shinto origins of ma, the himorogi roped off and consecrated as the sacred space into which the kami would descend, abide for a time, then depart. This is the ki-charged space-time of utsuroi, “the expectant stillness of the moment attending this kind of change” (Isozaki 15). Throughout After Life, Kore-eda creates this feeling of expectancy with his use of pillow shots, lingering black screens between scenes, and the frequent use of shots far longer than the conventional average of around five seconds (Pramaggiore and Wallis 209). Even long takes, shots of over a minute, are common in the film, and these often serve as contemplative space, slowing our sense of time passing. In this way, Kore-eda never lets the viewers forget they are in “framed” space-time, and, like himorogi or kekkai, this cinematic susabi is “an empty place where various phenomena appear, pass by, and disappear” (Isozaki 16). Even when a film image appears to be still, the frames or digital information are still in process, moving forward; our perception of spacetime is orchestrated within the frame. As Plate contends, “Through the technology of cinema—through camera lens, editing room, and projection equipment—a new world is assembled and presented on-screen. Viewers see and hear the world, but in entirely new ways because everyday perceptions of space and time are altered” (12). Of course, Kore-eda makes this explicit in After Life not only in its cinematic language but also in the many images of the film production process, from location scouting, to pre-production meetings, to special effects used while shooting on set, to the screening room from which clients vanish after their memory-film concludes. Self-reflexively, filmmaking is shown as a weekly ritual performed in a spiritual, liminal space wherein the dead reflect on their pasts, their mundane lives, and create a film that will define their futures. As the “reconfiguration of space and time into a singular aesthetic experience is . . . a key trait of ritual,” After Life demonstrates that filmmaking and film viewing can be seen as world-shaping rituals that transcend the boundaries between life and death (Plate 114).

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While After Life contains elements of slow cinema discussed up to this point, it is crucial to examine how the film alternates between techniques that portray stillness and silence and those that capture movement, brisk activity, and even chaos. Interestingly, Kore-eda uses varieties of documentary techniques to do both, such as handheld follow shots and the static talking-heads set-up. A close look at the opening scenes of the film illustrates this well. It opens with a black screen, and we hear a man’s voice talking as there is a fade into a bouncy handheld shot following two pairs of dark-trousered legs climbing stairs. The title “Monday” appears on the bottom of the frame. The morning sun pours into the stairwell from a large window, and lens flares and light shafts punctuate the shot as the voice explains the unrelenting focus on sexual exploits by his client the week before. The film’s second shot finally reveals the faces of these two men in another handheld shot, this time a frontal medium shot moving with them through a comparatively shadowy hallway, where dull gray and white walls and conventional double doors in the background reveal the institutional nature of this place. Low-key lighting and the absence of decoration emphasize this. The man, whom we soon learn is Kawashima, tells his young colleague that this client chose “a holiday with his wife” in the end. These are our first clues regarding what they do in this strange, unremarkable place. The camera follows these two as they pass by it on their way into a workroom full of desks, where a few others are already cleaning. In cinéma-vérité style, the camera actively explores the room, revealing the educational mise-en-scène, full bookshelves on the wall and desks in the center, while providing glimpses of the workers moving swiftly in their cleaning tasks, some complaining of the cold. Multiple panning movements and lens flares in this haphazard handheld shot capture the kinetic sense of a Monday morning workplace. Soon, the boss strolls in, bids them good morning, explains how many clients they “processed” the week before, and assigns seven or eight new clients for this week to each of the three male employees. A lone young woman, Shiori, has been seen sweeping quietly in the background, but she has not been addressed. Remarkably, this is all one long take, stretching one minute and twenty seconds, and in it the camera breaks the 180-degree rule several times. All of this results in a sense of documentary realism in an everyday world. The details that this is a Monday morning, that cleaning is the first task, that new assignments have been issued, and that it is surprisingly cold all mark both a place in time and movement from one time-space into another, a sense of passing through temporal “edges” (utsuroi): a new week, a clean slate, new undertakings, and a new season. The second scene in After Life brings an abrupt cessation of movement. The film cuts from the bustling workroom to a perfectly still, symmetrical long shot from inside the building, looking out through a broad doorway, framed by a second set of open doors closer to the camera. These two doorways form the entrance and exit of a vestibule, an interstitial space. This static forty-five second shot has an air of mystery, enhanced by its stillness but embodied by the thick, backlit fog shrouding and seeping into the entrance as well as the church or temple bells ringing during this quiet scene. Silhouetted individuals, one at a time, emerge from the mist like ghosts and approach a barely visible window in the vestibule, where

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Figure 5.1 The clients in After Life (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda 1998) enter the waystation as the bells toll on Monday morning.

they give their names to check into the waystation. The first person to do so tells the invisible clerk, “My name is Takahashi,” and perhaps this is a coincidence, but his name means tall or high bridge (hashi), and this might be seen as a clue, along with the mist and bells, of what this world is: an otherworldly bridge to the next place or other shore. The sound of the bells is reminiscent of John Donne’s famous, foreboding assertion: “[N]ever send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” (1B: 1667). At the end of the film, when we understand where we are, this shot appears again as the next Monday ushers in a new crop of clients, beginning the new cycle as the bells chime. In this sense, the plot could be described as having a mandala-like circular shape, but each person must meditate on their own lives rather than the virtues of the sacred Buddhas. Although this is a supernatural place, it is oriented toward the immanent world; it is not like the liminal space of Tibetan Buddhism’s bardo, wherein the dead are judged. This hashi week is about valuing what you had in life, recognizing its significance, which is a more human than cosmic perspective. The opaque mist in this scene reflects Seigow Matsuoka’s assertion that clouds and mist symbolize a “cluster” of ki, spiritual power, in traditional Japanese aesthetics: “the tie linking the natural with the supernatural was a morphology of clouds, their myriad changes and forms” (56). He connects this with “MA: the magnetic field from which the ch’i [ki] of kami subtly emanates” (56). Although the waystation is bereft of visual symbols of any particular religion, and even references to Japan, these human bodies materializing from the bright fog remind us

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that humans can become kami, in particular, sacred deceased ancestors, which we shortly learn they are. Thus, this shot symbolically represents a spiritually charged atmosphere that contrasts starkly with the workaday world witnessed in the first scene. In addition, whereas the first shots in the film are intensely kinetic with a documentary vérité feel, this motionless shot is precisely structured, with multiple frames within the frame, asking viewers to observe its artistic, painterly aplomb for its static forty-five-second duration. Matsuoka, like Isozaki, explains that this type of juxtapositional style is rooted in early Shinto sacred space: “The [power] of the kami’s coming and going was to pervade the structure of homes, the structure of tea houses, literature, arts, and entertainment, and it has developed into the characteristic Japanese ‘aesthetic of stillness and motion’” (56). This movement between starkly different styles and rhythms reminds viewers that this is a fictional world, and we are being guided through it by the orchestrating hand of a director, who plans our intervals of action and rest (michiyuki). Throughout the film, Kore-eda alternates between stillness and movement in this way. He also provides a number of repeated camera set-ups, some static and others moving, along with several important symbols, many of which conflate the everyday with the sacred. For instance, after all the clients have been informed of the schedule for the week and their task of choosing one memory, they are dispersed to their assigned “counselors,” whose job it is to help each one select their “eternal memory.” During these first three days, the most repeated shots are the still, frontal medium shots of the clients from the counselors’ points of view and the profile medium long shots of counselor and client sitting across from each other with the table separating the two (but also forming a hashi connecting them). While these frontal talking-heads shots are standard in documentary filmmaking, they are very different from the handheld vérité style used in other parts of the film, such as the opening shots and those during the shooting of the memory-films on Friday. Another difference is the fact that these “conference rooms” are quite bare; there are no colorful bookshelves or distracting activities in the background. The three rooms are all fairly blank, with dull tones, and several clients are interviewed in each room every day, such that when Koreeda cuts between different interviews, effectively creating interview montages, it can be a bit disorienting, unlike the careful, clarifying structure of most documentaries. The stillness of these head shots forces us to listen to the clients’ stories as they tell them at their own pace and in their own way, mirroring the active listening Kore-eda learned while making documentaries. In the Monday sequence, as Desser notes, there is a stretch with fourteen “straight-on head shots of fourteen different clients” in succession (“After” 62). The length of these shots varies greatly, from four to forty-five seconds, with most of the longer shots placed at the end of the montage (62–63). During these identically shot interview sequences, Kore-eda uses discrete but noticeable jump cuts in the midst of individuals’ stories to compress time, reminding viewers that what we are watching is orchestrated fiction. Also repeated in the film are the pillow shots of empty hallways. These feature two main hallways: one on the ground floor lined with windows and usually

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shown during the day and the other on the second level, running between the stairs and the workroom, which is dark or light depending on the time of day, though that proves to be deceptive. Both hallways feature closed doors at the end, thresholds reminding us that these long corridors are symbolic hashi, representing the waystation’s role as a bridge between one life and the next and also emulating the function of the pillow shot itself as a reflective interval (or corridor) between scenes. There are a handful of pivotal hallway shots that are not technically pillow shots as they include characters. The most consequential of these features Shiori and Mochizuki moving through light and shadow. In one lovely transitional shot, Shiori walks through visible sunbeams streaming into the ground floor hallway windows. The young counselor Mochizuki is seen more than once walking down the long upper-floor hallway at night, passing through shadows and isolated puddles of light. This reflects Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s famous claim regarding Japanese aesthetics: “[W]e find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates” (30; cf. this book’s introduction). The shifts between light and dark, as those between kinesis and stasis, are markers of spatio-temporal edges, which could signify the movement or lack of boundaries between secular and sacred spaces. This applies also to the pillow shots appearing between the days of the week, which are all long shots of the exterior of the plain brick building and its nondescript garden from various vantage points. A single metal bench with a lamppost beside it serves as an orienting landmark in the garden and is a key symbol of the everyday and human relationships, as will be discussed. These pillow shots never give us a complete view of this mysterious yet mundane building or even hint at what lies outside its immediate environs; these are not orienting establishing shots. The exterior pillow shots also inspire questions about the seasons in this odd place. The weather over the course of the week changes extremely from what appears in Monday’s opening shot to be late autumn, though some greenery remains, to heavy winter snowfall in Saturday’s six introductory pillow shots, each between six and ten seconds long, slowing the time greatly as we move toward that day’s screening, marking the departure of the week’s “successful” clients, and the emotional culmination of Shiori and Mochizuki’s journey. Pillow shots, a term coined by Noël Burch, are “cutaway still-lifes” that “suspend the diegetic flow” in a film, providing space-time for rumination (160–61). Burch, along with Thompson and Bordwell, argues that Ozu perfected the art of the pillow shot, which is a key motivating factor for the comparisons between Kore-eda and Ozu (Burch 161; Thompson and Bordwell 54). However, perhaps more suitable in regard to Kore-eda’s work is the concept of filmic “dead time,” defined as long takes or shots well exceeding typical length and characterized by stillness of and within the frame. These shots may or may not have living creatures in them, but there is little to no movement; it is frozen time. One of the filmmakers Kore-eda most admires, Theo Angelopoulos, describes his use of dead time as “musical” and “rhythmic,” explaining, “the pauses, the ‘dead time,’ give the spectator the chance to assess the film rationally but also to create, or complete, the different meanings of a sequence” (qtd. in Mitchell 32). Dead time

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also refers to moments when cuts are delayed, such as a shot staying in an empty room after characters have exited or beginning before characters enter. Yamada notes that Kore-eda himself calls these reflective moments “dead time” (10). Like other slow cinema techniques, Schrader argues, “ ‘Dead time’ (temps mort) is predicated on the active viewer,” and, he contends, there is a “fundamental difference between being slow to create mood,” as with pillow shots, and “being slow to activate the viewer” (“Rethinking” 9). Keiko I. McDonald alludes to this distinction when she writes that “Ozu makes us feel intuitively, while Kore-eda makes us think” (217). Dead time, of course, both evokes mood and engages the viewer’s mind, and Kore-eda uses it for these purposes in his films, but he also uses it to plant seeds in the viewer’s head that will grow after the film ends, as he states. In After Life, however, the whole film is temps mort, literally a diegetic spacetime containing the dead. The film is “dead time” also in that it is an interval between human life and “eternity.” Kore-eda uses dead time within dead time, then. Not surprisingly, time itself is a curious, protean thing at the waystation. While time is carefully marked with clear breaks between day and night and titles announcing the start of each day, time also is fluid and relative in this spiritual world. Kore-eda’s humorous portrayal of the moon, another natural temporal marker, also represents time as unmoored. In Thursday’s introductory morning shots, we see a waystation workman in a “company” jumpsuit on the building’s roof; in an eye-level full shot of the man, a viewer might be able to work out that he is cleaning “moon props.” That is, he is wiping off a number of “masks” on handles that are put over an artistic rendering of the full moon to make the moon appear to be moving through its normal monthly cycles. Right next to him, there is a rectangular black box, on the bottom of which appears to be a painted full moon. Put these signifiers together, and the close watcher sees a cinematic joke and intertextual sign pointing directly at the artifice of film, the contingency of perception (a real building but a fake moon?), and, perhaps, a nod to Georges Méliès’s daring Trip to the Moon (1902). Cinema creates magical spaces wherein time is a malleable, convenient fiction as opposed to the rigid, inconvenient truth that is mundane time.

Everyday Memories in (the) After Life Monday through Wednesday, the counselors (and viewers) listen to the memories of the clients as they describe them in Kore-eda’s still, talking-heads shots. However, in the evenings, the camera and the counselors loosen up as we see shots of them enjoying their hobbies, such as reading, listening to music, cultivating plants, and playing chess. Sometimes counselors relax together and chat over Earl Grey tea, of which they all seem to be fond. Montages of these everyday activities throughout the film capture the pleasure and comfort of the everyday experienced as ordinary. These juxtapose with the all-counselor meetings that also take place at night, which several times are shot with handheld cameras and contain unusual editing emphasizing the varying energy, tensions, and pathos of the discussions among the counselors and manager. We get to know the personalities of the counselors as we see their daily habits and activities and how these individuals relate

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to one another. It is clear, for instance, that the two young counselors, Mochizuki and Shiori, are friends; despite the facts that he is her trainer and the two had lived in very different eras, they share a love of reading and interact regularly outside of work meetings. After the first long day of interviews, Mochizuki complains to Kawashima that he has two “problem” clients, Watanabe (age 70) and Yamamoto (50), who insist that they had “average lives” and so are struggling to come up with a stand-out moment. Kawashima confirms that these are the worst type: people who can perceive nothing in their lives as extraordinary. However, the day after this conversation, Yamamoto, after again calling his life “very ordinary,” looks back at his childhood and chooses a moment of quiet happiness: as a middle school student, he was riding on a street car the day before summer vacation, enjoying the breeze flowing past and anticipating summer. As a youth, he was still capable of feeling joy and even wonder in everyday moments such as this one, a moment of ma marking the movement (utsuroi) into a season of play (susabi). While memories of childhood from the perspective of adulthood are sometimes the key to completing this waystation process, the actual youth and immaturity of some of the newly dead can be a hindrance. Kawashima has a particularly difficult twenty-one-year-old, Iseya, whose attitude toward the whole memory-choice endeavor is defiant. Iseya quickly works out that at the waystation there is no judgment of one’s virtuous or evil behavior during life; thus, there are no heavens or hells, and all of that morality claptrap was utterly moot: it was all a lie, and he will not comply with the “assignments” of any more authorities. Through Iseya, Kore-eda reinforces a core theme of the film: the stories we tell ourselves and others can be skillful means (upaya) to support growth that moves us forward toward transcendence of various kinds. Indeed, the memory-films themselves are upaya. Over the course of the week, Iseya steadfastly refuses to pick a memory, but he eventually claims that he is doing so only to “take responsibility” for his life, which we can assume was full of bad behavior. In the end, Iseya is his own judge and jury; he, evidently, does believe that there is some merit in virtue after all because he “sentences” himself to the job of counseling others at the waystation. Another young client, a woman in her mid-teens, tells her counselors, Mochizuki with trainee Shiori, that she has chosen a memory of a fun day at Disneyland. Reaction shots of Shiori show her concern during this interview. However, afterward, we see a long shot of Shiori moving down the ground floor hallway, crossing through bright diagonal shafts of sunlight; and then there is a cut to an exterior porch space (another liminal space for taking breaks). Here, Shiori hands the teen a mug of hot tea, a simple pleasure, and gently explains to her that Disneyland is a commonly chosen memory for girls her age, but it lacks depth. Shiori, only eighteen herself, has gained insight and maturity in her year of training at the waystation. This short scene is bathed in the warmth of the quotidian: beams of sunlight, steaming mugs, and a quiet, intimate chat. The young woman ends up choosing a memory from when she was only three and had her head on her mother’s lap as her mother was cleaning her ears; she recalls the summer breeze, the laundry flapping on the line, and the smell of her mother, “She was so soft and warm. It felt so familiar.” The profundity of experiencing and appreciating the everyday as

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ordinary is evident in the girl’s eventual choice of memory, which is presaged by this early scene in which Shiori extends maternal care to the young woman. Another telling case of immaturity takes this theme in a new direction. Nishimura appears to be a proverbial “little old lady,” but we learn, along with her counselor, Kawashima, that her mental development ceased at age nine, so she lives in her childhood memories. On Tuesday morning, we see a long shot of her oddly picking up small, indecipherable items from the ground in the garden, which she later sets out on the interview table in front of her: leaves, small stones, twigs, acorns. When Kawashima asks her if she got married or had children in life, she ignores the questions and continues to focus on her rather prosaic nature collection, asking him if they have flowers there. Kawashima replies that there are flowers in spring while Nishimura fusses over a green gingko leaf, a symbol of longevity and endurance. Nishimura has experienced life from the perspective of a child and is unbothered by the adult signifiers of achievement, such as marriage, kids, or money; instead, she is pleased with small pieces of nature and seeks out nature’s beautiful events, such as the emergence of the cherry blossoms, which she asks about specifically and ends up choosing as her eternal memory. At one point, the counselors wonder what Nishimura thinks when she looks at herself in the mirror and encounters the disjunction between the time marked on her aging body and her childlike consciousness. This provides another image of time unfixed, as past and present are layered and interlaced, as with all memory. Kawashima clearly is touched by his interaction with Nishimura and her simple, childlike wonder. He tells her of his precious daughter, Sakurako (little cherry blossom), who was only a toddler when Kawashima died. In fact, we learn that Kawashima has chosen to stay at the waystation only to watch his daughter grow to adulthood, though he sees her but once a year during the Obon festival (one of the few direct references to Buddhism in the film). He is paternal toward the elderly Nishimura, and it is she, on her final day at the waystation, who quietly hands him a small bag of pink paper petals from the shooting of her memory-film. That quintessential symbol of Japan, the cherry blossom, here is used to represent hope, wonder, and appreciation of the beauty of life, not only evanescence and the inevitability of loss. Moreover, these petals are fake; they are signifiers rather than the thing itself, just like memories and films. These types of representations of phenomena and experiences are skillful means to bring comfort, to imbue hope, and to evoke reflection, as After Life itself. Although it is easy to perceive childlike wonder in nature and the everyday as naïve and immature, through Nishimura, Kore-eda sends a clear message that we would do well to pay more attention to the wonders of nature around us. There are other significant approaches to everyday experience that surface in the memories of the clients. Two older clients remember momentous historical events in Japan’s turbulent twentieth century, but the memories they choose emphasize experiencing the ordinary as extraordinary, indeed, as transcendent, during times of extreme terror. A woman recounts living through the massive Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 in Tokyo when she was nine years old. Her family fled to a bamboo grove, out of harm’s way, and she and the other kids

