[TinyRedLeaf]

"Suzume" officially opened in Singapore today (March 9) with English and Chinese subtitles, and I was able to catch the first available screening at a cinema near my home. The novelty, of course, was no longer there on the second viewing, but on the other hand, I now have a better grasp of the plot development. I still feel that the movie started sagging in the third act, but I also now have a clearer idea of why the plot developed in that particular way.

As mentioned, there are by now multiple professional reviews available online. What's interesting to me is that there seems to be at least a couple of reviewers who feel that the writing in Suzume is stronger than it was in Shinkai's previous two efforts, with less reliance on mawkish sentimentality, and a better integration of themes and emotional beats with character and narrative flow.

So, there's really nothing new for me to add, in terms of a critical review. What I'll do instead is leave some thoughts on specific points in the show, and reflect on why some parts of Suzume resonated with me on a personal level.

All the following notes are huge spoilers, so I would recommend that you don't read them until you've watched the movie and formed your own conclusions about the story.

Spoiler for tributes and references:

1) A number of reviewers had pointed out that the plot device of earthquake-inducing worms and keystones is a modern take on the namazu of Japanese myth. To me, though, the first thing that came to mind is actually the Nightwalker of Studio Ghibli's Mononoke Hime. Like the worms of Suzume, the Nightwalker was also capable of wreaking considerable environmental havoc when it went on a rampage, and when it died and collapsed, so the worms seem to me to be a subtle reference to that Ghibli classic.

2) More pointedly, it appears that Daijin is at the very least a partial reference to Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart, which also featured a mysterious cat that led the protagonist towards her destiny. Whisper of the Heart was in fact mentioned by an unnamed passer-by in Suzume, who was amused by Daijin's antics on board a train.

3) Shinkai continues to have a penchant for weaving in the lyrics of old pop-songs into his movies. Listen out for the cheesy city-pop tunes that Souta's friend, Serizawa, plays on his car radio — the lyrics are all meant to allude to specific plot and narrative developments in Suzume.

Spoiler for closing doors and finding closure:

Suzume, to me, is ultimately a film about finding and achieving closure. There are three distinct types of closure in the movie.

1) There's the physical act of closing doors in lonely, abandoned places. That's the primary "quest" that propels the story's plot.

2) And then there's the closure of a temporal loop. In the final act, present-day Suzume reunites with herself as a young girl in the "Ever After", to comfort girl-Suzume and give her younger self the hope and courage to continue forging on despite the loss of her mother. As described by Souta, the Ever After is where the souls of the departed end up, and it's also a place where time has no meaning — the present and past can exist together. At the start of the movie, present-day Suzume recalled this meeting in the Ever After in a recurrent dream, although she did not realise at the time that the mysterious woman who gave her the toy chair was her future self. She had thought that it was her mother who had arrived to comfort her. This fateful meeting in the Ever After between the two versions of Suzume serves as the bookends to our protagonist's "Hero's Journey".

3) And lastly, there's the achievement of emotional closure, which unfolds on two levels.

3i) On one level, the closing and locking of doors requires a Closer to acknowledge the grief and anger of spirits whose lives had been tragically cut short by disaster, while also giving thanks for the love and care they had shown while they were still alive. This act of acknowledgement and thanksgiving is in fact part of the incantation a Closer must recite while closing a door and, as Souta describes it, it's the "weight of people's emotions" that keeps the worms at bay.

3ii) On the other level, there's also the emotional closure that Suzume achieves by the end of the movie, by finally allowing herself to acknowledge that her mother is dead and gone, a victim of the Fukushima tsunami and earthquake. By accepting the grief, Suzume was finally able to "let go" of her mother, and allow herself start moving forward again. In this sense, the Japanese title of the movie, Suzume no Tojimari actually has a double meaning — it's not just a reference to the physical act of closing the mystical doors through which the worms emerge, but also to the emotional closure Suzume achieves by letting go of her grief. I think this is a very powerful message of hope that Shinkai is trying to convey to the survivors of 3/11, which he had also attempted to do, albeit very clumsily, in Your Name. Specifically, it reminds me of this very poignant story about a man who continues to search for his wife, who is among the hundreds who are still missing, 10 years after the triple disaster in Fukushima.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/NV2jkIYIi5s

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Spoiler for plot device relating to earthquakes and keystones:

Thanks to the subtitles on my second viewing, I was better able to understand the mechanics that appear to govern the earthquake worms and the keystones. Or at least, I think I do, because a few crucial details are only hinted at, rather than spelt out explicitly.

