“Musubi is the old way of calling the local guardian ‘god.’ This word has a profound meaning. Typing is Musubi. Connecting people is Musubi. The flow of time is Musubi. These are all the god’s power. So the braided cords that we make are the god’s art and represent the flow of time itself. They converge and take shape. They twist, tangle, sometimes unravel, break and then connect again.” – Hitoha Miyamizu
Thus, all things are bound.
In 2016, a film from anime auteur Makoto Shinkai made the cinematic world tremble. Though his career is a bit eclectic in retrospect, Shinkai’s Your Name simultaneously wields and shatters convention in a fashion his previous work merely attempted to. Concerning two young adults unimaginably close, yet astronomically distant, the film explores notions of growth, grief, and perseverance amid uncertainty. As a relationship between the two central figures progresses, so too rises the daunting hurdle of reality. Within this struggle, however, lies a concept more transcendent than any individual experience.
With Your Name, Shinkai contests no action, thought, or emotion is lost in a vacuum. Rather, all movement, tangible or otherwise, parleys itself into a vast spiritual whole. A whole as dauntless as time and as fluid as consciousness. It is with this force, framed as Musubi throughout the film, Shinkai weaves his opus and posits that we are ineffably tethered to one another regardless of any conceivable distance.
At the narrative’s onset, Shinkai establishes his leads as synonymous broadly, yet slated for two utterly different trajectories. Enter Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi), a high schooler living in a rural town governed by her estranged father; and Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki), an identically-aged boy coasting through life with his adoptive brother. A cosmic event forces them to experience one another’s lives in 24-hour bursts, allowing them full control over the other’s vessel in the process. Abruptly, the two are allowed both a reprieve from their own mundanity and a fantastical intimacy.
Though disastrously jarring at first, the swap allows them to momentarily empower one another. Taki, for instance, grows more emotionally competent as Mitsuha’s femininity and social perception come forth. Mtisuha, on the other hand, conjures a sense of affirmation, grit, and confidence as Taki’s spirit carves through her classmates’ asinine bullshit. Their experiences continue to weave into one another, spurring them to establish some kind of correspondence. Their inability to ultimately do so effectively, however, stresses the intangibility of their phenomenon.
With this severance of experiences comes an earth-shattering loss for Taki and a far more literal end for Mitsuha. In one of his final, uncontrollable moments as his counterpart, Taki accompanies Mitsuha’s grandmother and sister to the basin of a sacred mountain. Here, they store Kuchikamizake Mitsuha prepared in a ceremony forwarding her town’s imminent festival. Given the process to catalyze sake, Taki is taken aback knowing they are moments from storing “half of Mitsuha” in an ancient shrine. This moment, at least for several agonizing years, marks the end of Taki’s more overt connection to Mitsuha. As Taki experiences Kataware, or twilight, at the side of a mountain, his experience as Mitsuha abruptly concludes and he is hurled into a post-high school career of oscillation and confusion.
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Mitsuha’s loss, however, is far more visceral. Knowing she orchestrated a date between Taki and his manager, Mitsuha resolves to venture to Tokyo and finally meet her body-swapping companion. Bewildered, Mitsuha is unable to locate Taki nor his colleague, admitting defeat as she boards a train back to her hometown. In a moment of melancholy, Mitsuha recognizes Taki on her train, but with obviously no familiarity with who she is aside from a “weird girl.” Out of desperation, she tosses her hair tie to a distant Taki, a physical manifestation of their ethereal connection. Though they are unable to converge at this moment, Taki opts to sport the hair tie as a bracelet like an unconscious reminder of fleeting unions. Mitsuha instead cuts her hair in complacency before she and her entire town are ground into nothing by the unprecedented fallout of a comet. Both figures set aside their belief in the ineffable, effectively losing themselves in the process.
Yet somehow and in the midst of his own failing career, Taki opts to find some cause for his belief. As Taki discovers the devastating fate of Mitsuha’s home three years prior, Shinkai further explores the meaning of Musubi. As Mitsuha’s grandmother would muse, the connection of all things disregards space and time. In fact, the recognizable absence implies in some faint way, something was very much there. Taki continues to obsess over the town lost in a crater, illustrating near-photographic reconstructions of Mitsuha’s home while his memory of her itself continues to fade. At this juncture, Taki’s infatuation becomes less concerned with an individual and more so an idea.
As the film approaches its climax, Shinkai admits there is little wonder in the two ends of a connection. Just like a movie inspired by another, Mitsuha and Taki of themselves are not overwhelmingly compelling. Rather, it is the composition of their bond and all the experiences it entails. The aforementioned allegory Shinkai conjures is that of twilight; it is the mysterious space between night and day that resonates within one. A spectrum, for example, is not a byproduct of two static colors but instead a vivid chronicle of their convergence.
Even when Taki is briefly able to return to Mitsuha’s body in an attempt to rewrite history, he has little choice but to concede it was the experience of their ordeal, rather than the action in of itself that gives them the agency to harness fate. As Taki struggles to evacuate the townsfolk prior to the impact as Mitsuha, he repeatedly questions if it would not be more effective for Mitsuha herself to enact his plan. As he his unexpectedly pulled back into his own time and body for the truly final time, he admits under the veil of twilight that all he simply has, in retrospect, is belief. Likewise, all either of them possesses, really, is a feeling. A feeling that, for Mitsuha, cascades into revelatory action.
Shinkai stresses with Your Name it is never enough to just expect something. The “something” we yearn for, after all, is just as transitory and shifting as our own memory. The beauty of hope is instead founded on feeling and experience, and rarely the reward we seek.