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there tied a rope between two trees and used it as a swing. The few families in the grove made rice over a fire and shared a simple meal. This memory renders a terrifying moment “everyday” with a playful activity, a diversion or break (susabi) from the fear, and with comfort food. Later, when the counselors are shooting her memory-film in an actual bamboo grove, the spiritual connection between the rope-swing and the shimenawa that mark trees as sacred becomes clear: this is a spiritually charged, ki-filled space of refuge. As she retells her story, the whole filmmaking staff gathers around to listen attentively; she speaks of the devastation of the quake and the fires but also of the gruesome, xenophobic massacre of six thousand Koreans that took place. Although After Life is not focused on politics, Desser insightfully notes that “in recalling not just the earthquake, but the killing of Koreans in the trauma of the earthquake, Kore-eda deftly brings up not just the Great Kantō Earthquake and the anti-Korean riots, but a whole history of Korean subjugation and discrimination in Japan” (“After” 57). Here, Kore-eda highlights the importance and power of collective historical memory and its impact on personal memory. This woman remembers a moment of personal and familial transcendence, of physical survival in dire times, but her story also is significant as a cautionary tale about history that is recounted in 1998, when right-wing nationalism again was on the rise in Japan (Ko 19–20). Another significant moment in Japan’s history arises when we listen to an old man recount a suspenseful story about his experience as a soldier in World War II, but his tale begins with a complaint about the rationing of salt. He explains that he was alone, extremely hungry, and surrounded by US troops. He figured he was as good as dead anyway, so he asked for cigarettes and food, which, to his surprise, they provided for him after taking him into custody. The man remembers their kindness to him warmly and expresses his delight in that simple meal, with salt. This is the memory he chooses. Once again, an everyday activity, eating rice, is set in extraordinary circumstances and is cherished and savored because of its remarkable framing. Another older woman chooses her joyful reunion with her fiancé after the war on a bridge, where they used to meet, explaining that it felt like they were all alone, which is how she remembers it, though she admits the bridge must have been full of people. This is another testament to the subjectivity of memory, the way it is shaped by emotions and the passage of time, which also is underscored by the jump cuts in this scene. There is clear symbolism in this woman’s memory: the hashi the two lovers are standing on is also the ma marking the pause between war and peace, their entrance into postwar life as a married couple, leaving the horrors of war behind and moving into their wondrous quotidian future. There are a few clients in this group who have lived such horrible lives that they either lie about their memories (to themselves and their counselors) or choose to erase the past entirely. In these cases, everyday experience is something to be avoided at all costs. A middle-aged woman who was a career prostitute describes feeling like the heroine in a film when waiting for a lover to meet her at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, but she admits that he said he had never loved her and she later learned he was married. When her counselor sympathetically confronts her with the fact that this hotel had been demolished before the date of the event she

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describes, she confesses that though she did await her lover at a hotel, he did not show up that night. She had embellished, setting the memory in an idealized hotel and creating a new ending in which her “hero” appears. She is not allowed to make a film of her imagined memory, so she chooses to “eternalize” the memory of her joyful anticipation as she was awaiting her lover. It is a moment on the expectant brink (ma) of happiness, as with the man remembering being a child on the edge of summer break. The emotions of these moments are what makes them transcendent, not the outcomes of them. In other words, transcendence appears in the process of the journey and its attendant faith in the future, not in the destination of a paradise or Pure Land. Perhaps the saddest case is a middle-aged man who solemnly admits, “I have only bad memories.” At the end of the day on Wednesday, when time is running out, he asks if he will forget everything else about his life if he chooses a memory. When Mochizuki confirms this, the man says, “Well, then that really is heaven.” He chooses a childhood memory from his junk-filled hide-out, in total darkness. Here, choosing a memory is about forgetting rather than remembering, much like Freud’s concept of screen memories, confabulated or heavily “edited” memories that “serve to repress and replace objectionable or disagreeable impressions” (Freud 20–21). This, of course, also can be a strong motivation for watching a film: escaping or transcending one’s own troubled thoughts or trauma. The rebelclient, Iseya, pushes Kawashima to allow him to create his own “screen memory,” asking if he can choose a dream or a projection of his desired future instead of a memory. This is on Thursday, after nearly everyone has chosen a memory, but Iseya remains resistant, so he is the only one still caught in a static talking-head shot. In two still shots stretching a minute and a half, sutured by one barely visible jump cut, Iseya questions his assigned task and the very premise of After Life: But those are just memories. And ultimately, we end up turning memories into our own images. Of course, it really happened, so it feels very real, but . . . [pause] say I construct the future, as though I’m making a film about it. . . . I think what I create would feel a lot more real than some memory. . . . And that’s a lot more meaningful than looking back at the past. [jump cut] So this looking back at the past, living with a single moment from my past, would be too painful for me. Here and elsewhere in the film, Kore-eda acknowledges this conundrum: what we perceive as reality in our memory is not a verisimilar representation of what we experienced, for a multitude of reasons. The very idea of re-creating what is already an imperfect memory in the form of a film and displaying all the collaborative work and tricks that go into making these memory-films communicate that there is enormous value in telling our stories and that our memories serve purposes both personal and communal. Truth or verisimilitude is not the point. What is most important is collaborating on a vision from and of your life in such a way that you comprehend your interconnectedness with the people, things, and events around you, and understand that your identity and experiences are never singular.

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This “feeling with others,” experiencing empathy, is Norinaga’s definition of mono no aware, and Makoto Ueda describes it as a mode of awareness: “to feel with a person or thing means to know the person or the thing thoroughly” (Literary 202– 03). Norinaga explains, “Living in this world, a person sees, hears, and meets all kinds of events. If he takes them into his heart and feels the hearts of the events, the cores of the facts—he knows mono no aware” (qtd. in Ueda, Literary 203). A crucial way of doing this is reflecting on life and being mindful of everyday experiences, truly appreciating what is good and pleasurable, and working on ameliorating what is not when possible. Memories, like films, are a kind of “Middle Path” between the ground of the real and the illusory nature of our perception and imagination. By these skillful means, films, like memories, can facilitate feeling with others. Indeed, Roger Ebert has declared, “Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts,” a point Kore-eda illustrates brilliantly in After Life (“Ebert’s”). The most pivotal of the problematic cases at the waystation, however, is that of the seventy-year-old Watanabe, who, appropriately, wears all gray.8 He tells Mochizuki that he is not a reflective person and can remember nothing special about his life: he had no kids, no hobbies, and his marriage was “very, very ordinary.” He served in World War II, got married, worked for a steel company, and retired. His life was “just so-so.” Mochizuki reports in an evening counselors’ meeting that Watanabe insists that he wants to choose “some evidence of life,” something extraordinary. An older counselor responds, “Evidence of life? That sounds good, but most people don’t leave anything like that behind. A little late to look for it here.” When Watanabe starts reviewing videotapes of his life to jar his memory (there is one tape for each year), we learn that he was an activist at university and said exactly this, that he wanted to make a positive impact on the world, to leave “evidence” of his life.9 There was a time, then, when Watanabe wanted a more than “ordinary” life, and perhaps it was this desire that led him to be disappointed with his life in the end. However, as the counselor says, most people do not have this kind of “evidence,” which seems more like proof of being recognized by others than a measure of a life’s value. As we watch excerpts from Watanabe’s video tapes along with him, it is evident that his wife Kyoko was a kind woman who cared for him and that he essentially ignored her. Watanabe begins to understand what he had in life and how he failed to see what was right in front of him. He admits to Mochizuki that he has realized his marriage was better for him than for Kyoko, finally showing some compassion. After watching all the tapes, Watanabe at last chooses a moment from early autumn, shortly before his wife died. They are sitting on a metal park bench, surrounded by fall colors, the cicadas chirping, and discussing how they would go to the movies once a month now that he is retired. They finally have time together. It is a sweet, peaceful moment between them, though they sit a distance apart. Watanabe tells Mochizuki that this was the first time in forty years he had taken her to the movies, even though she told him on their very first date that she loved American films, which we have witnessed in a video he reviews of that occasion. In After Life, there are no passionate speeches about appreciating what you have, as in its namesake It’s a Wonderful Life (dir. Frank Capra 1946); After Life’s Japanese title in katakana is

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Wonderful Life (Wandafuru raifu).10 Nonetheless, Kore-eda communicates quietly through Watanabe’s storyline that people should look for the extraordinary in the everyday while they have the chance, or at least they should enjoy the ordinary as ordinary and be grateful for it, valuing the people and things around them. The most dramatic relationship arc in After Life takes place between Shiori and Mochizuki. Although both characters are quiet, reserved people, her romantic feelings for him are obvious. Mochizuki is congenial with and supportive of Shiori, but he also is cagey and a bit distant. He seems to be wrestling with his own memories. As he helps Watanabe, a man of his own generation, Mochizuki realizes that Kyoko was his fiancée before he left for the war in which he would perish. Kyoko later accepted an arranged marriage with Watanabe. This upsets Mochizuki, who asks to be removed from the case but is denied. Although a senior counselor says in a meeting that counselors should not identify with their clients, Kore-eda makes it very clear in the film that the best experiences at the waystation for both clients and counselors grow from making genuine human connections, caring for and about others. Mochizuki remains silent about Kyoko until the end of the week, but he seems envious of Watanabe’s life and saddened by Kyoko’s lonely marriage. Meanwhile, Shiori notices Mochizuki’s sad gaze at Kyoko while watching Watanabe’s videos and figures it out for herself. Throughout the week, we witness Shiori quietly facing challenges, trying to help clients, and finding solace in everyday activities. At Tuesday night’s meeting, the counselors discuss a client who has chosen a memory from only six months old, and they share their own first childhood memories: drinking warm tea, sunlight glinting off a bus pass (a symbol of freedom), and the lovely silence of snow. These memories, like most in the film, are of multisensory everyday experiences, but they also reveal the openness of children to finding wonder in the mundane, as reinforced by Nishimura’s character. The head counselor explains that some people are able to remember back to when they were in the womb and that research says, “If you close your eyes and immerse yourself in water, the memory of the sense of security of being inside your mother can help with anxiety and other conditions.” There is a medium close-up of Shiori’s thoughtful face here, and what immediately follows is a humorous but sweet bit of editing. There is a brief shot of a cardboard “Bath Occupied” sign outside a door then a medium shot of a full, steaming bathtub at what would be seated eye-level, but all we see is the top of someone’s wet head for ten full seconds. When the head comes up for air, we see it is Shiori, who rubs her face, evidently decides her anxiety remains, and sinks back down under the water’s surface. This is a perfect example of Kore-eda portraying quotidian sensory experiences as comforting. In this case, Shiori purposely attempts to experience a hot bath as extraordinarily healing and soothing, to conjure an aura of security at a vulnerable moment.11 One of the most perplexing scenes in After Life takes place on Thursday, when Shiori goes out to scout locations for the memory-films. Upset by Mochizuki’s affection for Kyoko, she leaves the immediate grounds of the waystation and heads out into a city, which looks very much like modern-day Tokyo. The montage of Shiori’s scouting alternates between distant still shots and unstable

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handheld shots, but several of the still shots are at unusually high or low angles. At one point, there is a ten-second shot looking straight up at the bare branches of a tree, silhouetted diagonally against blue sky—composed much like a Japanese sumi-e (black ink painting)—and there is a hint of buds just starting to emerge from the branches. A cut to a long shot of Shiori with her camera tells us that it is she who framed this sumi-e, as she sits on a bench with leafy green trees and bushes behind it and pivots to photograph a pigeon. Is it spring here and not the waystation’s autumn? The normal city noises—traffic, people, machines—seem quite loud after the hushed world of the waystation, and it is unclear if the people around Shiori can see her as she shoots photographs. Is this the land of the living? In her wanderings, she pauses in front of an odd purple structure featuring a clock face with red lights at the top; it towers behind Shiori in a handheld, low-angle medium shot that circles her. We hear the tick-tock of the clock and a tinkling melody; however, the clock is difficult to “read” visually or sonically, as with “The Westminster Chimes” that can be heard at various moments at the waystation. Time is present, but it is mutable, unfixed. Kore-eda does not provide answers; the questions evoked are structuring absences (ma) that spawn thought. True to form, Kore-eda cuts from a long shot of Shiori on a noisy city street to a dark, quiet production meeting that evening at the waystation, where Kawashima is shuffling through the photos Shiori took that day. Frustrated, he tells her the photos are “useless” and will not help them create settings for the films. She mopily responds, “They were pretty,” which leads to a startlingly personal quarrel between them, more familial than collegial. This sequence, including Shiori’s scouting and the counselors’ meeting, raises another question: Is everyday beauty worth paying attention to even if it seems worthless? Is it worth preserving on film? This question is answered by After Life itself, both in its plot and in the beauty of some of the images shot in and around this ramshackle building. The paint we see peeling off its walls and its relentless dull grays and browns are not what one would call wabi-sabi; there is no refinement or cultivated humility that poetically reminds us of mujō, just plain old decay. As film viewers, the dilapidation is framed for us, so we might perceive it as wabi-sabi, but there is nothing elegant about living in that environment. Nonetheless, the way light flows into the dusty hallways in ethereal shafts and the sight of old books leaning against each other in disheveled bookshelves reveal that there is beauty worth noticing and preserving in this everyday world, if you stop to observe it, which viewers do because Kore-eda makes us linger on these details. In the production meeting, an exasperated Kawashima asks another vital question: “What’s the point of all our work? Recreating memories for the dead. What are we doing it for?” In other words, Kore-eda is interrogating his own vocation: What is the point of making films? He answers this from a filmmaker’s perspective with a jump cut from the quiet part of the meeting into the heart of creative, collaborative activity and discussion about how to make each of the clients’ memory-films: colors, props, costumes, special effects, and even symbolism are meticulously and energetically examined in multiple handheld shots, sometimes panning between people instead of cutting, communicating the joyful chaos of working with a creative team. These self-reflexive conversations about how to create cinematic illusions remind

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us that we are watching the product of such a process. The counselor-filmmakers demonstrate what it means to care for others by creatively orchestrating films that transport clients to the next stage of their (after-) lives. These counselors collaborate for a compassionate purpose: facilitating transcendence. The efficacy of such skillful means is explored poetically in the quiet moment directly following the tumult of the meeting. A visibly drained, pensive Mochizuki climbs the stairs and walks slowly down the same hallway we see at the film’s opening, now dark. In a frontal medium shot, we follow him as he moves through pools of artificial light, but he stops mid-corridor in a beam of pale, overhead light. In the following point-of-view shot, we see from below what appears to be a skylight and, shining down upon him, a lovely bright moon, which he has paused to gaze up at before continuing (a michiyuki type of ma). A closely attentive viewer might remember that the moon is a prop, as seen on the roof earlier. However, the moon looks real enough such that many viewers will take it to be so, though Mochizuki surely knows it is an illusion. Nevertheless, he takes a moment to savor the view. When Shiori walks up behind him asking what he is looking at, he responds, “I was just admiring the beautiful moon.” She scoffs, “Beautiful moon. How terribly romantic!” In his fifty years at the waystations, Mochizuki has learned what neophyte Shiori has not: whether the image is mediated or not, it can be a source of uplifting beauty. This is a fact to which multitudinous Japanese poems about the moon, reaching back well over a thousand years, can attest. Fake though the image may be, “buying” these illusions, taking solace in their charm, is not naïve, as Shiori implies they are. As we just witnessed in the film production meeting, films carefully recreate experiences to help people identify and appreciate what is best about life and to assist them in moving forward.

Figure 5.2 Mochizuki (Arata) takes a ma moment to appreciate the fake moon shining from above as Shiori (Erika Oda) makes fun of him in After Life.

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Immediately following this moon-gazing moment, the counseling manager, Nakamura, comes to Shiori’s room and good-naturedly explains to her that though the moon does not change shape, it “looks different depending on the angle of the light.” He clearly hopes she comprehends his metaphor: perception is all about context and perspective—in our everyday lives, in regard to images fake and real, and in our human relationships. Later, at the end of After Life, on Shiori’s first morning as a counselor, she is shown treading the same hallway, mirroring the earlier shot of Mochizuki, and she stops under the “skylight” exactly as he did. Her face is illuminated by moonlight as his was, but we can see from the hallway that it is daytime (another reminder that time is unhinged). In a point-of-view shot, we see the partial moon shining against its black background and hear and see a “moon mask” being removed; then the whole black moon box is removed from the skylight altogether, revealing the bright blue morning sky. Shiori cheerily bids “Good morning!” to the workman who leans into the aperture above her. This is Kore-eda’s humorous way of showing that the moon may always be the same, but it looks different in different light, depending on your perspective. Now, Shiori is the “romantic” looking up and happily greeting whatever vision enlightens her.

Film as Transcendence: Extraordinary Ordinariness On Friday, Kore-eda gives us a loving montage of the counselors making the clients’ memory-films, both in the studio space and on location in the bamboo grove. The handheld footage is a bit hectic. It depicts the collaborative nature of filmmaking and shows various special effects being enacted, starting with Nishimura’s falling pink sakura blossoms and her genuine wonder at the paper stand-ins, as if they were real. We also see fans blowing generated smoke to simulate a Cessna moving through gentle clouds, hear a cassette tape playing the sound of a trolley car, and watch workers rocking a fake trolley from side to side to simulate movement. The kinetic camera in this sequence is reminiscent of a “behind-thescenes,” making-of movie documentary, mirroring the chaotic process of filmmaking, with an emphasis on people working together on set to create something meaningful that captures the spirit of the clients’ memories. The joy of the clients as they direct the counselors, reliving their happy moments through re-creation, is evident and contagious. One older woman, for instance, teaches the dance she did as a child to the young girl who is playing her in her film, at least the steps she can remember, and the camera spends more time on the beaming elderly woman than anyone else on the set. In his review of After Life, Jonathan Ellis poetically extrapolates from this moment, Perhaps this is what we all do with memories. We create a beautiful dance that has no more than a tangential relationship to reality but reminds us of it nonetheless. Cinema’s ability to evoke the five senses works more or less in the same way. Sight and sound together can only begin the journey to recollection; the rest is up to us. (37)

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Films themselves, like memories, are a type of structuring absence; they are ma that our own imaginations must complete. After Life’s conceit of dead clients making films of their memories, based on their own faulty recollections, also illustrates Francisca Cho’s argument about cinema in general: “Film instantiates the Buddhist lesson that life itself is an illusory projection of our own minds, and it provides the means for exploring the features of this projection” (“Buddhism” 163). While Kore-eda avoids obvious religious symbols in the film, he certainly is exploring the relationship between memory and film, their illusory nature, and how our interaction with both might act as upaya by enhancing our everyday lives, awakening us to quotidian beauty and compassion. The last film made on Friday is Watanabe’s, wherein Shiori, ironically, plays Kyoko, Mochizuki’s former fiancée, but as an older woman sitting on a park bench beside her husband of forty years, Watanabe, as seen in the videotape. On Saturday morning, as heavy snow falls, the final ritual begins. The counselors’ odd, out-of-tune marching band leads the line of clients into a meeting hall for announcements before the screening, giving the scene a very ceremonial feel, but the off-key band dispels any sacred aura. The manager Nakamura announces, “The moment you relive your memory, you’ll move on to a place where you can be sure of spending eternity with that memory.” This means that the illusive enchantment of the movies truly is magical, or spiritual, marking the return of the sacred. The announced exit of the clients from this world also signals that the viewers’ journey in After Life will soon be coming to a close as well. In the screening room, we see a theater full of red velvet seats from the peculiar point of view of the screen itself, as clients and counselors shuffle in and await their transportation elsewhere. This still long shot is held for over thirty seconds, while we reflect on the coming “magic” and the incongruous luxury of this space: this is their chapel.

Figure 5.3 After Life’s clients in the waystation’s screening room, on Saturday, waiting for their memory-films to transport them into the next world.