1) The worms are the manifestation of the anger and grief of those whose lives had been cut short by disaster. That appears to be why they tend to break out from mystical doors in abandoned places, because there are no longer enough people there to keep the worms at bay with the "weight of their emotions".

2) The keystones are used to pin down the worms at two ends of Japan, one in the west and one in the east. Crucially, these "leylines", as I like to think of them, would shift locations over time. It's heavily implied, for example, that the eastern keystone — Sadajin, the "black cat" — was installed in Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Sadajin appeared in the movie only after the worm broke free in Tokyo, and Souta's ailing grandfather appears to be familiar with the black cat. I'm guessing that Souta's grandfather may have played a role in moving Sadajin to Tokyo, to pin down the worm and prevent it from causing another earthquake there.

3) So, it's my further guess that, in addition to closing doors in abandoned places, Closers have the ultimate responsibility of moving the keystones to new locations whenever it's necessary. The keystones themselves appear to be fond of humans in general, and Closers in particular. That appears to explain why Daijin was immediately imprinted on Suzume after she accidentally freed him at the start of the movie.

4) There's probably a specific ritual that a Closer needs to perform whenever he removes a keystone. At the very least, he would need to either ensure that the threat is no longer at the present location, or he would have to prepare a replacement for the removed keystone. In Suzume's case, she did neither. Daijin, having already bonded with Suzume, wants to become her "cat", but at the same time, he could not leave the worm in Miyazaki prefecture unchecked, so that's why he transferred that responsibility to Souta.

5) I got the sense that, under normal circumstances, a Closer would go on a journey with a properly freed cat/keystone to search for the new location that needs to be pinned down. Suzume only realised belatedly that Daijin had all along been guiding her towards locations where the worms would break free; she had misunderstood the nekomata's intentions as malicious mischief. So, from this perspective, I found it heartwarming that, towards the end, Suzume was able to repair her bond with Daijin. As I've said before, I think this reflects the crucial element of acknowledgement and thanksgiving that's so important for the door-closing ritual — after all, the keystone cats also want to be loved and appreciated for what they are and what they do.

Spoiler for why parts of the movie resonated with me:

As I've mentioned, I first watched Suzume in Tokushima city, the capital of Tokushima prefecture on the eastern end of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main Japanese islands, and likely one of the poorest regions in Japan, after Okinawa and possibly Tohoku.

I was struck by the coincidence of having unwittingly traced a part of Suzume's route across Japan, because I had also started my travels in Shikoku in Ehime prefecture, and ended in Tokushima.

I visited Shikoku specifically because I wanted to see, at first hand, the impact of rural depopulation in Japan. This is especially the case in the Iya Valley, one of the most isolated places in Japan, which runs east-west through the mountains that line the centre of Shikoku. This is where you'd find Ochiai village, where a handful of traditional thatch-roof cottages have been preserved, and also the "scarecrow village" of Nagoro. Wandering the deserted streets of Nagoro was a particularly creepy experience, because the scarecrows really drove home the feeling of desolation that is so prevalent in abandoned places like these.

Makoto Shinkai, for some reason or another, has been dwelling on this theme of loss and depopulation since Your Name, and I feel like he's finally struck the right note on this sensitive issue of national importance in Suzume.

And he's right in the sense that there is hope for a brighter future in these places, but the effort has to come from the younger generation. I had the tremendous luck of meeting a young half-Japanese, half-American woman at another small isolated village, about an hour's drive north of Kochi city. Her ancestors on her mother's side were from this region, and despite having grown up in Los Angeles, she feels a strong connection to the place, and has been visiting regularly to clean her ancestors' graves, for instance. She's now working with a business partner to explore possibilities for reviving local commerce in the valley, and I'm rooting strongly for her to succeed.

In fact, there's at least one other prominent foreigner who has also made it his personal mission to preserve or revive local culture in Shikoku. Alex Kerr, who's also American, has successfully preserved and restored a traditional thatch-roof cottage in the Iya Valley, which he's named Chiiori. I visited the cottage, but unfortunately wasn't able to make a reservation to stay there. But it's definitely located in a scenic part of the valley, and it's well worth a visit if you ever find yourself in this part of Japan.

It's very interesting to me that, in this part of Japan at least, foreigners may be able to make a key difference for local communities that are otherwise slowly fading away. That has given me a lot of food for thought, which was why it seemed so oddly apt for me to have watched Suzume at this particular time. It's almost as though Fate is trying to tell me something.

Finally, one last note: I was given this complimentary booklet when I bought my Suzume ticket at the ufotable cinema in Tokushima.



Of course, it's all in Japanese. If there's anyone who wants to give a stab at translating it or, better yet, who already knows where to find an existing scanlation, let me know.