Chapter 10

Essay GENKI KAWAMURA “Please write the essay.” That’s what Makoto Shinkai said to me in a meeting room at CoMix Wave Films. The sudden request flustered me, and I told him I thought interpretive essays should be written objectively, by third parties. I’m the producer of the your name. movie, and I don’t have that perspective anymore. Even so, Shinkai wouldn’t back down. He pressed me. Please. I want you to do this, no matter what. Several months later, I read the novel. It was a wonderful book. At that point, I thought I understood why Shinkai had asked me for the essay. He didn’t want me to “interpret” anything, I realized. He wanted somebody who was “in the family” to reveal how this novel came to be. Two years ago, I decided to make a feature film with Makoto Shinkai. That night, I was drinking sake with him at a cheap pub under the elevated tracks in Yurakucho. We were talking, me with a highball, him with a draft beer. Voices of a Distant Star. The Place Promised in Our Early Days. 5 Centimeters Per Second. Shinkai writes love stories about boys and girls who pass each other by in beautiful, magnificent worlds. I told him I wanted him to make his newest work “Makoto Shinkai’s best film.” I wanted people who didn’t yet know Shinkai to encounter his world and be astonished (the way I was floored when I saw Voices of a Distant Star fourteen years ago). I also wanted people who had kept up with Shinkai’s works to witness, as if for the first time, what this particular talent could accomplish. In addition, I told him I wanted the new work to be endlessly musical. (Makoto Shinkai’s works always have splendid music.) I asked him if there were any musicians he liked, and he named a certain band. I’d been on friendly terms with that band’s front man for a while, and under the influence of drink, I sent him a text. “I started looking for you in your third life back.” Half a year later, Yojiro Noda of RADWIMPS sent over a demo of “Third Life Back,” the theme song. It was a fantastic track that will probably turn out to be epoch-making for RADWIMPS as well. “I’m so psyched that I’m out in a downpour getting soaked as I listen to it.” For some reason, that Line message from Shinkai almost made me cry. In this world, which is overflowing with encounters, it’s hard to find your soul mate. Even if you do find them, who’s going to prove to you that they really are your soul mate? Makoto Shinkai and Yojiro Noda wrote the story of a pair who keep missing each other in an endlessly big world. These two met as if guided by fate, and the result was a miraculous collaboration (even if it was triggered by a pub under the train tracks). Makoto Shinkai wrote the story and script, Yojiro Noda picked them up and expanded them as music, and together, they became this book. In addition, although the movie is nearly finished, because this book was written, it’s filling out even more. Seriously, how was this production so lucky? “I’m not going to write a novel this time.” That’s what Shinkai said, but Yojiro Noda’s music made him write it. It’s not possible to play audio in novels, but I can hear RADWIMPS’s songs from this one. I think it’s a rare book, the product of a fateful encounter. In 2012, I wrote a novel called If Cats Disappeared from the World. It was a portrait of a dying postman. I thought I was writing about death, but at some point, it turned into a story about memories. What is the cruelest thing, as far as people are concerned? Death, naturally. That’s what I always thought. However, there’s something that’s crueler than death. It’s forgetting the person you love while you’re alive. Where do human memories live? Are they in the synaptic circuitry of the brain? Do retinas and fingertips hold memories, too? Or is there an invisible, amorphous, mistlike, spiritual collective somewhere, and that’s where the memories reside? Something we’d call the heart or the mind or the soul. Is it something you can take out and stick back in, like a memory card with an OS on it? In the book, Taki wonders to himself about this. Humans are mysterious creatures. We forget the important things, and all we remember are the things that don’t matter. Unlike memory cards, we don’t have the ability to keep the important stuff and delete what we don’t need. I always wondered why that was. However, now that I’ve read this book, I feel as if I understand, just a little. People forget the important things. That said, by resisting, by struggling against that, they gain life. your name., a movie that tells the love story of a boy and girl “struggling, magnificently” in this cruel world, will be completed very shortly. Without a doubt, it’s going to be “Makoto Shinkai’s best film”— No, let me rephrase that. The world is about to meet “Makoto Shinkai’s ultimate masterpiece.” Now, with the same feelings as the people who’ve read this novel, I’m looking forward to my encounter with that movie from the bottom of my heart. (Film producer and novelist)