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We finally hear a bell (ask not for whom), the lights go out, and the clicking projector shines its round light brightly into our eyes as the faces in the audience tilt up to look at the screen. We are the movie they are watching, and this film is projected into our minds, forming our own memories of this After Life. The next shot flips us to the audience’s point of view, as the waystation’s now familiar corporate insignia appears on the black screen: two white seemingly interlocking rings, but both circles are broken where they would be intersecting. There is a ma in each circle, a gap, which may represent the waystation itself, the pause between life and eternity from which the dead are about to depart. Or, perhaps, they are not interlocking circles but a depiction of a billowing cloud, as the white design against a sky-blue background in the waystation’s flag suggests, another example of the aesthetics of kū, the field of spiritually charged emptiness representing the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. It is another of Kore-eda’s purposeful ambiguities. Speaking of these, we do not get to stay and watch the films that have been the goal of this week’s work, so we do not witness the spiritual transportation of the clients, the movie magic. Instead, we follow Shiori as she consoles Mochizuki by digging up Kyoko’s memory-film; then we return to the screening room with them and view Kyoko’s memory from their point of view. Her film takes place on the same park bench as Watanabe’s, but it is a long shot from behind them, so we do not see the face of the man sitting a distance from Kyoko. A close-up of the man’s hands reveals that he is young and wearing a white military uniform, but when Kyoko turns to look at him in another shot from behind the bench, we see by her profile that she is old, the age she was when she died in the 1990s. The memory-film is set in 1943, so her film curiously depicts temporal disjunction. Kyoko chose to layer time in her memory-film, illustrating that her memory of this moment in 1943—which must be of Mochizuki when he was departing for war and they had hoped for a future together—helped sustain her throughout her life. Though Kyoko’s film denies us the vision of what we want to see, clear shots of emotive faces, it demonstrates the interpenetrating quality of time in memory and film. This is a memory that helped Kyoko feel cared for during her decades of marriage to a man seemingly oblivious to her. Memories, like films, can help us transcend or at least endure the present. When Shiori then digs up the videotape of this moment between Kyoko and Mochizuki on the park bench, and the two counselors watch it together, we finally see the young couple from the front, proof that this is Mochizuki, but the lovers seem distant in their silence. Previously, Mochizuki despondently had told Shiori that he refused to choose a memory fifty years before because he could not recollect any true closeness to another human being. However, a profile close-up, in shallow focus, of Shiori and Mochizuki as they watch this video shows their intimacy with each other, with their faces literally overlapping. This is the closeness he had wished for with Kyoko and which Watanabe never appreciated until it was too late, but an idea is starting to stir in Mochizuki’s mind. Although Shiori tells him, “She [Kyoko] chose this moment,” trying to comfort him, what the filmic syntax actually reveals is Mochizuki’s emotional connection to Shiori, to

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her acts of generosity, and to what the counselors do there, caring for people on their journeys. This very still and silent scene cuts directly to a frontal long shot of Shiori and Mochizuki sitting on the garden’s metal bench, now surrounded by a blanket of snow. Like Mochizuki and Kyoko on the park bench, he and Shiori sit silently, not looking at each other, but with an obvious difference: the two are sitting very closely, with legs touching, and also are in a silent snowscape bereft of the chirping cicadas prominent in the other versions of the “bench moments.” This static, eleven-second long shot leads to a still thirteen-second medium shot, in three-quarter profile, wherein we see the two in nearly identical bodily positions to those in Kyoko’s film and the 1943 video. Shiori stares down in sad silence and Mochizuki is engulfed in his own thoughts. Kore-eda slows time even further by cutting directly to a black screen, a ma stretching for eight seconds, that fades slowly into a high-angle long shot of the studio space where Watanabe’s film was shot. In this twenty-six-second shot, a diminutive-looking Mochizuki enters the dark space and sits on the bench, still deep in thought, as emphasized by his pensive profile in the fifteen-second medium close-up of his shadowy face. The viewers’ experience of time in this sequence of the film is slowed to a meditative pace as Mochizuki’s contemplative gaze mirrors our own in these silent, still shots. This stillness and introspective mood give way immediately to a topsy-turvy day shot of Shiori on the snowy roof of the waystation building, expressing anger and hurt as she exuberantly kicks the snow around; a handheld camera haphazardly follows her profusion of emotion, capturing it in a single shot of over one minute, which ends with her slipping down out of the frame. Consistent with his form in this film, Kore-eda cuts directly once again from turbulence to silence, as the next shot returns us to Shiori in the bathtub, in a still medium shot similar to the earlier one in this spot, except that her despondent face stays above the surface. She seems inconsolable. Shiori is the only character we ever see in this vulnerable place, trying to find comfort in the everyday bath, to experience it as an extraordinary return to maternal security or, perhaps, as kami are associated with water, a return to spiritual wholeness (cf. Kasulis 50–53). We linger here, with her sorrow, for eleven seconds before there is a cut to the longest take in the film, which is a static long shot stretching nearly four minutes in length. This shot happens in Mochizuki’s very dark room, with deep blue light in the windows, echoing Shiori’s quiet sadness. She walks into the frame and confronts the apparently sleeping Mochizuki, asking if he is leaving because he has chosen his bench memory with Kyoko. She berates herself for helping him, but he explains that after he died, he “searched desperately inside [him]self for any memory of happiness. Now, fifty years later, I’ve learned I was a part of someone else’s happiness. What a wonderful discovery. You too, someday, will find this.” Shiori is defiant, still a girl with a crush, insisting she will never choose because she never wants to forget him. When Mochizuki tells her that he has come to this epiphany only after interacting with “all the people I met and said goodbye to here,” we see the light in the windows has paled, marking the dawn, an utsuroi signifier of progress and enlightenment. At this point, it is yet unclear what memory Mochizuki has chosen, but on this Sunday morning, he asks his fellow counselors to help him

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make his film on the same set as Watanabe’s film, where the evening before he had reflected happily on his twenty-two years of life for the first time. From here, Kore-eda cuts to the film set where the counselors and workmen are all shooting Mochizuki’s film, and we see him sitting on the park bench, but now the set is fully lit with clear blue sky behind him. The lack of cicada sound effects is a clue that this is not a memory from the land of the living. There is a twenty-fivesecond, handheld close-up of Shiori while she watches the filming, as she, along with viewers, considers what Mochizuki’s film is about and means, though After Life’s viewers are denied another glimpse of what is being filmed. We finally see the “magic” of this filmmaking in a cut straight to the screening room, where, after the bell rings, the projector rolls, and the counselors watch Mochizuki’s film. Before the projection begins, we are given a frontal two-shot in medium close-up of Shiori and Mochizuki, looking much like they did on the garden bench, but now exchanging friendly words of goodbye. He asks her to finish reading the mystery novel he is in the middle of for him. They look at each other, confirming their connection, and our screen cuts to black. At last, the viewers are allowed to see a memory-film in the screening room. It starts with a frontal full shot of Mochizuki sitting alone on the bench, but the set looks odd; the shadows are in the wrong places, disclosing its artificiality: this is a film about filmmaking (vertiginously, within a film about filmmaking). Mochizuki is wearing the same outfit he has been wearing all week at the waystation, so we know this is not meant to be his past. He slowly lifts his head to stare straight ahead into the camera, toward the filmmaking counselors and us, the viewers, and his steady gaze is locked on us in an uncanny close-up for twelve seconds. The next cut gives us Mochizuki’s point of view: a staged full shot of the counselor-filmmakers and a few crewmembers posed in group-photo style with the cameraman looking into the viewfinder of a film camera directly facing Mochizuki and the viewers. They stand in front of a fully lit, blue-sky backdrop with puffy white clouds and barely move as they smile gently in our direction in this static, sixteen-second shot, giving us time to take in its significance. This shot is a literal depiction of the aesthetics of kū (sky), symbolizing the world they exist in, a ma serving as a field of emptiness between life and the next stage of the soul’s journey. When the projector sound stops, our screen goes black, and, as the lights come up, we see the counselors sitting in a row in a frontal medium shot that pans to the left to reveal the empty seat where Mochizuki had just been. The screening of his film has transported him to another world, an explicit depiction of the “transcendence” into other worlds that happens when viewing films.12 The white covers over the tops of the red seats, bearing the ambiguous waystation insignia, are reminiscent of those in airplanes, reminding us that film, indeed, transports us. However, Mochizuki is not able to achieve this transcendence until he is able to perceive the value of his short human life and his fifty years of work helping clients. This happens finally when he identifies with Watanabe and sees how easy it had been to ignore the value of the people and events in everyday life. In the end, Mochizuki finds happiness in his memories, reflecting back on his twenty-two years with pleasure, because he sees himself as a source of Kyoko’s happiness, but this

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Figure 5.4 The final tableau of Mochizuki’s memory-film, a still shot of those he made films with in order to facilitate the transcendence of others in After Life.

is only the beginning of his epiphany. The reflection we experience with him, in the film’s slow, silent moments, leads him to the realization that his work helping clients choose and re-create memories has generated happiness for a great many others. Therefore, he chooses to remember the waystation and the people with whom he created eternal memories that transport people into the next step of their journeys. In the conclusion of Mochizuki’s story, Kore-eda reminds us that After Life is a fable about the power and healing potential of cinema. After Life comes full circle when Monday dawns and we open with the same frenetic follow-shot of two pairs of legs ascending the stairs. However, it is Shiori’s voice that answers Kawashima this time, and in the cut to the frontal medium shot of them walking down the same hallway, we see her new, professional-looking outfit: she is now a full-fledged counselor. Also, Shiori and Kawashima clearly have made peace with each other, another indication of progress. Mirroring the opening shots of the film, the camera follows them down the same corridor (a hashi) into the meeting room, where they commence cleaning, the ritual purification and practical duty that represents renewal. This is not a world of ultimate Zen enlightenment, where there is no dust on the mirror (or anywhere else); at the waystation, things and people need cleaning and maintenance, literally and symbolically. It is a mundane environment, despite being a spiritual space, and everyday pleasures—such as drinking hot tea, cleaning the office as a team, sitting in the garden, and taking steamy baths—are true comforts here, whether experienced as ordinary or perceived as extraordinary. When Shiori stops in the hallway,

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on her way to interview her first client, and looks up at the painted moon being removed to reveal the blue sky, it is clear she understands that both the fake moon and real blue sky are worth pausing to appreciate. As evidenced by the memory-films the counselors make and After Life itself, cinema is a type of skillful means (upaya) and a bridge (hashi) to help us recognize the beauty of everyday experiences and objects around us, as well as appreciate the people with whom we share them. This film ends as it began, with the newly dead materializing out of the mist, heralded by resounding sacred bells. In the final moments, we again are in a conference room, illuminated with bright morning sunlight and looking at the familiar image of a client’s chair, currently empty. There is a reverse shot of Shiori from our point of view, as if the viewer were the interviewee (it tolls for thee), and we hear a knock at the door. When she turns toward it in expectant hope, the screen cuts to black. As in some of the memory-films, we see the significance of capturing the edge of a moment (utsuroi) just before the opportunity for happiness or positive change arrives; thus, it is with Shiori’s growing compassion and impending growth that Kore-eda ends. In After Life, aptly named “counselors” help make films that occupy a ma between re-creation and repair. In the process of their making—from sifting through memories to transcendent screening—these eternal films require an active, collective “feeling with others,” distilling and restoring what is most valuable in life. Koreeda’s experimental film exploring what cinema is and can accomplish creates poetic structuring absences that help us see anew. In a passage in Sculpting in Time that presciently reflects After Life, Andrei Tarkovsky writes, Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life. . . . Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. . . . [Great artists are] capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life. (20–21, my emphasis) Perhaps if we watch this film attentively, if we resonate in and reflect on its many types of ma, After Life may plant seeds of connection to and appreciation of our quotidian lives and relationships that will blossom long before we arrive at the next waystation.

Cosmic Wholeness: Transcending Disintegration in I Wish Why is everyone so calm when the volcano is erupting?

—Kōichi in I Wish

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish (2011), which he also wrote, directed, and edited, was made over a decade after After Life and follows in the footsteps of his

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“breakthrough” film Nobody Knows (2005) in that it focuses on the lives of children, examining how they cope with loss in their everyday lives. In this way, I Wish clearly echoes Kore-eda’s first documentary, Lessons from a Calf (1991), as well. He also uses documentary techniques in I Wish, such as following behind the children with a handheld camera in an observational mode, letting them lead, literally and figuratively, in several scenes. In addition, Kore-eda once again uses the documentary talking-heads technique, as he did in After Life, for a few key scenes, allowing the children to speak as themselves. Marc Yamada confirms, True to his attempts to document a child’s perspective, Kore-eda allowed the children to determine how the narrative unfolded. Although he wrote a loose script for I Wish, he encouraged the children to improvise their lines, particularly during interview scenes, in which they discuss what they want to be when they grow up. (“Between” 23) Again, the focus is a responsiveness to the people in front of him, even while telling a fictional story. Thus, Kore-eda continues his project of blurring the distinctions between documentary and fiction film while also challenging the boundaries between the mundane world and the spiritual, wherein the miraculous and wondrous can be perceived and experienced. The Japanese title of the film, Kiseki, meaning miracle, expresses that the diegetic world of I Wish contains the capacity for a type of spiritual transcendence while looking at the quotidian lives of lower-middle-class Japanese families at the end of two decades of economic recession. Although the lives of the two young brothers, Kōichi and Ryunosuke Osako—played by real-life brothers Kōki and Ohshirō Maeda—are planted firmly in the here and now of two cities on Japan’s southern Kyushu island, this is still a spiritually charged world, full of tama, understood as soul or spirit but more specifically “a spiritual power infusing a material object” (Kasulis 14). By the time Kore-eda made I Wish, he had moved on from some of his earlier experimental techniques, such as frequent use of static long takes, pervasive silence, and abiding in extremely dark or even entirely black frames. However, two key aesthetic properties from the earlier experimental films flow forward through his subsequent work: careful attention to the aesthetics of the everyday and the use of ma in multiple capacities. The exploration and revelation of the beauty, and bother, in quotidian life are at the heart, or kokoro (heartmind), of this film, and Kore-eda uses specific techniques—particularly montage, pillow shots, and repeated images—to create ma that focus our attention on the potential richness of everyday experiences, particularly those we share with others. Yamada notes, Indeed, one of the reasons that Kore-eda made I Wish was to teach his young daughter about the transcendent potential of everyday experience through fictional characters with whom she could relate. Even in such a personal story, Kore-eda reinforces his belief in the nondualistic treatment of drama

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I Wish, in its narrative and in its making, demonstrates that while all things are ever-evolving, processual—which can feel frightening, disturbing, or unstable— everything also is interconnected and, at the best of times, mutually sustaining. I Wish opens with twelve-year-old Kōichi stepping out onto the balcony of his second-floor room and casting a worried gaze upward. As is common in Koreeda’s films, the boy steps into the open space of the frame, and he is captured in a profile medium shot just below his eye-level, so he occupies the whole right side of the screen, with his hair almost brushing the top of the frame. A pointof-view shot soon reveals that his serious look is focused on a massive volcano, Sakurajima (Cherry Blossom Island), spewing ash voluminously into the sky, creating a cloud that hovers near the city of Kagoshima, on the southern edge of the island of Kyushu.13 These two opening shots reveal the anxious kokoro of our protagonist as he steps into a ma, an open, liminal space between indoor and outdoor, and faces a threatening natural force from this middle ground, which Sakurajima keeps invading via its billowing ash (a reminder that clouds can be symbols of a kami’s power). Kōichi busies himself sweeping the ever-falling ash off his small balcony and, inside his room, intently wiping it off his belongings. He pauses as he picks up a framed photo of him and his brother and looks at it wistfully before cleaning the fine gray dust from its glass. The danger spreads into all the crevices of his life, and he is intent on at least symbolically battling it with constant cleaning. In this scene, we can make the connection that kokoro refers to a mindful heart that “is not separate from the body”; it suggests “an affectively charged cognitivity” connected to somatic and emotional experiences (Kasulis 25). Kōichi’s fear response leads to an everyday physical activity through which he attempts to alleviate his dread, though it does not seem to be working. When Kōichi descends from his room into the house’s cramped kitchen, we meet his grandmother and his mother in this functional room that is replete with Hawaiian kitsch, such as the fake tropical flowers festooning the walls and a Hawaiian print apron and curtain in the background. As Kōichi’s mother washes dishes in the foreground of the shot, his grandmother behind her is learning what arm movements mean in hula dancing as she enacts them (moon, wind, sea, etc.). It is obviously his grandmother who has decorated this space, and she is curious and joyful in her love for Hawaiian dance. As Kōichi heads out the door to school, his mother admonishes him to dry his wet hair before returning from the pool, but he retorts, “You don’t get it. That’s the best part.” These opening moments in the film capture significant motifs going forward: Kōichi’s anxious relationship with “the world” (embodied here by the volcano), the import of everyday activities (such as cleaning), the enjoyment of simple pleasures (wet hair on a hot day), and the meaning and inspiration that can be gained by creative endeavors (or just hobbies), which some might consider trivial or a waste of time.

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In the narrative of I Wish, anxious older brother Kōichi has been living with his mother and maternal grandparents in Kagoshima for only a few months, and he is obsessed with getting his family back together, living in the same house in Osaka. The ash falling from the sky is a constant reminder of the cataclysm that has befallen his life and the terrible possibility, the real disaster, that his family will never again be whole: to Kōichi, this is the volcanic hell that looms over his existence. Meanwhile, his carefree younger brother, Ryunosuke (Ryu), seems to thrive in the city of Fukuoka, in northern Kyushu, living with his freewheeling musician father (played by Joe Adagiri). We see Ryu tending a healthy vegetable garden next to the run-down traditional house they live in and joyfully running through city streets with friends, wearing their wet swimming towels as capes. Kore-eda’s cross-cutting draws a sharp distinction between the emotional state of the two brothers. Early in the film, Kōichi and his friends at school are talking about the new bullet train (shinkansen) opening up on Kyushu, and his friend tells him that the intense energy released when two such trains pass each other for the first time can bring about “miracles.” Of course, this is what the Japanese title of the film, kiseki, refers to, and Kōichi is looking for some kind of supernatural intervention. Kōichi immediately seems to believe the urban myth and decides that this sort of power could be harnessed to bring about his greatest wish: the reuniting of his family. He rallies his two friends, Makoto and Tasuku, along with his little brother to come with him on this adventure and make wishes of their own, so they hatch a detailed plan. The two brothers and their friends meet at the small town where the trains will pass each other, and each of the children has a wish prepared to scream out loud at the sacred moment and place of the intersection. However, enlightenment comes to Kōichi and his friends when their wishes suddenly change entirely or do not come to fruition, revealing a greater purpose in the children’s spiritual journey and its culminating, hierophanic ritual. This gentle, playful film uses imagery of everyday life, technological power, and the evanescent splendor of the natural world to communicate the beauty of the creative energy (ki or tama) connecting all things to one other and to the cosmos, a revelation which eclipses the grief of familial disintegration for Kōichi in the end. In Kore-eda’s predominantly quiet but ineffably powerful oeuvre—which portrays loss and the aftermath of fractured families—I Wish stands out as more sanguine, or sweeter, than most of the others, but it is no less poignant or profound for that. The plot featuring two young brothers separated from each other after the divorce of their parents pulls at the heartstrings, and its mise-en-scène contains evocative post-apocalyptic elements that mirror the destruction of the family. However, those elements, or more accurately Kōichi’s perception of them, also end up being the barometer of the troubled young man’s progress toward an enlightenment that resonates with Shinto and Buddhist ideas and practice. These sacred frameworks help us understand I Wish, but, ultimately, what Kōichi rises above is his own brokenness, which he accomplishes by developing the ability to appreciate the people, things, and experiences in his everyday existence that make life sweet, even if perceiving the nuances of that sweetness must be learned.

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Sakurajima is the first sacred signifier we encounter in the film, and it is at the center of his journey. Immediately after we encounter the massive volcano in the first moments of the film, we see Kōichi walking to school with his two friends. The accompanying soundtrack of acoustic guitar alternating between two notes, like footsteps or time marching on, joined soon by tambourine, drums, and a high violin countermelody, bespeaks the light tone and rhythms of the boys’ morning “commute.” Kōichi complains to his friends that he is late because he had to clean the ash off of his possessions and room. Makoto responds by telling him that the ash from Sakurajima was used to “build that famous baseball stadium,” referring to the nearly century-old Hanshin Koshien Stadium, home of Osaka’s professional baseball team, the Tigers, and, more importantly, where high school baseball teams from every Japanese prefecture compete each summer. These competitions are televised and popular all over the country, and the stadium is the object of many a young man’s dreams; thus, a bit of the “soil of Koshien,” a mix of Sakurajima’s ash and local dirt, is taken by young men who compete there as a symbol of their accomplishment, a wish (or miracle) come true.14 This is the earliest hint that there is a more constructive, or even magico-religious, way to perceive the ash, rather than reading it as the harbinger or aftereffects of perilous doom, as Kōichi does. When the three boys climb the hill up to their school, an extreme long shot captures them looking tiny compared to the gigantic shadow of the volcano stretching across the entire screen behind them. Kōichi stops to stare out at Sakurajima and asks his pals, “Why is everyone so calm when the volcano is erupting?” His friends cannot comprehend his angst, and one even responds cheekily, “You should have moved to Fukuoka with your little brother.” Kōichi seems incapable of separating himself from his fear, which is an echo of his deep longing for the reversal of the eruption of his family unit.

