Chapter 11

AFTERWORD I’ve always had an unrequited love for novels. And not only novels. Manga and movies and animation, and real-life scenery, too. I love them, but they aren’t all that interested in me. I suppose I’m technically too grown up to be thinking about something so beyond my control, but I just can’t shake the feeling. I work as an animation director, so at the very least, I have the opportunity to tell animation, “Look how much I love you.” However, it doesn’t work that way with novels. The best I can do is page through a paperback now and then in my spare time, on trains or while I’m waiting for rendering (since in digital animation, it takes quite a while to compile the footage on computers), and think, in frustrated awe, How can novels be this fascinating? So you can imagine my delight when Da Vinci Magazine gave me the opportunity to serialize The Garden of Words as a novel. The writing itself was fun; I could freely do so many things that were difficult or impossible to do in animation… For example, I could write the sentence, “She gives a smile like a lost child.” Whenever I did something like that, I’d think (to my animation-director self), Check that out! Check that out; you’d have a hard time showing that visually, wouldn’t you! Can the actress make her expression sufficiently like that of “a lost child”? Can the animators create a drawing that will bring the words like a lost child to the mind of every viewer? It’s impossible. No doubt the anxiety would be clear, but it would be incredibly difficult to create a visual that would express that simile: like a lost child. Or I’d write, “I could hear the after-school chatter in the halls beyond the door, like the faint noise from somebody else’s headphones.” I’d grin and think to my visual side, You could never do this. Audiences won’t associate the sounds of a classroom environment with sound bleed from headphones. Writing brought it home to me that the pleasure of novels is in the strings of letters themselves. Now that I’m looking back over it, I realize that I was the only one so excited about it, but it was still an enjoyable time for me. I’m backtracking a bit, but this book is the novelization of a 2013 animated film of the same name, which I directed. Meaning I wrote the novel for a movie I directed myself. However, the original movie was a forty-six-minute, midlength feature film shown only from the perspectives of Takao and Yukino. In contrast, in the novel, I increased the number of narrators, boosting the amount of content until a film version would have run over two hours, and reassembled it. I tried to write it in such a way that both people who’d seen the original film and people who hadn’t would be able to enjoy it. I was excited to tackle the work of writing, but naturally, the fun didn’t last. I soon realized that visuals are an inevitably superior, and more fitting, means of expression. For example, take things like “atmosphere.” Say I’m depicting a cityscape at night. I layer music that has a tinge of sadness over it. A light will go on in a window somewhere, or be abruptly extinguished—the timing doesn’t really matter. That’s all it takes for a film to envelop an audience in a particular sense—atmosphere is the only word I have for it. Long story short, these atmospherics are the emotions given off by human activity, and a film can evoke them with no more than a light in a window. How do you create the equivalent of that in a novel? Questions like that drove me nuts. For the sake of brevity, I won’t write about it in detail, but there are many other types of metaphors that can be portrayed more eloquently with visuals. Sometimes a single cut of an animated ring of ripples can convey emotion that it wouldn’t be possible to communicate even with several pages of writing. In addition, ultimately, technical issues aside, I kept worrying about the extremely natural question of what to write. By the time I was finished, all I could think was, Wow, novels and novelists are something else. I was also a bit disappointed to find that I was as far from reaching their level as ever. In the end, what I gained from writing a book was an even deeper unrequited love for novels and animation. But I had never been hoping for a mutual relationship in the first place. There may even have been something similar in Takao’s feelings for Yukino. Come to think of it, all the characters in this book have some sort of unrequited love, and I am again reminded that this sort of human emotion was what I wanted to show. The fabric of this world is woven from the feelings of longing for someone, for something, that we have in isolation. That is what I wanted to depict in this book. A tale of “lonely sorrow,” far older than “love.” That was the tagline for the film version of this book. In the Man’yoshu, more than thirteen centuries ago, the word for “love” was written with the characters lonely sorrow, and even today, I’m sure there are many people for whom the use of those characters rings true. In the process of writing this book, I spoke with all sorts of people. Beginning with Professor Kaoru Kurasumi, who chose the Man’yoshu poems that appear in the book, I talked to shoemakers, high school and university teachers, current high school students, people working in sales for manufacturing companies, and many, many others. Your stories all gave the book added depth, and I’m profoundly grateful. In addition, I’d like to express particular gratitude to Chiharu Ochiai, whose deep love and insight have supported this work from the film onward. I was working on this book while the movie The Garden of Words was in theaters, and so I ended up writing most of the manuscript at destinations I was visiting for work. It doesn’t have much to do with the content, but looking back, I wrote in quite a few places, so I’ll list them here for fun: America, Shanghai, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Russia, Scotland, France, and Vietnam. In most of these, I was attending film festivals and animation events, while I visited some of them to look for locations for other projects, but the hotel stays at each destination and the plane trips there and back served as valuable writing time. In addition, when I wrote the epilogue, I was on a train crossing the Seto Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku myself. The views I saw from the windows may have lent some color to the text. Thank you very much for picking up this book, and for reading it. February 2014, Makoto Shinkai