Chapter 9

Afterword To be honest, I didn’t intend to write this novel. It may be rude to the readers for me to say something like that, but I thought your name. worked best as an animated film. This book, your name., is the novel version of an animated movie I directed, which is scheduled to open in the summer of 2016. In other words, it’s a novelization of the movie, but actually, as I’m writing this afterword, the movie hasn’t been finished yet. They tell me it will take another three months or so to complete. That means the novel will go out into the world first, so if you asked me which is the original work, the movie or the novel, I’d have to say, “It’s complicated.” Writing this book has altered some of my personal impressions as well. For example, Mitsuha was a pretty laid-back, optimistic kid, wasn’t she? and Taki really is hopeless with women. It’s likely to influence the postrecording (when the actors and voice actors create the voices for us) for the movie. This “gift exchange” between a movie and a novel was a first for me, and to tell the truth, it was a lot of fun. There are no major differences between the novel and the movie as far as the story is concerned, but there are slight differences in the way it’s told. The novel is written from Taki’s and Mitsuha’s first-person perspectives; in other words, from their viewpoints only. They can’t tell us about things they don’t know. Meanwhile, movies generally use third-person perspectives: the world as the camera shows it to us. For that reason, many scenes are literally told from a high-angle viewpoint and include characters other than Taki and Mitsuha. I think it’s more than possible to enjoy either work on its own, but due to the unique characteristics of each medium, they inevitably complement each other. I wrote the novel on my own, but movies are made by the hands of many people. The script for your name. took shape over several months of preliminary meetings with the Toei (the movie company) your name. team. Producer Genki Kawamura’s suggestions were always brisk and decisive, and although I sometimes secretly thought, He’s really superficial (because he’s the sort of person who says even important things like they don’t mean much), he always showed me the way. In addition, I wrote this book both at home and in the movie production studio, about half in each location, and I think it’s thanks to the animation director, Masashi Ando, that I managed to complete it. It wasn’t that I discussed the novel with him. It’s just that, thanks to his truly dedicated work on the movie itself, I was able to relax even in the pandemonium of an animated film production site and make time to work on the book. Then there’s the score by RADWIMPS, the group in charge of the movie’s music. Naturally, there’s no background music in the novel, but the book was greatly influenced by the world of RADWIMPS’s lyrics. The role music plays in the your name. movie is a big one, and I hope you’ll pay particular attention to how it was rendered in both the movie and the novel. (In order to do that, I guess you’ll need to see the movie. Please do go see it!) I wrote in the beginning that I thought this story worked best as an animated film, but that’s because the movie is—as I mentioned before—a splendid crystallization of the talents of many people. I think movies are in a place that’s far beyond the ability of individuals. Even so, in the end, I did write a novel version. At some point, I changed my mind, and I began wanting to write it. I had the feeling that, somewhere, there were boys and girls like Taki and Mitsuha. This story is a fantasy, of course, but I do think there are people somewhere who’ve had experiences similar to theirs, and who hold similar feelings inside. People who’ve lost precious loved ones or places, and who’ve privately decided to “struggle and fight,” even so. People 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, and I think that’s why I wrote this book. Thank you very much for picking it up, and for reading it. March 2016, Makoto Shinkai