Figure 5.5 In I Wish (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda 2011), Kōichi (Kōki Maeda) anxiously contemplates the massive Sakurajima volcano spewing ash as his two friends mock him on their walk to school.

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As the boys walk up the hill and out of frame, the word miracle (kiseki) appears on the screen, hovering in the middle of Sakurajima: this awesome kami, indeed, has a hand in the miracles that take place in this film. Shinto beliefs see all of nature as full of ki and tama, both forms of spiritual power or energy, but mountains are particularly powerful, as seen in the syncretic Shinto-Buddhist Shugendō sect, in which yamabushi, ascetic hermits or “mountain priests,” seek to connect to and acquire mystical powers in the mountains. Seigow Matsuoka states that in ancient Shinto a sacred mountain was a “god-body,” and one of “conical shape” was especially “precious”; he goes on to explain that people “chose to cherish kami by embracing it [sic] in fear” (56–57). Sakurajima, with its beautiful name, functions as an intimidating “god-body” to Kōichi, a frightening, threatening presence. It even manifests sonically for Kōichi, as he later tells his brother that the ashes “make a really loud sound when they fall,” though that is empirically untrue. In Shinto, a key spiritual goal is to perceive and honor the awe and wonder of the natural world, to comprehend its sacredness; that attitude of respect should be accompanied by an understanding and acceptance that nature cannot be controlled. Thomas P. Kasulis asserts, “The awe in feeling Shinto is not necessarily comfortable”; however, “Shinto spirituality is about learning to feel at home with them [kami]—feeling we belong with them and them with us—even if we do not fully understand why” (11). Kōichi fears Sakurajima’s destructive power because he sees it from the perspective of an alienated stranger, which reflects his feelings about Kagoshima and his new life there. The mountain inhabits his everyday life, but he experiences it as extraordinary and defamiliarized in a way that produces acute anxiety rather than positive wonder (cf. Saito, Aesthetics 13). However, Kōichi’s spiritual journey “home” begins and ends with this volcano kami. Kasulis writes that Shinto spiritual markers, such as torii and kami embodied in nature (e.g., trees, stones, mountains), are “tangible gateway[s] to an intimacy with the world, one’s people, and oneself. When people get lost in the details of everyday life, when they disconnect from their capacity for awe, they often feel homeless” (18). For Kōichi, a child with an active imagination who feels traumatically displaced, his awe is strongly intact, but it only serves to alienate him further. He needs to find his way home in his new world and, thus, must make peace with Sakurajima and his life in Kagoshima. Kōichi’s obsession with cleaning ash off of everything communicates his desire to exert some order, to have some power despite his state of frustration and helplessness in the wake of a divorce and move to Kagoshima that he did not choose. Yuriko Saito argues that the quotidian act of cleaning, repairing, or restoring “is a way of combating the natural course of events and it is a way of showing that we are in control, exerting our stamp and power over the way things naturally become” (Everyday 163). Nonetheless, the cleaning that permeates all aspects of Kōichi’s life seems to provide little comfort because it is motivated by anxiety. Kōichi’s drive to clean, organize, and control evidently is part of who he is, as an oldest child and as a person, but he must learn to let go, allow life to unfold, and appreciate the everyday pleasures and beauty along the way. However, the answer is not a complete resignation to or acceptance of whatever is by removing

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all desire—recognizing that all is illusory, as in Buddhist doctrine—but a maturation resulting in enhanced compassion for others, appreciation of the mundane, and a sense of wonder without fear. Kasulis contends that Shinto teaches three core lessons about spirituality in our everyday existence: “the importance of connectedness to feeling whole; the appreciation of awe; [and] the function of ritual praxis” (165). In I Wish, Kōichi and the other children learn these lessons as they create and experience their own technology-based ritual that proves to have genuine transformative spiritual power. This also reflects esoteric and Zen Buddhism, which see all things as having sacred Buddha nature, including man-made objects as well as natural phenomena. Most important in the connection between Shinto and particularly Zen practice, here, is the focus on living in community with responsive virtuosity, using skillful means (upaya) to facilitate the enlightening recognition of interconnectedness: “the experiential connection with every person and every thing [that] derives from a conviction that all are based on a common source,” a spiritual bond experienced as both transcendent and immanent (Hershock, Chan 152–53; Kasulis 165). This is reminiscent of Nishitani’s Zen-inspired philosophy of the interpenetration of all things on a “field of emptiness” that is full of processual, interconnected movement. Regarding the core of Mahāyāna doctrine, Francisca Cho explains, “Emptiness is better understood as the infinite openness and potentiality of things that are cramped and made small by our labels. . . . Realization of emptiness means coming back to the realm of samsara itself” (“Buddhism” 166). Interconnection is both a spiritual and an embodied experience, both cosmic and “localized” in the body. Günter Nitschke, a prominent scholar of Japanese architecture and aesthetics, makes this point from the perspective of the spiritual-corporal nature of ma, arguing that “the profound importance of the ma concept in Japanese society is best revealed in the everyday terms for ‘human being’ and ‘the world’,” nin-gen (人間) and se-ken (世間), respectively, which both contain the character for ma (間) (20). In these terms, and in the word for companion, naka-ma (仲間, literally relationship-place), “people are thought to exist only in the context of ‘place.’ Mankind was seen as only one component in a bigger whole of man/environment/ nature. The implication is that the greater whole . . . is the measure of all things” (Nitschke 20). Moreover, as seen in nin-gen, literally person-place or person-inrelationship, a human being is defined specifically in relationship to others, as “emplaced” within a sphere of ever-evolving interconnections, a plenitudinous “field of emptiness” in which one moves in tandem with and relationship to others. In I Wish, Kōichi is on a journey toward understanding the “infinite openness and potentiality” of his relationships and his world in order to transcend his sense of fear and estrangement, including his negative sensation of the extraordinary in the everyday. He is nostalgic for his nuclear family, looking back and idealizing it, but his journey proves that this is wrong-headed: moving forward well means not trying to recreate the past but feeling (at) home where you are, embracing change, and recognizing connectedness apart from “assigned” or expected structures (e.g., biological family). Like the characters in After Life, those in I Wish are not resigned to their fate but are actively engaged in creating their futures.

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What sparks Kōichi’s quest to shape his own future by employing a well-timed wish is a sudden shift in his perspective on Sakurajima. Right after Kōichi and his friends discuss the miraculous power generated by the new shinkansen trains on Kyushu passing each other for the first time, they find themselves waiting at a local train crossing, where an old woman is standing on the opposite side of the tracks. After the train passes, the boys try to wave away the clouds of ash stirred up by it, but, when the ash clears, the woman has disappeared. The boys are astounded. Were these tama-charged clouds? One of them whimsically guesses, “Time travel?” They find this disappearance miraculous, and, in a high-angle long shot from behind, we see them ponder the mystery as they look out at another grand mountain and decide that they do believe in the special magic of the bullet trains passing each other on their inaugural run. It might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to tap into this techno-spiritual power. Kore-eda vividly displays the wonder of children throughout the film in playful moments such as this one, which sheds light on the seriousness with which the children treat their pilgrimage to the passing shinkansen. However, it does not occur to Kōichi to wish for the volcano to erupt until a pivotal conversation with his grandfather. A central theme in the film is finding purpose or a passion in life, which could be called ikigai, the globally trendy Japanese concept that essentially refers to the reason one gets up in the morning.15 For Kōichi’s grandmother, it is learning hula, as seen in the opening scene, but his grandfather develops his ikigai during the film’s narrative. He decides he will try to make an exceptional version of a traditional Japanese snack, karukan cake, which has fallen from popularity, and he enlists Kōichi as a partner. One day, Kōichi follows his grandfather around Kagoshima like a duckling as they purchase karukan cakes, and his grandfather takes him on the city’s Ferris Wheel Amuran, a huge red wheel with enclosed pods for riders. The establishing shot of the wheel is an extreme long shot featuring the whole wheel with Sakurajima dominating the background. It seems like a superimposition of childlike fun (susabi) over the threat of annihilation, or one could read the image as an expression of life’s ups and downs, or samsara, as it continues to go round and round under the shadow of death and destruction. The pods containing humans appear tiny against the hulking mountain. Jumping closer to human scale, Kore-eda cuts to a long shot of the pod containing Kōichi and his grandpa, hanging in the balance in front of Sakurajima. We then cut to closeups of the two inside the pod as they converse about the karukan cakes and the unavoidable sign of danger. Looking around, Kōichi asks, “Why do they live so close to the volcano?” Though he also lives in the city, he tellingly speaks in the third person. His grandpa informs him, “Eruptions are proof the mountain’s still alive. It’s alive, so it has to let off energy once in a while.” It is evident that his grandfather identifies with the ancient mountain as a fellow aging creature, but he does go on to remark placidly that if there were a large eruption “everyone in the whole area would have to move.” It is at this moment that Kōichi gets the idea to wish for Sakurajima to explode and force his family to come back together. His wish will be a prayer to the great kami to act on his behalf. Once again, as with his cleaning, Kōichi imagines he can exert some kind of control over his environment

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vis-à-vis the volcano, but this time he wills Sakurajima to use its power for him. However, his brother and his friends find his wish disturbing. Ryu remembers how unhappy his parents were when together and is excited about his new life in Fukuoka, especially his growing vegetable garden; he tells Kōichi on one of their daily phone calls that his volcanic “miracle” is selfish. When Kōichi tells Makoto and Tasuku about his wish, one says, “Hey, wait a minute. That means we all die.” Kōichi has not considered the destruction of human life and property involved with his “miracle.” Kōichi, unfazed, responds, “Run away.” Kōichi even consecrates his wish by painting a picture of Sakurajima erupting: a large brown mountain spewing blood-like scarlet and black lava, surrounded at its base by gray clouds of ash. He tacks the portrait high on his bedroom wall and then treats it as a representation of the kami, kneeling, clapping his hands twice, and bowing to it in prayer. This seems peculiar, as Kōichi can see Sakurajima from his balcony, so he could address the mountain directly. However, painting his own image of the volcano has symbolic significance. Creating a representation of Sakurajima erupting as he desires is another way of containing its power in his own frame, exerting control over it. Also, the painting serves as a type of ema, pictorial votive offerings that are popular at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in Japan. Money Hickman explains, “The custom of dedicating votive objects to the deities of revered natural features and places, as well as to shrines and temples, has an enduring history in Japanese religious life” and dates back to ancient Shinto (196). The form of ema evolved into a wooden “plaque,” also called a wish plaque, with a simple image painted on one side, which can be seen as a “messenger between the temporal and celestial worlds” that carries one’s prayers to the deities (Hickman 196). Kōichi uses his painted image as a messenger to Sakurajima. Today, people purchase these pre-painted (or stamped) plaques and write their wishes on them before tying them to a board for this purpose in temples and shrines. Kōichi, however, paints the volcano on the back of a large paper calendar page (the word for paper is a homophone for kami), and the calendar is an instrument that organizes time, thereby helping people feel in control. Kōichi’s artwork, then, is a physical signifier of space-time, ma, two intersecting elements that cannot be completely controlled in life, though they can be in art, such as film. Indeed, Kōichi and his friends put their faith in the “magic” of a particular space-time confluence, the moment two “super” trains pass for the first time, a sacred ma wherein a technological coincidence is imbued with spiritual consequence.

Quotidian Beauty and Everyday Miracles While the children’s ritual and epiphanies take center stage in I Wish, equally important in the film is Kore-eda’s signature attention to the details of everyday life, lovingly depicting what some may perceive to be trivial. The director points to this overtly in a conversation between Ryu and his father backstage at one of his band’s shows. Ryu asks his father, Kenji, what “administrative re-evaluation” means, a term his brother had used, but his father cannot hear him through his

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headphones and so responds, “You can eat the crumbs,” pointing to the empty bag of chips. When Ryu repeats the question, Kenji explains that the term means, “It’s a waste, so cut it out.” Ryu laughingly suggests that this is what his mother said about his father, then empties the chip crumbs into his mouth. Kenji, who is more philosophical than practical, lays some truth on his son: “Listen. There’s room in this world for wasteful things. Imagine if everything had meaning. You’d choke.” The profundity in the statement and its application to the proliferation of quotidian imagery in the film is evident. What could be perceived as trivial or wasteful—such as grandma’s hula dancing, grandpa’s karukan cakes, Kenji’s music, or the children’s ritual—also fosters community and feeds the soul, deepening our experience of life and the way we connect to others. Throughout the film, we see food, particularly snacking among friends, as an ordinary pleasure of this sort, a savoring of “the very ordinariness of the familiar” (Saito, Aesthetics 31). Something as banal as eating the salty crumbs at the bottom of the chips bag, as in this scene, is a repeated and meaningful image in the film as it expresses momentary delight in small sensations, but it also reveals love and even maturity, as Ryu’s father grants him this small joy, which is echoed later when Kōichi gives the chip crumbs to Ryu during a heart-to-heart talk on the “miracle” trip. This genuine appreciation of small or ordinary pleasures resonates with the belief in both Shinto and Zen Buddhism that all have sacred potential, affirming that everything has the capacity to be enlightening (cf. Cho, “Buddhism” 167). The film also portrays events that are familiar, though not diurnal, but are experienced as extraordinary, a perfect example of which is the “wasteful” joy of Japanese sparkler fireworks (senko hanabi). There is an enchanting minute-anda-half scene at Ryu and Kenji’s house one evening, with their friends gathered in the yard, and they are playing gleefully with the sparklers, which have an incandescent lifespan of about ten seconds. Their short but beautiful illuminations are divided into four stages representing the progression of human life: bud, peony, pine needles, and falling chrysanthemum (Tsutsui; Matsuura). This connection with natural processes makes it clear that senko hanabi are perceived as a symbol of the ephemerality of life and beauty, a reminder to focus on present mirth and loveliness, even if it quickly disappears into ash. The children dance in delight in the glow of the sparklers, as the handheld camera captures their ebullience. Grandpa’s karukan cake is another significant example of this principle. When he sets out to make a new and improved cake, he hangs an icon of his “guardian angel” up in his small industrial kitchen, where he formerly made food for the shop he had closed five years before. He and Kōichi clap twice and bow to the icon (which viewers cannot see), mirroring Kōichi’s ceremony with his Sakurajima painting. Grandpa appears to be praying for his angel to enter the kekkai of his kitchen and bless his culinary endeavors. What follows is a montage of grandpa teaching Kōichi how to do each step of the process, from grating Japanese yam, to mixing all ingredients, to steaming to perfection. The many shots of old and young hands working side by side are heartwarming; there is something wondrous about this process. Kore-eda is known for capturing hands on camera, as can be seen to great effect in Still Walking and Nobody Knows, and this is

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another way he communicates the importance and richness of multisensory experience and enjoyment of mundane pleasures. When Kōichi finally tastes the finished karukan, he states that it has a “faint” sweetness, which his grandfather positively calls “mellow.” The appreciation of this “mellow” quality, a fine nuance rather than a distinct flavor, can be connected to another traditional Japanese aesthetic concept, shibui, which medieval artists defined as a simple, unostentatious beauty. By the Edo period (1603– 1868), shibui had become a widespread concept, as “urban commoners . . . , who prided themselves on their refined taste, asserted their preference for a quietly appealing ambiance” (Ueda, “Shibui”). Makota Ueda asserts that “[t]he penchant for shibui still survives in Japan, forming part of the basic aesthetic taste and manifesting itself” in myriad endeavors, including architecture, fine arts, cinema, cooking, and even sports (especially baseball) (Ueda, “Shibui”). In I Wish, Kōichi’s growing appreciation for the subtle taste of karukan marks his movement toward understanding ma, the all-embracing field of interdependence, and his recognition that the nondualistic, liminal taste between sweet and not-sweet is not a “waste” (or wasted on him) but can be genuinely savored, like other everyday pleasures. Significantly, when the grandfather later shares this cake with his group of friends, they are not impressed and encourage him to try a gimmick instead: make the cakes in the shape of the new bullet train or, because it is called the Sakura Train, dye the cakes pink. He staunchly refuses, claiming his guardian angel would not approve. His wife, interested in the potential income, asks him pointedly, “In these hard times, who can afford not to compromise?” Grandpa retorts that he would choose his angel over his family. To him, the details are not trivial or up for sale; there is a sacredness, a kind of purity, in his cakes. The next morning, the grandfather shares with a friend that he feels the cake failure in his kokoro and wonders aloud if “kids today feel anything about anything.” In other words, are young people’s hearts stirred by simple pleasures? Are they sensitive to mono no aware in their everyday lives? These snacks are serious, spiritual business. The grandfather’s perhaps unusual priorities reflect those of Kōichi and Ryu’s father, Kenji, who not only values the “wasteful” but also centers his life around music rather than the ideal of the nuclear family. Kore-eda gives us a telling snapshot of what their family had been like in a nightmare Ryu has one night: a dinner table scenario in which his mother is enraged at his father because he has lost another job and seems too immature to hold one down for long. Nozomi, his mother, wanted a more financially stable life with her husband and two sons, but it is plain from Kenji’s behavior in the film that he is quite content with his grubby house in Fukuoka and the unconventional life of a musician. Ryu’s happy-golucky personality also works well in this environment, while Kōichi’s attitudes are more akin to Nozomi’s anxieties and traditional expectations. Just after grandpa’s karukan cake conclave, Kōichi phones his father to have a serious talk about his parents reuniting, but Kenji changes the subject, telling him, “I want you to grow up to become someone who cares about more than just your own life,” suggesting that Kōichi could direct his energies toward, “for instance, music, or the world.”

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A frustrated Kōichi asks, “What’s ‘the world’?” The editing and frame composition in this scene communicate a warm intimacy between father and son despite their physical distance: Kenji and Kōichi appear in medium close-ups in a crosscutting pattern, with Kenji always facing left from the right side of the frame and Kōichi facing right from the left side, as if the two were face to face. This is a familiar technique in the film, and it mirrors the structure of the scenes showing Kōichi and Ryu chatting on the phone at their respective neighborhood pools after daily swimming; it feels as if the boys are in the same room during these animated conversations. Kore-eda hereby expresses that an empty space (ma) between people can be bridged (hashi) by a combination of technology and love, a spiritual power. It is a type of magic or miracle. Although Kōichi is once again perplexed in this scene with his father, we see that the seed has been planted for the boy’s new growth. Kōichi’s nostalgic fixation on the past, idealizing his “unbroken” family, generates angst and prevents him from appreciating his new community of friends and family members in Kagoshima as well as his continuing closeness with his brother and father. As Kōichi and Ryu make plans with their friends to perform their “miracle” ritual at the inaugural meeting of Kyushu’s high-speed trains, Kore-eda gives us two documentary-like talking-heads sequences in which each of the brothers and their friends takes a turn sharing his or her wishes. Here, he uses the same documentary techniques as in After Life, having many of the actors improvise their responses, answering as themselves, and using jump cuts, a type of editorial ma, to compress time and remind viewers that their space-time journey in the film is orchestrated. However, these talking-heads shots are handheld, reflecting the kids’ excitement about this adventure and, perhaps, the instability of their visions of their future at this early stage of life. Kōichi and his friends meet in their usual hideaway, a shadowy underpass, another marker of transitional movement. Makoto announces his wish is to be a professional baseball player when he grows up, and Tasuku’s wish is to marry their school’s librarian, on whom all the boys have a crush. The other boys find this weird as she is so much older than they, but he does not relent. Kōichi reiterates his wish for Sakurajima to have a “gigantic eruption” and finds his friends disturbed by his seeming indifference to their fates. Back in Fukuoka, Ryu’s friends gather in his pal Megumi’s bright bedroom, and the pattern of talking-heads shots repeats, with more evident improvisation and jump cuts. Megumi wants to be a successful actress, though her mother (a failed actress) disapproves; Kanna wants to be a good painter; and Rento wants to collect more Beyblade toys and get really good at battling with them, though he admits it is a “childish” wish. Ryu himself has a few “childish” desires: he wants to be a Kamen Rider on television, and he wants to drive a “super car.” When asked if he desires the same thing his brother does, the reunion of his family, Ryu demurs, despite their insistence that he must support his brother’s wish. Humorously, it is at this moment precisely that Kore-eda cuts to Ryu’s family nightmare described earlier, ending with a voice-over: “I can’t take any more of that.” Unequivocally, Ryu does not share Kōichi’s wish, and it appears that their nuclear family was destined to explode and probably is better off for it. These children may not have

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realistic or mature wishes for their futures, but it is heartening to see that they are looking ahead and dreaming of what might be despite the struggles and failures of the adults in their lives. As the audience knows more about each child and about the grown-ups in the brothers’ lives, the film takes on an increasingly complex cross-cutting structure, often using montages to explore the repetitive details of the characters’ everyday activities and alternating seamlessly between Kagoshima and Fukuoka. Appearing throughout the film, these montages connect people, places, and experiences across space and time, weaving characters’ stories together in such a way that their mutual impact, their interconnectedness, is evident. Kore-eda employs montage sequences in this way in several of his fiction films, including After Life, of course, but also in documentaries such as Without Memory. In I Wish, the montages depict the endless flow of life and the joy that arises from simple things and activities. The longest, most extensive montage occupies the center of the film and stretches over five minutes in length. A simple, non-diegetic harmonica tune, joined by guitar, runs through the montage, and it orchestrates the viewer’s journey through the montage by speeding up and slowing down, which affects emotional impact and focuses attention at particular moments. The music and editing serve as a michiyuki form of ma, guiding flow and pauses along our path. This montage fittingly begins with Kōichi’s worried, shadowy face on the evening bus home from his daily swim; he is experiencing his quotidian life as extraordinary and defamiliarized in a negative way and is anxious about its trajectory, despite the positive relationships we see him building. The montage moves on to show Makoto practicing his batting alone at night on the school field, Kanna working on her drawing at Ryu’s house while Kenji’s friends play music, Megumi performing in a silly commercial, Rento desperately struggling to run for exercise as he is passed by a whole track team (comically, the music picks up pace here), and Ryu laughing at the manga he is reading. The music slows significantly when Tasuku and his sister are shown standing on the sidewalk while their father abandons them to duck into a pachinko parlor, which is followed by Makoto trying to walk his ancient little dog, Marble, but it quickens again with a shot of Ryu’s makeshift garden marker, created out of a styrofoam take-out container. The montage ends at the pool with Kōichi working on his butterfly stroke, cutting finally to him playfully opening his mouth in the shower to catch the water. The montage of the children’s everyday lives finishes with whom it began, Kōichi; however, his concerned face at the start contrasts with his contentment in the final shot, again expressing that Kōichi does not recognize the pleasures of his life. In the midst of this montage, there is a pillow shot looking up at the blue sky through power lines, a moment of kū aesthetics, but, unlike Ozu’s, this pillow shot moves to follow a passing jet, indicating movement and progression rather than stasis. This reflects the theme of the montage as a whole, which shows each child actively working toward their “wishes” and reveals some heretofore undisclosed desires they are harboring for their futures. When the day of the children’s miracle pilgrimage arrives, Kore-eda begins it with a shot of Kōichi standing up in class to read a poem aloud, “Ikiru” (meaning

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“to be alive”), by Shuntarō Tanikawa. Significantly, it is a poem about appreciating the details of everyday life, and Kōichi reads, To be alive now is to thirst, is to be dazzled by the light, is to remember a melody, is to sneeze, is to hold your hand. As with Kore-eda’s film, the poem contains no approbation for Buddhist nonattachment to the world but instead sings the praises of mundane sensory experience. Amusingly, Kōichi feigns fainting in the midst of reading the poem so he can get out of school, reflecting his own sense of adventure and pursuit of “being alive.” After Kōichi and his friends escape school with grandpa’s help, Kōichi grabs a few karukan cakes for the road. This is surprising as it seemed like grandpa had given up on his “new and improved” karukan cake dream, but grandma repeats twice to Kōichi that these are “ordinary ones,” nothing fancy. Grandpa has returned to the pleasure and comfort of experiencing the familiar as ordinary. When Makoto shows up for the train, he is carrying his dog in his backpack: Marble has died, and Makoto now will wish for his beloved pup’s resurrection. Viewers again are struck with children’s capacity for magical thinking, at once wonderful and heartbreaking; even Makoto’s friends look dubious but say nothing. The following montage of the train journeys of the two groups of kids shows them indulging in tasty snacks and playing entertaining games, joyful experiences of trivial pleasures; it depicts a ma of susabi. Ironically, when Kōichi and his two friends arrive at the town where the two bullet trains will be crossing, what is immediately in front of them in the distance is another volcano, a clear reminder of Sakurajima and an interesting statement that, even here, where miracles are sought, there is still danger (et in Arcadia ego). The station guard tells the boys that this volcano, Mt. Fugen, erupted just twenty years before, killing fifty people, and Kōichi looks dumbfounded. Even in this place of magic, the specter of destruction looms. Kōichi is now grumpy and, subsequently, is displeased to find that Ryu has brought along three of his friends, telling Ryu that if they slow him down, he will leave them behind. Nevertheless, the following montage of the seven children wandering through the small town, just enjoying their explorations, renews the sense of childhood discovery and fun. Here, Kore-eda uses a documentary-style handheld camera again, often following them at a little distance, allowing us to track with their playful curiosity about and observations of this new place. It is at this point that the children have a sublime encounter with nature, as they are talking casually about how long it takes for fruits to grow (e.g. “eight years for persimmons”) and noticing the pretty trees around them. Their conversation highlights the film’s themes of the processual quality of all things and children’s impatience for time to move forward more quickly. Processes, by definition, are not instantaneous. The motif in the film of Kōichi waiting for trains to come or to pass at the same

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neighborhood train crossing reiterates this point. Living in the present, as the children are in this adventure, is key to appreciating everyday experiences, mindfully encountering each step on the journey, but also important is the larger perspective that development takes place over time, that some experiences and knowledge come only with growth. At this point, the children stumble upon a yard full of tall, green flowering plants with lovely pink flowers in various shades. The children flow into the yard and engage in a close encounter with these flowers, looking at, touching, and smelling them. The camerawork moves lyrically between closeups of the children’s hands touching the stems and delicate petals and their faces gazing intently at the flowers. They are mesmerized by the sudden irruption of beauty. One of the girls announces, “These are cosmos flowers.” Another child exclaims, “Amazing!” and another, “So many seeds.” Their wonder is palpable and the music is light and airy, expressing their fascination. An aura of mystery permeates this scene, reflected in one child’s query, “I wonder where the people who used to live here went.” Another responds, “They must have loved cosmos.” More than just a poetic interlude, this short scene encapsulates the purpose of the journey these children are on—the beauty of the cosmos flowers draws the children to recognize their connection to the natural world, which in turn emblematizes the interpenetrating quality of all things. Cosmos also echoes Kenji’s wish for Kōichi to care about more than himself—to transcend selfishness and develop compassion for the world outside of his narrow conceptions and expectations. During the course of this short journey and its ritual, each child carries an individual wish, but the children also will start developing the sense of being connected to a larger world, one of constant growth and change, where the nature in and of one’s environment can be perceived anywhere on a continuum between hostile and healing. The children, especially Kōichi, are learning that they can accept the nonduality of their circumstances—the intersections of good and bad, pleasant and disturbing—and make choices about the ways in which they perceive and experience their lives. Meanwhile, they can plan and work toward achieving their wishes for the future. There will always be ma—connecting intervals like their encounter with the cosmos flowers—wherein the quotidian is punctuated by transcendent moments of beauty and awe, defamiliarizing the familiar and providing a cosmic perspective on existence. Writing of Chan Buddhism, the Chinese counterpart of Zen, Peter Hershock argues, In an irreducibly karmic cosmos, there is no question of whether things have a meaning or not but only of which meaning. It is a cosmos in which differences truly make a difference, in which changes of heart are practically effective in reconfiguring the interpersonal present and future. . . . The teaching of karma urges human beings to consider the direction of our life stories and the values and intentions that establish it. (Chan 56) In this short episode, a contemplative break from the action of the narrative, the combination of beauty and ephemerality embodied in these irresistible flowers

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expresses the impermanence of natural beauty and of childhood, but it also communicates the crucial point that being present in moments of sensational and quotidian pleasure is critical to understanding the meanings of our own stories and purposes. Moreover, these moments of reflection are inextricable from our understanding of our interconnectedness with all things. The bright pink of the cosmos flowers and their symbolic use here alludes to the volcano Sakurajima and the Sakura Train, both of which bear the name of that quintessential symbol of Japan and mujō, the cherry blossom, the ultimate expression of enjoying ephemeral sensations while they are present and looking forward to the next beautiful marker of change (utsuroi). However, Kore-eda uses cosmos flowers to expand beyond these symbolic borders, to look at the world. Though Kōichi is soon irritable and urges the children to move along, away from the flowers, he is internalizing these lessons. That evening, a miracle truly does happen when the children stumble into a safe place to stay for the night. Megumi, plying her acting skills, tells a local policeman that her grandparents live in this town and that the group is staying with them. When she sees an older woman in front of a house, Megumi addresses the woman as “grandma,” and the baffled woman plays along. This older couple happily takes them in and feeds them a big meal. The children successfully employ expedient means (upaya) to evade an abrupt end to their fun. That evening, the children write all their wishes on a white “prayer flag” that functions as an ema for the train ritual. The older woman bonds with Megumi, who resembles the couple’s estranged adult daughter. When the woman brushes Megumi’s hair, we can see Megumi realizing that she lacks this sort of intimacy with her own mother. For a moment, both of them revel in the tactile and emotional connection. Kore-eda communicates here that people often do not get the parents or the children they need or deserve, a theme he explores more profoundly in Nobody Knows (2005) and Shoplifters (2018). Late that night, Kōichi and Ryu share quality brother time on the porch, another liminal space (ma), like this town and their journey. Kōichi shares his karukan cakes with Ryu, who finds the flavor “faint,” but Kōichi explains that “the mellow flavor is growing on me.” Though they have been apart for only six months, Ryu responds, “You’re so grown up now.” Kōichi is learning to savor the ordinary as ordinary, to find comfort in it. The viewers also recognize the gentle sweetness in the exchange between the brothers, who then discuss watching over their respective parents as they stand back-to-back, measuring their heights against each other. These two will always be joined in their kokoro, no matter how physically distant. The shinkansen kami they have come to importune represents a hashi, forming a bridge where Kōichi once perceived an empty chasm separating him from his brother and the past for which he yearns. At dawn, when the old couple drops the children off near the place where the trains will pass each other, Kanna asks them what she can wish for on their behalf, and they tell her that this encounter with the children is their miracle. Their chance connection with these children clearly has touched their hearts. Waving their wish flag, the children run up the hill to a spot above the tunnel where the trains will pass for the very first time. Kore-eda’s energetic handheld camera follows them

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Figure 5.6 At the beginning of the montage of Kōichi’s epiphany, his painting of Sakurajima erupts with red lava, ushering in quiet images of his everyday pleasures in I Wish.

to their destination. Kōichi has brought his volcano painting, his personal ema, to accompany the ritual of screaming their wishes at the sacred moment. However, just before the trains pass dramatically and loudly below them, we see Kōichi glance down at his painting, the calendar on its reverse side visible, and there is a sudden cut to a stop-motion animated depiction of his painted volcano erupting, bright crimson lava spraying out of its top and cascading down the mountain, an irruption of the imaginary into the realist aesthetics of the film.16 This animated explosion, a fantastical fulfillment of Kōichi’s wish, is immediately followed by a montage of images passing through Kōichi’s mind, featuring many of his memories from recent months: a blue popsicle eaten after swimming, chip crumbs at the bottom of a bag, paints on Kōichi’s floor, a neatly folded school uniform on his bed, his red swimsuit floating in the sink, the green stalk of a growing vegetable in Ryu’s garden, the ash covering his school’s baseball field, his grandma’s hands doing graceful hula movements, Makoto petting Marble’s still head, the nuclear family he had gazed at enviously in the train station, karukan cake, the colorful cosmos flowers, a child’s hand holding a tiny frog, and a close-up of where he had written his wish on the children’s flag. These shots transition without pause into close-ups of still photographs of the brothers, happy memories from before their separation, then a shot of his father’s new CD cover, its green color reminding us that moving on from the past (the still images) has brought about new creativity, new opportunities. The last three images of Kōichi’s personal ma in diegetic space-time, his kokoro montage, are a pillow shot looking up at a blue sky intersected by power lines—a pause for reflection in the aesthetics of kū—and two culminating images of innumerable ema and omikuji (paper

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fortunes), hanging at a shrine or temple, bearing the prayers and wishes of a great many people. These appear in a long shot; then there is a close-up on one ema, one wish among myriad. In this climactic, keenly anticipated moment, just when the trains are about to pass for the first time, Kore-da interjects this quiet montage containing no diegetic sound, only a simple, peaceful guitar melody, and the images have a dreamy quality, nearly all using selective focus such that the activity or sensation experienced in the shot is the only element in sharp focus. The gentle guitar music seems to slow the flow of images, allowing us to stop with each for a moment, reflecting on the beauty and significance of these everyday, ordinary pleasures. Most of the images contain close-ups of human hands, that pervasive motif magnifying the tactile and multisensory nature of embodied experience. Thus, Kōichi sees in his mind’s eye, or senses in his kokoro, the beauty of his own experiences in Kagoshima as well as those of his family and friends there and in Fukuoka. In his epiphany, he can feel and appreciate his own quotidian pleasures and those of others, expanding his realm of concern outside of himself. At this final moment, Kōichi realizes his wish is one in a sea of others and that he is a part of all of these, at home within “horizonless interrelatedness” (Hershock, Chan 68). The end of the montage and return to diegetic space-time is marked with a close-up of Kōichi’s pensive face above the calendar-volcano page representing his attempt to control time and nature. The trains pass each other just then, and, as the children yell out their wishes, Kōichi, the instigator of the ritual, stands in silence at the “magic” moment. Half of the children’s wishes have changed since their original declarations: Makoto now wishes for Marble to come back to life; Rento’s new wish is to become a fast runner, as implied in the earlier montage; and Tasuku wishes for his dad to quit gambling, a far more immediate and practical desire than marrying the librarian. Life changes, loss happens, and children mature, but this does not mean that their wonder and hopes for the future disappear. The technological sound generated by the shinkansen trains passing each other communicates their mighty power and, perhaps, even a miraculous force; but the organic, impassioned sound of the children screaming out their wishes along with the close-ups of their intense faces represent the zenith of their ritual, a moment of spiritual transcendence. However, the silence immediately following is anti-climactic. There is a sense that no magic has transpired. Makoto confirms that Marble is still dead, and they head down the hill, passing a cemetery. When the boys suggest burying the dog there, Makoto insists on burying him at home. These rituals are important; honoring and feeling close to his deceased furry family member is not trivial. The children leave the flag there, as ema, messengers to the kami, are left to abide in sacred spaces. Back at the train station, where the two groups of children await their trains back home to their respective cities, the two brothers have a parting parley that sums up Kōichi’s revelation: RYU. KŌICHI.

I hope our wishes come true. You know, I didn’t make a wish.

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RYU. KŌICHI. RYU. KŌICHI.

Why not? I chose the world over my family. Sorry. Actually, I made a different wish, too. Sorry. It’s okay. [pause] Dad’s all yours now.

Kōichi has let go of his obsession and realized that his family and home are much larger than he had been allowing. Hershock asserts that Zen Buddhist doctrine and practice changed the meaning of family in that it “decentered the notion of blood relations or genetic continuity, . . . point[ing] instead toward the centrality of ‘dramatic continuity’—that is, continuity based on unwavering commitment to a particular direction for the meaning of things” (Chan 56–57). Although Kore-eda is not propounding Japanese Buddhism in this film, this resonates with his message regarding compassion, feeling with others, beyond the boundaries of family, city, and, by extension, nation. Kōichi learns that “the horizons of responsibility that are part of our typical self-definition”—causing his anxiety about reuniting his broken family—do not have to define him; he can invest in his present life, enjoy his immediate experiences, and be open to a new future (Hershock, Chan 57). In short, he sees that, in Hershock’s words, “Our presence together with others—our sharing of a particular world and history—is already evidence that we meaningfully belong together” (57). Furthermore, Kōichi is not the only one impacted profoundly by this journey. We see Megumi arrive home and tell her mother that she will be going to Tokyo to be an actress, but she will return sometimes to see her mother, unlike the old couple’s daughter. Megumi realizes she does not have to choose between her family and her dream. In the final shot of Megumi, she opens her bedroom window, stretches her arms out into the bright morning sunlight, and dances around her room joyfully, the free movement of the handheld shot reflecting her elation. When Kōichi, Makoto, and Tasuku arrive back in Kagoshima, a low-angle long shot captures them heading out the glass doors of the large train station and standing side by side at the top of the long, broad staircase, whereupon each one declares “We’re home” as they gaze out ahead of them like conquerors. These are not the same boys who left the day before. The next shot, over a minute long, is an extreme long shot from an angle high above them that follows the boys as they descend the flights of stairs and gleefully run down the street toward their homes. This shot communicates the larger world they now understand themselves to inhabit and their excitement in moving into this expanded cosmos. The buoyant music accompanying the boys’ journey home features two swiftly alternating guitar notes, like quick footsteps, and four ascending xylophone notes repeating, expressing upward progress that is also seen in Kōichi’s uphill run, with the music ending when Kōichi reaches home. He greets his grandpa, “I’m home,” telling him that Ryu is still “too young” to appreciate karukan cake, then chirps “I’m home” to his grandma, practicing hula, and his mother in the small kitchen. The final shots of the film return to Kōichi on his balcony, looking up at the volcano thoughtfully. This time, he rests his arms on the railing without wiping off the ash, and Sakurajima, still spewing a tremendous gray plume, appears closer to Kōichi in the point-of-view shot, clearly taken with a longer lens. The concluding shot

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Figure 5.7 Kōichi, no longer intimidated by Sakurajima’s ash, assesses the way the wind is blowing and confirms it will be a good day in I Wish.

of the film is twenty-eight seconds long, beginning with a medium close-up of Kōichi in profile, now appearing pensive rather than anxious. He licks his finger, raises it in the air—as he has seen his grandfather do—and declares optimistically, “It won’t pile up today.” He walks out of the frame with a smile on his face, no broom in sight, and the static shot holds there for eight full seconds, its very shallow focus leaving all blurry except the ma from which Kōichi departed and giving viewers time-space for reflection. Kōichi no longer perceives the volcano as a looming threat to his future or as a (super)natural power he can use to wreak devastation, forcing a return to the past of his nuclear family. Instead, he feels at home in this place and the world. The tiny frog in the boy’s hand in Kōichi’s montage, an allusion to Kōichi himself, reminds us that this is all about coming home: the Japanese word for frog (kaeru) is a homophone for a verb meaning “to return home,” and frogs are common symbols in Shinto tradition for this reason (Kasulis 11). Kasulis avers that the “point of Shinto practice is often more to make one feel at home with awe rather than try to understand or control it” (167). Kōichi is one small person facing a big world with powerful forces he cannot control, no matter how much ash he cleans off his environment every day. However, he now can look the awesome kami in the eye, appreciate its wondrous nature, and understand it will not crush him. It is part of him, part of his home-ground, literally and spiritually. Thus, Kōichi experiences what Nishitani calls trans-descendence, realizing one’s interconnection with all things on the ever-evolving “field of emptiness” by planting oneself fully in immanent human experience, “an existence through and through within the world” (174–76). Hershock notes that a “common metaphor in Mahāyāna Buddhist literature is that of someone rushing all over in search of a

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‘lost’ wish-fulfilling gem that is actually stuck to his own forehead” (Chan 149). As with this Buddhist parable, Kōichi discovers that the “gem” he seeks “is actually stuck to his own head” (Hershock 149; cf. Yamada 11). Kōichi chooses the world, which had been with him the whole time.

Conclusion: Homey Numinosity Throughout I Wish, Kore-eda vividly depicts moments of transcendence in which our young protagonist is able to glimpse or feel his connection to all things around him, to sense his interdependence with the cosmos, beyond his narrow ideal of the nuclear family. This can be seen in Kōichi’s shifting attitudes toward Sakurajima, the volcano he considers his enemy, then his potential savior, and, finally, a part of his home. In the traditional Mahāyāna Buddhist teachings on nonduality and nonattachment, differences perceived in the world and our shifting responses to them are illusory, as all states of being are impermanent and the material world is insubstantial. Kōichi’s changing perception of his world and home may reflect this, but his ultimate understanding of the value of the people and experiences in his everyday life bespeaks an embracing of attachment and discernment. The fact that the supernatural world of After Life appears as distinctly material reality also reflects nonduality, but the clients are there to attach themselves to a memory that will mean everything to them. Thus, there is a type of spiritual transcendence in both films, but it is not entirely of a Buddhist or Shinto nature, though certainly there are elements of each in them. Kore-eda himself seems uninterested in religion, per se, and has confirmed that viewers do not need to know about Japanese religion or culture to understand his films (Ellis 37; Schilling 15). He is most interested in depicting and responding to human lives and relationships in the here and now. In this way, Kore-eda’s films resonate with the values accompanying Mahāyāna Buddhist practice in regard to living in relationship with others and the world. As has been shown in this chapter, After Life and I Wish positively portray the Zen Buddhist ideal of upaya to respond to the phenomena that arise in everyday life, including other people, circumstances, and all aspects of our environment, embodying “the improvisational expression of relational virtuosity oriented toward the resolution of conflict, trouble and suffering” (Hershock, “Chan” sec. 5). This, in turn, reflects the Shinto emphasis on the interconnectedness of and respect for all things, including Norinaga’s idea of mono no aware as feeling with others, being stirred by the world: all of these concepts refer to compassion, and this is the kokoro of these two films. Kore-eda’s portrayals of compassionate engagement with the world are rooted in his representation of multisensory quotidian experience: it is these everyday details that comprise life’s meaning by connecting the characters to each other and to the larger world around them. As has been demonstrated, Japanese Buddhism and Shinto provide several aesthetic and philosophical principles that can be used fruitfully to read film. However, in regard to enhancing attention to and enjoyment of everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito asserts that the influential notion of emptiness (Skt. sūnyata) central to Zen philosophy, while useful for interpretive purposes,

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does not amplify how we experience art, nature, or the everyday because it seeks “the total emptying of our minds,” which is not conducive to savoring embodied sensory experience (Aesthetics 86–87). Saito explains that our engagement in multisensory experience “is rooted in our human aesthetic sensibility and imaginative faculty,” so one cannot “empty every consideration” when appreciating everyday objects or nature; rather, one should determine “which considerations should be emptied” (Aesthetics 86–87). In I Wish, Kōichi’s physical and imaginative journey leads him to empty his heart-mind of fear and the compulsion to control his environment, resulting in his embracing of a new, expanded vision of home. In After Life, the clients choose one memory that will empty their minds (or souls) of all else, so each will live eternally in a moment of sensory joy or human warmth or, in the worst case, physical darkness. What the characters in both films do is creatively engage with and shape the future using skillful means: the rituals of making films and wishing on passing trains, or of helping others find memories, hula dancing with friends, or planting and tending a vegetable garden. These characters are not resigned to what is but look toward what is ahead, working with the support of others to move forward. Moreover, on this journey that is ever in process, these characters enjoy the everyday pleasures along the road, the ma orchestrating their paths. What the counselors and clients in After Life and the children and adults in I Wish gain in these diegeses is an appreciation of human relationships (even posthumously) and life’s mundane joys and comforts: tea with a friend, a hot bath, an ordinary karukan cake, a manga that makes you laugh. Although we see the characters in these films relish the ordinariness of daily activities and experience some familiar activities as extraordinary, the point is that these characters, and these films, are “making a concerted effort to maximize aesthetic potentials from hidden crevices of life,” which “goes a long way to improv[ing] the quality of life” both on and off the screen (Saito, Aesthetics 30). For viewers, these spectacles of the everyday— alternating, as life does, between lively kinesis and quietude—encourage us see our world anew by defamiliarizing the familiar, framing the quotidian in new ways that have the potential to “guide us to live mindfully by paying careful attention to things and surroundings” (Saito, Aesthetics 18). Saito contends that when we recognize the wonder and comfort of everyday things, “our horizons become widened and our lives enriched” (Aesthetics 18). The point of everyday aesthetics is to live life to the fullest, to appreciate what we have, and to recognize the human experiences, sensations, and emotions that connect us all. In the wake of the lockdowns during the global pandemic, stretching well over a year, our experiences of home and its quotidian pleasures and pains have become front and center in our lives. Never have our local and global interdependence been more evident or consequential. For the millions who were largely confined to their homes, pausing to look out at the twilit sky, to pet a purring cat napping in a spot of sun, or to watch a film that transports you to another space-time, these and so many other everyday ma have become lifelines. Kore-eda’s work celebrating the beauty, wonder, and comfort of the everyday has increasing resonance, pointing us toward gratitude and compassion.

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Notes 1 Quoted in Houston, p. 140. 2 See this book’s introduction for a more detailed discussion of this history. 3 For a well-researched and poignant account of the rise of societal insecurity and loss of relationality in Japan, and an examination of its causes, see cultural anthropologist Anne Allison’s book Precarious Japan (2013). 4 For an overview of the focus on Ozu and “Japaneseness” in journalistic reviews of Kore-eda’s first three critically acclaimed films—Maborosi, After Life, and Nobody Knows (2004)—see Kristi McKim (72). Notably, Roger Ebert’s review of Maborosi devotes considerable space to comparing the film to Ozu’s work; Ebert asserts that Kore-eda’s “love for the work of the great Yasujirō Ozu is evident.” Kore-eda’s later statements do not bear this out. 5 See especially Desser’s essay “The Imagination of the Transcendent: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Maborosi (1995)”; Richie’s “Kore-eda’s Maborosi: Showing Only What Is Necessary”; and McDonald’s chapter on the film in her book Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context, pp. 198–218. 6 Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is a great admirer of Ozu and was hired by Ozu’s former filmmaking home, Shochiko Studio, to make an homage film, Café Lumière (2003), to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Ozu’s birth. Hou is known for his “slow cinema” techniques resembling those of Ozu, but his work often depicts violence and grisly imagery connected to the struggles of families and communities in Taiwan’s turbulent history over the past century (see, for instance, his classic A City of Sadness [1989]). Kore-eda seems to be most influenced by Ozu through the lens of Hou, whose style and subject matter is focused in darker directions. 7 Appears in Blyth’s Haiku, Vol. 1, p. 237. 8 The clients and the counselors wear the same outfits all week, so their apparel often indicates personality traits. For instance, the bright purple accents in Shiori’s otherwise drab outfit reveal her aching and caring heart. 9 It is interesting that VHS tapes are the medium on which everyday life is recorded (or at least stored), and we see Watanabe, Mochizuki, and Shiori watch these videos on a television. Kore-eda’s career has moved between television and film. Television has been the medium for his documentaries and the film screen the medium for his fiction films, which is similar to After Life, in that the videos are recordings of “real life” and the memory-films are made as fiction films, with props, lighting, and special effects. The memory-films are kept in cans and have a proper screening in a movie theater. When Mochizuki gives the tapes to Watanabe, he says, “Just use them for reference. . . . Watch them as a way of bringing up the past.” This is one significant function of documentary films. 10 See Desser’s article on After Life for more on its connections to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which, like Kore-eda’s film, “is a fantasy about how to come to terms with the meaning of one’s existence” and examines the importance of “how our lives have impacted the lives of others” (47, 51). Clearly, Kore-eda did not want this connection to distract Western viewers from appreciating After Life on its own terms. 11 Scenes of bathing are not common in cinema, in general, but they are not uncommon in Japanese film, including anime. Japan’s longstanding tradition of communal baths and hot springs (onsen), although not the most common way to bathe today, makes bathing a rich symbol. The ritual ablutions that priests and laypeople perform at Shinto shrines, along with Shinto’s rigorous attention to purity, also contribute to the import of bathing in Japan. There are memorable scenes of bathing, for instance, in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and in Kore-eda’s Still Walking (2008), in which children bond with their parents. One of the key settings of the Academy Award-winning Japanese film Departures (dir. Yojiro Takita 2008) is an old communal bath in a small town; it is a crucial symbol in a film about the current meanings of purity and pollution in Japan.

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12 S. Brent Plate points out that many Hollywood studios’ insignia, or “vanity cards,” which appear before films, contain backdrops of blue sky or a cosmic view of stars, the moon, and/or the earth, such as Universal’s spinning globe. He argues, “Many of these self-consciously demonstrate how the world is not simply being reflected on-screen but is actively reimagined. These moving logos repeatedly portray a predominant theme through their scenarios: the heavens and earth are connected through the productions of cinema” (10–11). The connection between the final moments of Mochizuki’s film and the raison d’être of the waystation is clear. 13 Sakurajima is “one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and one of the few that are at present in constant . . . activity” (“Sakurajima”). Kōichi’s fear is not unfounded. 14 The significance of the “soil of Koshien” was brought to my attention by Associate Professor Yuko Sugiura of Konan University in Kobe, Japan, who very generously shared her expertise with me. 15 See note 3 in the introductory chapter for more information regarding ikigai’s popularity in the West. 16 There are some similarities here to director Shinji Sōmai’s 1993 film Moving (Ohikkoshi), in which Renko, a girl of about twelve, spends the whole film trying various plots to reunite her divorcing parents. In the final attempt, she talks her parents into taking a trip together to a town where the family had attended a yearly festival. Frustrated, she runs away from her parents and encounters a kindly old couple who take her in for the day and feed her; she reminds them of their dead child. In the climactic scene, she has a fantasy vision of her family reuniting beside a burning float that seems a part of the sacred ceremony (matsuri). As in this scene with Kōichi, fantasy intervenes in the midst of verisimilar realism and inspires an epiphany.

Works Cited After Life. Directed, written, and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda, performances by Erika Oda, Arata Iura, Susumu Terajima, and Yūsuke Iseya, English subtitles translated by Linda Hoaglund. Soda Pictures, 2007 [1998]. Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Duke University Press, 2013. Bashō, Matsuo. Narrow Road to the Interior, translated by Sam Hamill, Shambhala Publications, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2009 [1936], pp. 665–685. Bird, Michael. “Film as Hierophany.” Horizons: The Journal of the College Theological Society, vol. 6, no. 1, 1979, pp. 81–97. Blyth, R. H. Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture, translated by R. H. Blyth, Hokuseido Press, 1976. Burch, Noël. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Revised and edited by Annette Michelson, University of California Press, 1979. Cho, Francisca. “Buddhism.” The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, edited by John Lyden, Routledge, 2011, pp. 162–177. Cho, Francisca. Seeing Like the Buddha: Enlightenment through Film. State University of New York Press, 2017. Davis, Bret W. “Encounter in Emptiness: The I-Thou Relation in Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Japanese Philosophy, edited by Michiko Yusa, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 231–254. Desser, David. “After Life: History, Memory, Trauma and the Transcendent.” Film Criticism, vol. 35, no. 2/3, Winter2010/Spring2011 2010, pp. 46–65. Film & Television

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Index with Full Text. libproxy.calbaptist.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=58085360&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 6 November 2018. Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema. Indiana University Press, 1988. Desser, David. “The Imagination of the Transcendent: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Maborosi (1995).” Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, edited by Julian Stringer and Alastair Phillips, Routledge, 2007, pp. 273–283. Donne, John. “From Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 1B: The Early Modern Period, 2nd ed., edited by Constance Jordan and Clare Carroll, Longman, 2003, p. 1667. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Routledge, 1992. Eagan, Daniel. “Kore-eda, Hirokazu: ‘Nobody Knows’ Tells Poignant Story of Abandoned Family.” Film Journal International, 27 Jan. 2005, fj.webedia.us/kore-eda-hirokazu. Accessed 6 March 2019. Ebert, Roger. “Ebert’s Walk of Fame Remarks.” RogerEbert.com, 24 June 2005. www. rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/eberts-walk-of-fame-remarks#:~:text=We%20are%20 who%20and%20when,things%20will%20never%20get%20better.&text=Movies%20 are%20the%20most%20powerful%20empathy%20machine%20in%20all%20the%20 arts. Accessed 4 November 2020. Ebert, Roger. “Review of Maborosi.” RogerEbert.com, 21 March 1997. www.rogerebert. com/reviews/maborosi-1997. Accessed 9 June 2021. Ehrlich, Linda C., and Yoshiko Kishi. “The Filmmaker as Listener: A New Look at Koreeda Hirokazu.” Cinemaya, vol. 61, Winter/Spring 2003/2004, pp. 38–45. Ellis, Jonathan. “Rev. of After Life.” Film Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2003, pp. 32–37. www. jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2003.57.1.32. Accessed 1 June 2021. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, Penguin Books, 2003. Geist, Kathe. “Buddhism in Tokyo Story.” Ozu’s Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 101–117. Harper, Thomas J. “Afterword.” In Praise of Shadows, Kindle ed., edited by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Leete’s Island Books, 1977, pp. 43–50. Hershock, Peter D. Chan Buddhism. University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Hershock, Peter D. “Chan Buddhism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2019 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/ buddhism-chan/. Accessed 18 May 2020. Hickman, Money. “Ema.” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Kodansha, 1983. Houston, James M. Joyful Exiles: Life in Christ in the Dangerous Edge of Things. InterVarsity Press, 2006. Isozaki, Arata. “Space-Time in Japan—MA.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 12–53. I Wish. Directed, written, and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda, performances by Kōki Maeda, Ohshirō Maeda, Isao Hashizume, Kiki Kirin, and Joe Odagiri, music by Quruli, English subtitles translated by Linda Hoaglund, Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2012 [2011]. It’s a Wonderful Life. Directed by Frank Capra, Liberty Films, 1946. Jacoby, Alexander. “Authorship: Author, sakka, auteur.” The Japanese Cinema Book, edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips, British Film Institute/Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 38–52. Johnston, Robert K. Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, 2nd ed. Baker Academic, 2006.

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Kasulis, Thomas P. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Kenkō, Yoshida. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, translated by Donald Keene, Columbia University Press, 1967. Ko, Mika. Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness. Routledge, 2010. Leddy, Thomas. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Lim, Dennis. “A Death in the Family.” Still Walking [DVD Booklet], dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Criterion Collection, 2011, pp. 4–11. Matsuoka, Seigow. “Aspects of Kami.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 56–57. Matsuura, Thersa. “Senko hanabi: Japanese sparklers light the summer nights.” Boingboing. https://boingboing.net/2018/09/10/molten-drops-and-fragile-spark.html. Accessed 10 September 2018. McDonald, Keiko I. Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. McKim, Kristi. “Learning to Love What Passes: Sensual Perception, Temporal Transformation, and Epistemic Production in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life.” Camera Obscura 68, vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 69–101. DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2008-003. Accessed 11 January 2021. Mes, Tom, and Jasper Sharp. The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. Stone Bridge Press, 2005. The Mirror. Directed and co-written by Andrei Tarkovsky, Mosfilm, 1975. Mitchell, Tony. “Animating Dead Space and Dead Time: Megalexandros.” Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, edited by Dan Fainaru, University of Mississippi Press, 2001, pp. 28–32. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness, translated with an Introduction by Jan Van Bragt, University of California Press, 1982. Nitschke, Günter. “Ma—Place, Space, Void.” Kyoto Journal, no. 98 (title: “ma: a measure of infinity”), August 2020, pp. 8–23. Nolletti, Jr., Arthur. “Kore-Eda’s Children: An Analysis of Lessons from a Calf, Nobody Knows, and Still Walking.” Film Criticism, vol. 35, no. 2/3, 2010, pp. 147–165. libproxy.calbaptist.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&d b=f3h&AN=58085369&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 6 November 2018. Norinaga, Motoori. “On Mono no Aware.” The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael F. Marra, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007 [1763], pp. 172–194. Orr, David. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. Oxford University Press, 2002. Pence, Jeffrey. “Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineffable.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 29–66. Plate, S. Brent. Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, 2nd ed. Columbia University Press, 2017. Pramaggiore, Maria, and Tom Wallis. Film: A Critical Introduction, 4th ed. Laurence King Publishing, 2020. Ravina, Mark J. Understanding Japan: A Cultural History. The Great Courses/Smithsonian, 2015. Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, Revised ed. Kodansha International, 2005.

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Richie, Donald. “Kore-eda’s Maborosi: Showing Only What is Necessary.” Film Criticism, vol. 35, no. 2/3, 2010, pp. 37–45. http://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=58085363&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 6 November 2018. Richie, Donald. “The Influence of Traditional Aesthetics on the Japanese Film.” Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, edited by Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser, University of Texas Press, 1994, pp. 155–163. Saito, Yuriko. “Aesthetics of the Everyday.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2021 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/ entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/. Accessed 12 June 2021. Saito, Yuriko. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford University Press, 2017. Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007. Saito, Yuriko. “Everyday Aesthetics in the Japanese Tradition.” Aesthetics of Everyday Life: East and West, edited by Liu Yuedi and Curtis L. Carter, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 145–164. “Sakurajima volcano.” VolcanoDiscovery GmbH, edited by Tom Pfeiffer, updated 28 July 2021. www.volcanodiscovery.com/sakurajima.html#quakeTable. Accessed 31 July 2021. Schilling, Mark. “Kore-eda Hirokazu Interview.” Film Criticism, vol. 35, no. 2/3, 2010, pp. 11–20. http://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/login.aspx?direct=true& db=asu&AN=505406166&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 6 November 2018. Schrader, Paul. “Rethinking Transcendental Style.” Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. University of California Press, 2018, pp. 1–33. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Da Capo Press, 1988 [1972]. Sobchack, Vivian. “Embodying Transcendence: On the Literal, the Material, and the Cinematic Sublime.” Material Religion, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 194–203. DOI:10.2752/ 175183408X328307. Accessed 26 July 2019. Solaris. Directed and co-written by Andrei Tarkovsky, Mosfilm, 1972. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows, Kindle ed., Leete’s Island Books, 1977 [1933]. Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. “Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu.” Screen, vol. 17, no. 2, 1976, pp. 41–73. Three Colors: Blue. Directed and co-written by Krzysztof Kieslowski, MK2 Productions, 1993. Tsutsui, Kyoko. “Japanese Fireworks Called ‘Sparklers’ Presented by Tsutsui Tokimasa Fireworks Co., Ltd.” Google Arts & Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/ japanese-fireworks-called-%E2%80%9Csparklers%E2%80%9D-presented-by-tsutsuitokimasa-fireworks-co-ltd-tachibana-museum/rALyU2DrTWGFKg?hl=en. Accessed 4 July 2021. Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1991. Ueda, Makoto. “Shibui.” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Kodansha, 1983. Yamada, Marc. “Between Documentary and Fiction: The Films of Kore-Eda Hirokazu.” Journal of Religion & Film, vol. 20, no. 3, 2016, Article 13. http://digitalcommons. unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss3/13. Accessed 17 March 2018. Yomota, Inuhiko. What Is Japanese Cinema?: A History, translated by Philip Kaffen, Columbia University Press, 2019.

Concluding Science-Fiction Postscript Cinema as 間

In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2017 film Before We Vanish—an apocalyptic sciencefiction film with touches of horror and humor—aliens arrive on Earth and take over people’s bodies on a quest to absorb as many human “conceptions” as possible before destroying all humanity and seizing the planet. There are many remarkable things about this film, but one of the most significant is its interrogation of the way our conceptions of key elements of existence define us as people. When the alien inhabiting thirty-year-old salaryman Shinji takes his sister-in-law’s concept of “family,” for instance, the young woman responds to the loss of “family” by prancing out of her sister’s house as if she did not have a care in the world. Nonetheless, every time concepts are taken from unsuspecting humans, unbidden tears fall from their eyes, despite the weight of the concept being lifted from them. The aliens take other notions, such as “possession,” “work,” “self,” and “other,” and the responses from those robbed of their ideas are complex but tend to resemble a happy madness. In an allegorical move, Kurosawa portrays the Japanese governmental powers as knowing what is happening but announcing to the public that there is a terrible new virus circulating that affects people neurologically. The film focuses on the married couple of Narumi and Shinji, a cheating husband now inhabited by an alien. As Shinji has taken the concept of “family,” he seems to understand what marriage means and also knows the “real” Shinji was a bad spouse, so he declares that he will “rebuild” Shinji. The bizarre relational journey of alien Shinji and Narumi, who also becomes his guide to humanity, culminates just before the aliens commence their invasion and extermination. Shinji warns Narumi that the end is nigh, and she insists on giving him her concept of “love,” both because she wants him to experience the power and beauty of her feelings for him (the alien Shinji) and because she does not want him to “go home misunderstanding humans.” As the couple stands on the precipice of the end of humankind, looking out over the gray ocean and overcast sky (a ma image), Shinji proclaims, “Everything looks different.” Love is the concept that changes one’s perspective on all things, and all conceptions, of this world. When the aliens begin strafing the Earth with fire-bombs—inevitably reminiscent of World War II carpet-bombing and the atomic holocaust—Shinji protects Narumi. The cut to black is a hashi to two months later, which starts with another kū shot of cloudy gray skies, but now there are shafts of sunlight streaming through the DOI: 10.4324/9780429276057-6

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cumuli. Kurosawa’s camera pans to the left and tilts downward to reveal a solitary human figure below traversing the bomb-pocked ground. Humanity has survived. Another cut discloses that the “human” is Shinji, and he enters a dilapidated building serving as a hospital, to which he delivers medications. The amiable doctor who thanks Shinji asks him why he thinks the aliens called off their invasion, to which he responds, “Maybe coming to Earth made them a little wiser.” She clearly suspects he is an alien and insists that there is a reason the aliens came to Earth “exactly when they did.” She contends the brush with annihilation has had a positive impact: “Humanity was facing all kinds of problems. It helped us rethink everything from scratch.” This is one result of tribulation and trauma, the opportunity within brokenness to “rethink” and rebuild our conceptions and thereby alter the material and spiritual conditions of our world. The doctor then admits, “That leaves the aftereffects. Loss of conceptions and abnormal behavior. We have no way to treat them. But humans are resilient. The sufferers are slowly recovering. . . . Have faith in the future.” Shinji then delivers food to others dwelling in the hospital, which also seems to house people left homeless, and we see that Narumi’s love has taken root in Shinji, manifesting in active compassion for all humans. In just two months, his love has grown and now supports other people. In post-3.11 Japan, following over two decades of debilitating economic precarity, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is speaking in this film about the reimagining of Japanese life and identity. There are no easy solutions or antidotes for survivors, but recovery is happening, and perseverance may involve a leap of faith, hope in an unknown, unpredictable future. It is telling that Kurosawa made a dark, pessimistic film ironically entitled Bright Future (Akarui mirai) in 2002, in the wake of 1995’s twin disasters and the first decade of post-Economic Bubble hardship. As evidenced by Before We Vanish, there is something about the unconscionable loss and devastation of 3.11 that leads one to gaze over the edge of human extinction and ponder if there is meaning, perhaps even redemption, in reconsidering and reimagining what it means to live in connection with others: local, global, natural, and otherworldly. Makoto Shinkai’s your name. re-envisions the 3.11 disaster, reversing harrowing loss by transcending the boundaries of space-time and celebrating survival and love in a masterful use of the aesthetics of kū and choreography of musubi. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life and I Wish were made before 3.11, but they respond to the disasters and struggles of the Heisei period, profoundly exploring interdependence between people and among all things phenomenal and spiritual. The Shinto notion of appreciating and feeling at home with the wonder of the natural world and understanding one’s place within it is at the center of these films, but so is the idea of savoring everyday things and experiences, especially those shared with others. Akira Kurosawa portrays the negative side of interdependence in his revisionist samurai films Throne of Blood and Ran, wherein there are no heroes, only perpetrators and victims, and they all go down together. In post-World War II Japan and a globe locked in the Cold War stand-off, these spectral Nō-inspired masterpieces are meant as warnings that we are all caught in downward transcendence,

Concluding Science-Fiction Postscript 239 degenerating into perdition, if we relentlessly continue to pursue our greed for power, property, and wealth, whether personally or nationally. Following Japan’s precipitous economic dive, the venerable octogenarian reverses course in his final film, Madadayo, which returns with great poignancy to the subject of upward transcendence within compassionate community, the professor and his former students forming a mutually sustaining bond of love and care in difficult times. When there is trauma and brokenness, there are opportunities to reset and rebuild our relationships with people, nature, and everything else that surrounds us. The rupture in space-time created by disasters gargantuan and diminutive, global and personal, opens up ma in which to reflect on past, present, and future. These intervals are truly bridges to the future, and while these moments may inspire a mono no aware that accepts the losses of the past, the mujō of all things, it is also a mono no aware that feels with others, embracing the emotions and sensations attendant upon this processual world, appreciating our connections of all kinds. The films explored in this book express these sensibilities in both their formal elements and narratives. Throughout the book, it has been demonstrated that the multidimensional concept of ma is a religio-aesthetic paradigm that opens up copious space for a rich dialogue between cinematic aesthetics, thematics, and story. As the kanji for ma shows (間), the gates surrounding the sun frame the space through which the golden rays flow: light needs an open space, a ma, to be seen. The framed space of the cinematic screen, no matter the size or type, is the gate through which the light plays for a time. The ma of film itself is a framed “field of emptiness” that can be perceived as a place where, musubi-like, diverse times and places intersect both on screen and in the relationship between viewers situated in space-time and the diegetic worlds they enter. To be sure, not all people at all times will perceive or experience a particular film as transcendent, as sacred space, but crossing a threshold into a filmic world is a type of susabi, an entertaining break, and, at times, this may be the primary sort of ma one experiences with a film. Arata Isozaki describes this susabi type of ma as “an empty place where various phenomena appear, pass by, and disappear” (16), an uncanny description of the dance of light and shadow on a framed screen. Moreover, if one experiences the viewing of a film as susabi, it still is a ma that has the potential to bring a human transcendence of present concerns and pain. On the other side of this spectrum, a film may be a kekkai or himorogi, wherein the flow of moving light arrives like kami and departs, and in between, while the sacred abides in the ma, viewers experience spiritual power and revelation that transforms their vision of themselves, their world, and the future. The films examined in this book have the potential to be experienced as sacred spaces that re-frame our worldview as well as susabi, but there are myriad factors and contexts—including the viewing environment, technology, and even one’s mood—that determine how a particular cinematic text will be perceived at a specific time and place. Whether a film is experienced as susabi or kekkai, or anywhere in between, there is always an opportunity to connect with others on screen, to realize interrelationality, whether those “others” are river dragons, blood-thirsty

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samurai, or after-life counselors. This can expand the range of our empathic senses. Cinema offers us a window, a ma, in which to feel with others, to practice compassion that may be taken out into our environments, our own mises-en-scène. It is a conception we can carry with us, helping us to transcend our insular perspectives. Indeed, it is this quality that led Roger Ebert to make the sincere (though perhaps a bit partial) proclamation, “Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts.” Films are a musubi experience of multiple times, places, and relationships intersecting and folding into each other, as they do in memory, in dreams, and in our kokoro. As a religio-aesthetic principle, ma may not be applied productively to all Japanese films, which are brilliantly diverse, but it can be used as a concept to read some films from all over world. One does not steal the conception from Japan in applying ma to non-Japanese arts and spaces. Arata Isozaki has demonstrated this in his architectural structures around the globe, which display the connective, playful, guiding properties of ma while reflecting the places and cultures in which they reside. Ma does not have to be deracinated from Japan or exoticized as an element of “Japaneseness.” As a kaleidoscopic concept, ma can be used to explore cinematic texts in order to elucidate spaces of interconnection—bridges between times, people, and places—and to illustrate and invite the opening of sundry gates between the sacred and mundane. This trans-descendence, a movement or awakening to the interdependent “ground” of self and others, creatural and spiritual, is at once humanly and numinously transcendent. In the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi, pottery is mended with an adhesive and gold powder, such that the seams of the breakage gleam with gold in the repaired vessel. Pottery mended with this process is more beautiful and valuable than before it was damaged. After the triple disaster of 3.11, demand for kintsugi greatly increased, especially on objects such as everyday bowls, as many lost everything but a few pieces of their quotidian lives (Kintsugi). Artist and writer Makoto Fujimura explains, “Kintsugi speaks about conditions of trauma and brokenness, ground zero conditions, valuing what you have rather than this disposable culture. Kintsugi is . . . a redemptive journey that leads to new creation” (Kintsugi). Kintsugi master Kunio Nakamura describes it as an art that is “between repair and creation,” but closer to creation, and he affirms that “[k]intsugi is not just fixing. It can connect different times together, and memories together. It’s a special kind of magic” (Kintsugi). This is the magic we see in the films explored in this book, which look toward mending the brokenness of the past and creating ma in which to envision a transcendent future. They pour light through the open gate of the frame “into the fissures of the world” (Fujimura). Kintsugi shares with musubi and kekkai the kanji radical meaning thread (糸). These terms refer to binding together, whether pieces of objects, fractured individuals, humans within community, or the phenomenal with the spiritual: the essence is the need for and strength within interconnection, the weaving into an interdependent whole that is more valuable, more beautiful than both the individual piece and the larger vessel before its breaking. These films respond to difficult times and trauma with artful, restorative creativity, turning memories of the past, concerns about the present, and hopes for the future into cinematic visions of the process of transcendence.

Concluding Science-Fiction Postscript 241

Works Cited Before We Vanish. Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, English subtitles by Don Brown, Nikkatsu, 2017. Ebert, Roger. “Ebert’s Walk of Fame Remarks.” RogerEbert.com, 24 June 2005. www. rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/eberts-walk-of-fame-remarks#:~:text=We%20are%20 who%20and%20when,things%20will%20never%20get%20better.&text=Movies%20 are%20the%20most%20powerful%20empathy%20machine%20in%20all%20the%20 arts. Accessed 4 November 2020. Fujimura, Makoto. “Kintsugi Generation.” MakotoFujimura.com, 5 May 2019. https:// makotofujimura.com/writings/kintsugi-generation/. Accessed 4 May 2021. Isozaki, Arata. “Space-Time in Japan—MA.” MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Arata Isozaki, et al., Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979, pp. 12–53. Kintsugi. Directed by Jonathan Cipiti, Windrider Studios, 2019.

Index

3.11 triple disaster see Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami event 5 Centimeters Per Second (Shinkai 2007) 96, 104, 107; see also Shinkai, Makoto aesthetics 2, 7, 15–16, 20, 24–52; definitions of 9–11; everyday aesthetics 9–10, 25, 29–30, 42–43, 54, 172, 177–182, 187, 189, 230–231; see also religio-aesthetics After Life (Wandafuru raifu) (Kore-eda 1998) 8, 18, 29, 35–37, 49, 54, 57, 172, 175–177, 180, 182–210, 211, 216, 221, 222, 230–235, 238; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Air Doll (Kore-eda 2009) 175, 184, 185, 188; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Akira (dir. Katsuhiro Ôtomo 1988) 96 Allison, Anne 21–23, 33, 57, 121, 175, 232 Amaterasu 2, 45, 76, 105, 157 Amida Buddha (Amitabha) 15, 86, 91–92, 139–140, 151, 159, 161, 166 Angelopoulos, Theo 28, 34, 185, 194, 235 anthropocentrism 65, 69 Antonioni, Michelangelo 174 Aoyama, Shinji 173 apocalypticism 96, 120–122, 126–128, 136, 159, 161, 213, 237 Article 9 (the “peace clause” in the Japanese Constitution) 21, 24 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack (1995) 22, 55, 172, 175 aura 180–181, 201, 205, 224 auteur/auteurism 3, 103, 134, 135, 137, 152, 185 axis mundi 45, 67, 80, 91, 112, 117, 138, 145, 151 Bakhtin, Mikhail 62, 108 Barefoot Gen (dir. Masaki Mori 1983) 20, 121, 131

Bazin, Andre 28, 30 Before We Vanish (K. Kurosawa 2017) 173, 237–238; see also Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Benjamin, Walter 28, 30, 44, 49, 57, 152, 167, 180–181 Berger, James 120 Bergman, Ingmar 184 Bingham, Adam 106 Bird, Michael 24, 29–30, 56, 57, 180 Black Mound (Nō play) (in Jp. both Adachigahara and Kurozuka) 16, 79, 149–150 Bordwell, David 194, 236 Boyd, James W. 62, 63, 78, 81, 91, 92 Bradshaw, Nick 96, 126–127, 131 Bresson, Robert 30, 174, 184 Bright Future (Akarui mirai) (K. Kurosawa 2002) 238; see also Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Broderick, Mick 96, 131 Buber, Martin 38 Buchanan, Judith 167 Buddhism 6–7, 9–18, 19, 25–26, 34, 37, 39–41, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 65, 68, 70–72, 83–84, 87, 103, 110, 145, 150, 163, 166, 186, 197, 205, 216, 219, 224, 228, 230; see also Pure Land Buddhism; Zen Buddhism (Chan) Buljan, Katharine 38, 52, 55, 57, 64, 86, 123 Burch, Noël 33–35, 41, 57, 194 Cannes International Film Festival 173 Cardullo, Bert 137, 168 Carter, Robert E. 112, 131 Cavallaro, Dani 85, 91, 92 cherry blossoms (as symbol) 20, 47, 55, 104, 122, 150, 187, 197, 212, 225 Cho, Francisca 36–37, 48, 57, 63, 216, 219, 233

Index Chōmei, Kamo no 164–165 cinéma-vérité 172, 191, 193 City of Sadness, A (Hou 1989) 232 Clements, Jonathan 11, 21, 130, 131 Collick, John 138, 146, 158, 161, 167, 168 Collins, John J. 122, 131 Comee, Stephen 150, 170 communitas 65, 77, 90; see also Turner, Victor Constitution of Japan (1947) 21, 137 consumer culture (consumption culture and consumerism) 10, 63, 73, 76, 82, 84, 88, 137 Croteau, Melissa 120, 122, 131 Cure (K. Kurosawa 1997) 173; see also Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Cusack, Carole M. 38, 52, 55, 57, 64, 86, 123 Davis, Bret W. 29, 40, 42, 57, 69, 177 Davis, Darrell William 21, 57, 156 “dead time” 194–195 Debold, Elizabeth 2, 57 dengaku 91, 138 Departures (dir. Yojiro Takita 2008) 232 Desser, David 2, 34–35, 37, 57, 174, 184–186, 188, 198, 232, 233, 234 Detweiler, Craig 24, 56, 57 Distance (Kore-eda 2001) 175–176, 181, 185, 188; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Dodson-Robinson, Eric 156, 167, 168 Dōgen 14, 62, 65, 66, 92 Dōjō -ji (Nō play) 159 Donaldson, Peter S. 148, 168 Donne, John 192, 234 Dorman, Andrew 3, 31–33, 56, 57, 166 Dorsky, Nathaniel 24, 56, 57 Douglas, Mary 190, 234 Dreams (A. Kurosawa 1990) 130; see also Kurosawa, Akira Duke, Shaun 128, 131 Eagan, Daniel 186, 188, 234 Ebert, Roger 39, 57, 67, 69, 92, 200, 232, 234, 240 Economic Bubble and Economic Miracle (Miracle Economy and Bubble Economy) 13, 20–24, 33, 55, 73, 137, 164, 171, 173, 175, 238 Ehrlich, David 90–91, 92 Ehrlich, Linda 34, 35, 171, 186, 234 Eightfold Path 84, 162 Eliade, Mircea 4, 45, 57, 67, 91, 92, 99, 131, 143, 145, 147, 168 Ellis, Jonathan 186, 204, 230, 234

243

ema (wish plaques) 12, 176, 218, 225–227 emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā; including “field of emptiness”) 25, 29, 36, 39–43, 46, 49, 54–55, 67–69, 72, 74, 79, 84–86, 88, 90, 98, 102–103, 105–107, 111, 122, 139–140, 206, 208, 216, 229–230, 239 Epstein, Jean 28–29, 58 Erice, Victor 35, 185 everyday aesthetics see aesthetics First Reformed (Schrader 2017) 55, 184–185; see also Schrader, Paul five processes (or five elements) 15, 40, 68, 95 Four Noble Truths 50, 140 Freud, Sigmund 199, 234 Fujimura, Makoto 10, 240, 241 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant 1, 95, 121 Funa Benkei (Nō play) 159 furusato 125–127 Geist, Kathe 46, 58, 136, 160, 162, 168 gendai-geki 136, 166 gerotranscendence 167 Glassman, Hank 72, 92 globalization 2, 3, 31, 65, 178 Godzilla 121 Godzilla (dir. Ishirō Honda 1954) 121 Goodwin, James 152, 162, 167, 168 Goto-Jones, Christopher 134, 167, 168 Grapard, Allan G. 66, 67, 70, 92 Great Hanshin Earthquake 22, 172 Great Kantō Earthquake 1, 20, 134, 164, 197–198 Hamner, M. Gail 167, 168 Hana (Kore-eda 2006) 185; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Hardacre, Helen 12, 13, 14, 15, 53, 58, 87, 108, 125 hashi 46, 54, 67, 76, 97, 102, 110, 115, 138, 145, 148, 182, 188–189, 192–194, 198, 209–210, 221, 225, 237; definition of 45; see also ma Hashiguchi, Ryosuke 173 Havens, Norman 123, 131 Heart Sutra 39 Heian period 15, 33, 50–51, 103, 145 Heisei era (the “Lost Years”) 20–23, 54, 171–175, 238 hell(s) 71, 84, 134–136, 143, 145–147, 156, 158–159, 160, 163, 166–167, 213

244

Index

Herbrechter, Stefan 135, 160, 168 Hershock, Peter D. xii 187, 216, 224, 227–230, 234 hibakusha 20, 120–121, 125 Hickman, Money 218, 234 hierophany 4–5, 29, 45, 55, 56, 116, 138, 141, 143, 145–147, 151, 157, 213 himorogi (kekkai) 53, 80, 91, 98, 119, 138, 144–145, 148, 151, 157, 182, 190, 239; definitions of 44–45; see also ma Hirano, Kyoko 152, 162, 168 Hirasawa, Caroline 145, 158, 166, 168 Hōjōki 164–165 honji suijaku (Buddhist-Shinto syncretism) 15, 72, 91, 150; see also ShintoBuddhist syncretism Hou, Hsiao-hsien 28, 34, 35, 172, 174, 232; see also City of Sadness, A (Hou 1989) However . . . In the Time of Government Aid Cuts (Kore-eda 1991) 171, 172; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Howlett, Kathy M. 157, 168 humanism 135–137, 141, 160–162 hungry ghosts 71, 83 Husserl, Edmund 180 Huxley, Aldous 134, 168 ikigai 7, 55, 126, 217, 233 I Live in Fear (A. Kurosawa 1955) 167; see also Kurosawa, Akira impermanence see mujō Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan 2014) 131 Isozaki, Arata 10, 19, 39, 43–47, 49, 58, 67, 91, 112, 114, 115, 150, 181–182, 190, 193, 239, 240 Itami, Jūzō 21 I Wish (Kiseki) (Kore-eda 2011) 16, 19, 36, 54, 172, 176–177, 182, 187, 210–231, 234, 238; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Izanagi 76, 89, 120, 130 Izanami 76, 89, 120, 130 Japaneseness (nihonjinron) 12, 15, 26, 51, 56, 72, 156, 166, 167, 232, 240; definitions of 30–38 jidai-geki 15, 136, 146, 156, 179 Jizō 71–73, 89 Johnston, Robert K. xi 5, 8, 56, 58, 176, 234 Jones, Kip 167, 168 Jorgens, Jack 149, 168

Kagemusha (A. Kurosawa 1980) 20, 136–138, 146, 156, 166; see also Kurosawa, Akira kagura 98, 108, 112 kami 2, 11–16, 18, 27, 44–49, 52–54, 56, 63, 64, 66–68, 71–84, 88–91, 95, 98, 99, 103, 105, 108–110, 112, 114–117, 120, 122–130, 139, 143, 144, 147–148, 157, 160, 182, 190, 192–193, 207, 215, 217–218, 225, 227, 229, 239; definitions of 39 kamikakushi 66 Kasulis, Thomas P. xii 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 47, 51, 58, 64, 67, 72, 74, 76, 83, 97–98, 103–104, 109, 123, 128, 207, 211, 212, 215–216, 229 Kawase, Naomi 173 Keene, Donald 158, 168 kekkai see himorogi; ma Kenkō, Yoshida 47, 58, 95 Kermode, Mark 101, 131 ki (spiritual power/energy) 39, 43, 44–45, 48, 52, 56, 67, 68, 85, 90, 103, 190, 192, 198, 213, 215 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 174 Killing Stone, The (Sesshōseki) (Nō play) 159 King Lear (play) 136–137, 152, 154, 155, 158–159, 162, 167 King, Mike 5–6, 55, 58 Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, The (dir. Mami Sunada 2013) 64 Kingston, Jeff 21, 22, 58 kintsugi 240, 241 Kishi, Yoshiko 186, 234 Kitano, Takeshi 173 Ko, Mika 31–33, 58, 164, 198 Kojiki 14, 63, 75, 76, 130 kokoro (heart-mind or mindful heart) 14, 18, 38, 40, 66–69, 76, 81, 90, 109, 112–113, 117, 122–123, 164, 165, 187, 211–212, 220, 225, 226–227, 230, 240 kokugaku see Native Studies Kon, Satoshi 23 Kondō, Marie 42, 58 Kore-eda, Hirokazu 2, 3, 8, 16, 18–20, 25–32, 34–38, 42, 48–49, 53, 54, 103, 172–233, 238; see also After Life (1998); Air Doll (2009); Distance (2001); Hana (2006); However . . . In the Time of Government Aid Cuts (1991); I Wish (Kiseki, 2011); Lessons from a Calf (1991); Maborosi (1995);

Index Nobody Knows (2005); Our Little Sister (2015); Shoplifters (2018); Still Walking (2008); Third Murder, The (2017); Truth, The (2019) Kott, Jan 141, 155, 169 kū (sky, void) (including kū shots and aesthetics of kū) 29, 39–41, 49, 67–69, 73, 78, 84, 86–87, 88–89, 97–98, 103–105, 122, 160, 166, 188, 206, 208, 222, 226, 237, 238; see also ma kuchikamizake 98, 102, 112, 114, 116, 119, 124 Kūkai 14, 39–40, 68, 95 Kuroda, Toshio 11, 12–13, 15, 58 Kurosawa, Akira 2, 3, 6, 15–16, 18, 19, 20, 27, 32, 34, 38, 47, 53–55, 121, 130, 134–167, 175, 238; see also Dreams (1990); I Live in Fear (1955); Kagemusha (1980); Madadayo (1993); Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, The (1945); Ran (1985); Red Beard (1965); Rhapsody in August (1990); Rashōmon (1950); Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō) (1957) Kurosawa, Kiyoshi 23, 173, 174, 237–238; see also Before We Vanish (2017); Bright Future (2002); Cure (1997); Tokyo Sonata (2008) Kyoto School 29, 40, 68, 98 labyrinths 141–142, 145, 147–148 Last Temptation of Christ, The (dir. Martin Scorsese 1988) 8–9, 55 Leddy, Thomas 180–181, 235 Leonard, Kendra Preston 161, 169 Lessons from a Calf (Kore-eda 1991) 171–172, 211; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Levinas, Emmanuel 38, 58, 91 Lim, Dennis 31, 34, 58, 188 Lindvall, Terry 24, 58 Lotus Sutra 187 Lyden, John 4 ma (間) 2, 8, 19, 27, 44–47; basic definition of 4–5; detailed definition of 37–44; difference between ma and mu 49, 51–55, 66–69, 72–74, 76–77, 81, 84–85, 87, 89, 97–99, 101–104, 109, 110–114, 129, 138, 142, 145, 148, 150, 157, 166, 172, 176, 177, 179, 182–184, 188–190, 196, 198–199, 202–203, 205–212, 216, 220–226, 229, 231,

245

237, 239–240; types of 47–48; see also hashi; himorogi; michiyuki; shimenawa; suki; susabi; utsuroi; utsushimi; yorishiro Maborosi (Kore-eda 1995) 32, 34–37, 48, 173–174, 176, 184, 185, 188, 232; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Macbeth (play) 136, 141, 142, 147–148 Macquarrie, John 6, 7, 58 Madadayo (A. Kurosawa 1993) 54, 135, 136, 139, 163–166, 167, 239; see also Kurosawa, Akira mandala(s) 15, 27–28, 142–143, 145 Marra, Michael F. (Michele F.) 40, 41, 58, 68, 92 Marran, Christine L. 36–37, 59 Matsumoto, Shigeru 51, 59, 63, 92, 105 Matsumura, Kazuo 123, 131 Matsuoka, Seigow 10, 41, 44, 47, 48, 59, 68, 105, 123, 192 matsuri (festival) 12, 52, 108, 233 McDonald, Keiko I. 35, 56, 59, 143, 149, 167, 174, 188, 195, 232 McKim, Kristi 174, 180, 188, 232, 235 McKinney, Meredith 132 McRae, James, xii 38, 59 Meiji era 2, 12, 14, 15, 20, 37, 64, 75, 112, 136 Méliès, Georges 195 Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, The (A. Kurosawa 1945) 138; see also Kurosawa, Akira Mes, Tom 171, 172, 173, 179, 235 michiyuki 101, 110, 144, 148, 182, 186, 188, 193, 203, 222; definition of 45–46; see also ma Middle Path (middle way and nakamichi) 84–85, 87, 140, 189, 200 miko see shrine maidens Mirror, The (Tarkovsky 1975) 235 misogi 81 Miyazaki, Hayao 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 16, 20, 25, 30, 32, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43, 47, 53, 62–92, 95, 123, 129, 150, 232, 238; see also My Neighbor Totoro (1988); Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984); Ponyo (2008); Princess Mononoke (1997); Spirited Away (2001) Mizoguchi, Kenji 166, 174, 184 mono no aware 34, 35, 53, 95, 102–107, 109–110, 112, 121, 126–129, 138–139, 164, 166, 186–187, 200, 220, 230, 239; definitions of 49–52

246

Index

monotheism 65 Mōri, Motonari 152–153, 155 Mount Fuji 130, 143, 145–147, 153 Mousley, Andy 136, 163, 169 Moving (Jp. Ohikkoshi) (Sōmai 1993) 233; see also Sōmai, Shinji mu 25, 36, 46, 48–49, 68 muen shakai (relationless society) 175 mujō (impermanence) 6, 19, 20, 40–41, 49–50, 68–69, 103, 129, 138–139, 165, 183, 202, 225, 239 Murakami, Haruki 18–19, 55, 59, 95, 120, 129 musubi 53, 88, 92, 99, 107–116, 122, 127, 128, 130, 238–240 My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki 1988) 16, 32, 65, 71, 73, 77, 232; see also Miyazaki, Hayao Nadeau, Randall L. 145, 169 Nakamura, Kunio 240 Nakane, Chie 33, 59 Napier, Susan J. 62, 65, 76, 77, 91, 93, 104, 108, 120, 130, 132 Naruse, Mikio 34, 185 Native Studies (kokugaku and Nativism) 13, 15, 33, 63, 64, 75, 103 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Miyazaki 1984) 65, 123; see also Miyazaki, Hayao Nayar, Sheila J. 4, 24, 56, 59 nembutsu 91, 151 nihonjinron see Japaneseness Nihonshoki 14, 63 Nishimura, Tetsuya 62, 63, 78, 81, 91, 92 Nishitani, Keiji 29, 40–42, 50, 59, 68, 69, 86, 88, 90, 93, 98, 106, 112, 122, 132, 177, 189, 216, 229 Nitschke, Günter 39, 59, 67, 93, 216 Nō theater 11, 16, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 36, 45, 54, 70, 79, 80, 81, 91, 112, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142–144, 146–150, 151, 155–160, 167, 238; genzai Nō 146, 159; kyōran-mono Nō 158–159; mugen Nō 146, 159; zatsu Nō 159 Nobody Knows (Kore-eda 2005) 172, 185, 188, 211, 219, 232; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Nolletti, Jr., Arthur 172, 235 nonattachment 19, 50, 140, 152, 223, 230 nondualism 26, 36, 39, 68, 79, 84, 139–140, 189, 211, 220

Nordin, Kenneth D. 162, 169 Noriega, Chon A. 121, 132 Noriko’s Dinner Table (dir. Sion Sono 2008) 23 Norinaga, Motoori 13–14, 33–34, 50–51, 53, 59, 63–64, 75, 103–106, 109, 122–123, 164, 166, 169, 187, 200 nuclear bombings (atomic bombings) 20, 47, 120–122, 125, 128, 130, 159, 164, 216, 237; see also hibakusha Occupation of Japan by US forces 21, 31, 56 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 55, 59 omikuji (paper fortunes) 12, 56, 226 Ono, Sokyō 13 Orpheus and Eurydice (myth) 76, 89 Ôtomo, Katsuhiro 96 Our Little Sister (Kore-eda 2015) 188; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Ozu, Yasujirō 25–26, 28, 30–36, 41, 46, 49, 50–51, 103, 142, 174–178, 183–185, 187–188, 194–195, 232 paper (as sacred symbol) 12, 16, 45, 52, 56, 83, 91, 197, 204, 218, 226–227 Parkes, Graham 14, 40, 59, 65, 68, 93 Parry, Richard Lloyd 19–20, 59, 121, 124–126, 130, 132 Pence, Jeffrey 8, 60, 176, 180, 189, 235 Pilgrim, Richard B. 39, 49, 60, 68, 93 pilgrimage 3, 12, 25, 52–53, 56, 65–69, 70, 74, 77, 80, 84, 88, 90, 129, 217, 222 pillow shots 25, 34, 41, 56, 174, 181, 188–190, 193–195, 211, 222, 226 Place Promised in Our Early Days, The (Shinkai 2004) 107, 128; see also Shinkai, Makoto Plate, S. Brent 4, 49, 60, 190, 233, 235 pollution 6, 69, 72, 75–77, 79, 81, 83, 90, 172, 233 Ponyo (Miyazaki 2008) 123; see also Miyazaki, Hayao posthumanism 136–137, 160, 163; definition of 135 Pramaggiore, Maria 190, 235 precarity 23, 55, 164, 173, 175, 238 Prince, Stephen 138–140, 143, 156, 159–160, 162, 167, 169 Princess Mononoke (1997) 16, 65, 81; see also Miyazaki, Hayao Prohl, Inken 10–11, 60 Pure Land Buddhism 15, 86, 91–92, 139–140, 151, 199; see also Buddhism

Index purification/purity 16, 32, 40, 65–67, 69, 71–72, 75–77, 81, 83, 90, 110, 112, 122, 125, 148, 209, 220, 232 Ran (A. Kurosawa 1985) 18, 19, 20, 27, 34, 54, 130, 134–141, 143, 146, 151, 152–163, 165, 166, 167, 238; see also Kurosawa, Akira Rashōmon (A. Kurosawa 1950) 31; see also Kurosawa, Akira Ravina, Mark J. 171, 235 Red Beard (A. Kurosawa 1965) 135, 139; see also Kurosawa, Akira Reider, Noriko 66, 79, 81, 91, 93 reincarnation (samsara) 12, 71, 83–84, 87, 110, 112, 141, 150–151, 155, 183, 216, 217 Reinders, Eric 70, 84, 91, 93 religio-aesthetics 2, 7, 9–10, 20, 24–25, 36, 38, 49, 53–54, 67, 72, 182 Resnais, Alain 184 responsive virtuosity see Hershock, Peter D.; upāya Rhapsody in August (A. Kurosawa 1990) 121, 136, 167; see also Kurosawa, Akira Richardson, Herbert W. 5–6, 60 Richie, Donald 2, 7, 11, 31, 33–35, 49–51, 56, 60, 95, 103, 120–122, 132, 136–137, 139, 141–143, 146, 155, 157, 160, 162–163, 166, 167, 174–175, 185, 232, 235, 236 Rijū, Gō 173 Ring, The (dir. Hideo Nakata 1998) 60 ritual(s) (and rite[s]) 2, 4–7, 12, 14, 16, 44, 47–48, 51–53, 62–64, 76–77, 80–81, 91, 102–103, 108, 109, 112, 114, 123, 126, 138–139, 142–143, 145, 147, 151, 156–157, 159, 172, 182–183, 187, 190, 205, 209, 213, 216, 218–219, 221, 224–227, 231–232 Robertson, Jennifer 126–127, 132 Saito, Yuriko 9–10, 42–44, 60, 177–182, 187, 190, 215, 219, 230–231, 236 Sakurajima (volcano) 54, 212, 214–215, 217–219, 220, 223, 225–226, 228–230, 233 samsara see reincarnation sarugaku 91, 138 Sasaki, Ken-ichi 10, 43, 60 Scheibe, Susanne 106–107, 132 Schilling, Mark 34, 35, 60, 172, 176, 185, 186, 230, 236

247

Schrader, Paul 2, 4, 8, 11, 24–30, 33–35, 37, 41, 46, 49–51, 55–56, 60, 103, 142, 176, 180, 181, 184–185, 195; see also First Reformed (2017); transcendental style (in film) Scorsese, Martin 8–9, 55 Sehnsucht 3, 97, 106–107, 112, 115, 127, 129 Sengoku jidai 34, 54, 137, 140–141, 143, 153, 166, 167 senko hanabi (sparklers) 219 Shakespeare, William 136–137, 141, 148, 159, 169 Sharp, Jasper 171, 172, 173, 179, 235 shibui (simple beauty) 220 Shields, James Mark 135, 137, 139, 169 Shigehiko, Hasumi 35, 60 Shimazaki, Chifumi 150, 158–159, 169–170 shimenawa 16, 56, 82, 83, 113, 116, 198; detailed definition of 44–45 Shin Godzilla (dir. Hideaki Anno 2016) 121 Shinkai, Makoto 2, 3, 20, 30, 32, 38, 41, 43, 49, 53, 62, 95–130, 238; see also 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007); Place Promised in Our Early Days, The (2004); Voices of a Distant Star (2002); Weathering with You (2019); your name. (2016) Shinozaki, Makoto 173 Shinto 1–7, 9, 11–20, 27, 32–33, 39, 41, 43–48, 50–53, 55, 63–65, 67, 69–72, 74, 76–83, 87, 91, 97–99, 101, 103–105, 107–113, 122–124, 127–128, 130, 135, 138–140, 142–145, 148, 150–151, 157, 164, 166, 182, 190, 193, 213, 215–219, 229–230, 232, 238; see also State Shinto Shinto-Buddhist syncretism (BuddhistShinto syncretism) 11–12, 15–16, 18, 39, 53, 65, 69, 72, 80, 97, 112, 138, 150–151, 215; see also honji suijaku Shirane, Haruo 56, 60 shomin-geki 175 Shoplifters (Kore-eda 2018) 173, 188, 225; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu shrine maidens (miko) 53, 98, 108, 123, 124 six realms of reincarnation 71, 84, 87; see also reincarnation (samsara) skillful means see upāya slow film 27, 180–181 Smith, Huston 7–8, 60

248

Index

Sobchack, Vivian 29, 51–52, 60, 177, 181, 187, 189, 236 Solaris (Tarkovsky 1972) 236; see also Tarkovsky, Andrei Sōmai, Shinji 233; see also Moving (Ohikkoshi) (1993) Sørensen, Lars-Martin 64, 93 Spirited Away (Miyazaki 2001) 3, 8, 16, 25, 27, 34, 42, 43, 53, 56, 62–92, 95, 103, 109, 116, 129, 150, 238; see also Miyazaki, Hayao Spitznas, Andrew 134, 162, 164, 167, 170 Stanley, Amy 167, 170 State Shinto 13, 20, 47, 64, 112, 123, 130 Still Walking (Kore-eda 2008) 34, 178, 181, 188, 219, 232; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Stone, Jon R. 122, 132 Sugiura, Yuko xii 233 suki 47; definition of 46; see also ma sumi-e (black ink painting) 202 susabi 182, 190, 196, 198, 217, 223, 239; definition of 46; see also ma Suzuki, Ayumi 91, 93 Suzuki, D. T. 10–11, 26 Suzuki, Toshio 64 Takahata, Isao 15, 20, 86, 92 Takemitsu, Toru 160–161 Tale of the Heike, The 92, 139 Tamaki, Mihic 1, 37, 61, 96, 121, 126–127 Tan, Matthew John Paul 97, 106, 133 Tanikawa, Shuntarō 223 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō 36, 61, 194 Tarkovsky, Andrei 26, 27, 184–185, 210; see also The Mirror (1975); Solaris (1972) Taylor, Barry 24, 56, 57 Tenkōsei (dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi 1982) 101 Teo, Stephen 137, 170 Tessier, Max 136, 161, 170 Third Murder, The (Kore-eda 2017) 185; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Thomas, Jolyon Baraka 11–12, 15, 61, 64, 72, 93 Thompson, Kristen 194, 236 Thornton, S. A. 137, 163, 170 Throne of Blood (Jp. Kumonosu-jō) (A. Kurosawa 1957) 15–16, 18, 19, 20, 27, 34, 54, 135–152, 156, 158, 163, 165, 167, 238; see also Kurosawa, Akira Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami event (Great East Japan earthquake and

tsunami and 3.11) 1, 19, 24, 54, 95–96, 107, 121, 124–129, 130, 238 Tokyo Godfathers (dir. Satoshi Kon 2003) 23 Tokyo Sonata (K. Kurosawa 2008) 23; see also Kurosawa, Kiyoshi torii gate(s) 1–2, 16–17, 70, 98, 112, 215 transcendence 2–9, 16–18, 19, 24, 26–27, 29, 37–38, 40–42, 49–55, 56, 69, 79, 91, 109, 119, 139, 143, 151, 157, 158, 162–163, 166, 175, 176–177, 179, 180–181, 183–184, 187–189, 196, 198–199, 203, 204, 208–209, 211, 227, 230, 238–240; definitions of 5–8; downward transcendence 4, 6, 16, 18, 53–54, 89, 134–136, 142–145, 151, 163, 166, 167, 173, 238–239 transcendental style (in film) 8, 37, 48, 54–55, 55–56, 60, 142, 176, 180, 184–185, 189; definitions of 24–30; see also Schrader, Paul trans-descendence 69, 176, 189, 229, 240; definition of 42; see also Nishitani, Keiji Truth, The (Kore-eda 2019) 178, 186; see also Kore-eda, Hirokazu Turner, Victor 62–63, 65, 77, 94 twilight (magic hour) 76, 85–86, 96, 99, 109, 110, 111–112, 116–119, 124, 166, 231 Tyler, Royall 11, 61, 70, 94, 146, 150 Ueda, Makoto 10, 50–51, 61, 104, 123, 133, 144, 159, 164, 170, 200, 220, 236 Ugetsu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi 1953) 166 ukiyo-e 86, 91 ultra-nationalism 51, 64, 72, 123, 130, 135, 155, 164 upāya (skillful or expedient means and responsive virtuosity) 32, 82, 127, 140, 186–187, 196, 197, 200, 203–205, 210, 216, 225, 230–231 utsuroi 112, 150, 164, 182, 185, 190, 191, 196, 207, 210, 225; definition of 46–47; see also ma utsushimi 47, 182; definition of 46; see also ma Venice International Film Festival 31, 173 Voices of a Distant Star (Shinkai 2002) 96; see also Shinkai, Makoto wabi-sabi 75, 110, 116, 183, 202; definition of 35 Watts, Alan 11, 26, 61

Index Weathering with You (2019) 107, 125; see also Shinkai, Makoto Wilmington, Michael 167, 170 Wolfe, Alan 120, 133 Wollen, Peter 35, 61 Wong, Kar-Wai 175 World War II (post-World War II) 13, 20–21, 26, 30, 33, 47, 56, 64, 85, 121, 130, 142, 143, 155, 161, 174, 175, 183, 198, 200, 237, 238 Wright, Melanie J. 24, 61 Yamada, Marc 21–23, 36, 61, 175, 176, 184, 187, 195, 211–212, 230, 236 Yamamba (Nō play) 16, 79, 94, 150 yamauba 15–16, 80, 87–88, 143, 147, 149–151, 158; definition of 78–79 Yang, Edward 172 yokai 2, 53, 63, 79 Yomi (the underworld) 12, 76, 130

249

Yomota, Inuhiko 173, 185–186, 236 yorishiro 67, 70, 80, 91, 144, 148; definition of 44–45; see also ma Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro 2, 26, 33, 56, 61, 135, 164 your name. (novel) 98–99, 101, 112, 122, 125–126, 128; see also Shinkai, Makoto your name. (Shinkai 2016) 3, 27, 41, 43, 54, 95–130, 238; see also Shinkai, Makoto yūgen (refined beauty) 35 Zambrano, Ana Laura 146, 170 Zeami 16, 79, 94, 149 Zen Buddhism (Chan) 10–11, 14, 25–26, 28–30, 32–34, 39–40, 42, 45, 46–50, 56, 65, 72, 79, 84, 87, 98, 103, 140, 180, 187, 189, 209, 216, 219, 224, 228, 230–231