Makoto Shinkai – Contemporary Japanese Literature

She and Her Cat collects four interlinked short stories about women and their cats. Though these stories are bittersweet, their gentleness is a source of comfort and encouragement.

The stories in She and Her Cat were written by Naruki Nakagawa, who’s mainly known as a screenwriter for science fiction anime from the mid 2000s, and the concept is based on the 1999 short indie film (which you can watch on YouTube here) created by the international superstar anime director Makoto Shinkai. I think it’s fair to say that the original short film is a representative example of the iyashikei “comfort” genre of anime, which Patrick Lum describes as “designed to be as comfy and mellow as can be.” This book, which Nakagawa wrote in his late forties, similarly uses young female characters to create a sense of living in a world where a brighter future is always possible.

The first story is a direct adaptation of Shinkai’s original short animation. A young office worker named Miyu brings home a kitten who’s been left outside in the rain in a disintegrating cardboard box. Miyu is growing apart from both her boyfriend and her best friend, and she feels as though she’s no longer able to understand the nuances of other people’s feelings. Thankfully, her new cat Shiro loves her unconditionally, and he’ll always be there for her.

The second story is about an art student who can’t find the motivation to apply to a university-level Fine Arts program, and the third is about an aspiring manga artist who was unable to make her debut and became a hikikomori after the death of her writer, who also happened to be her childhood friend. Both women find the courage to pull themselves out of their depression and take the first few steps forward – with the help of their cats, of course.

In the last story, a childless middle-aged woman finds herself alone after caring for her husband’s parents only to be left by her husband himself. As she gets older, so too does the boss of the neighborhood stray cats, and she ends up adopting him. Around the same time, her nephew has a quiet breakdown at his first job out of college, and the woman ends up sheltering him too. In return, he eagerly learns the non-corporate life skills she shares, and he naturally begins to help her manage the household. While it’s always rewarding to nurture a mutually loving and beneficial relationship with a cat, this story reminds the reader that kindness can exist between humans as well.

The narrative viewpoint of these stories alternates between the cats and their human companions. When the cats aren’t expressing their undying love for the human ladies in their lives, they’re off on their own adventures in the neighborhood, doing as cats do. Even more than the human characters, the cats have strong personalities and know what they’re about.

Comforting Japanese books about cats are currently enjoying a small cultural moment, and She and Her Cat is among the best of them. As you might expect from a book written by a professional screenwriter, each “scene” is fairly short, which makes for a quick and engaging read. Nagakawa maintains the distinctive narrative voice associated with Makoto Shinkai’s films, and Ginny Tapley Takemori conveys this straightforward gentleness perfectly in translation. In the English edition, each story is prefaced by a gorgeous full-page illustration by Rohan Eason, which only adds to the book’s charm. Exactly like the creatures it celebrates, She and Her Cat is light, nimble, and filled with character.

Content warning: discussion of body swapping, gender dysmorphia, and social dysmorphia

Title: your name.
Japanese Title: 君の名は。(Kimi no na wa.)
Author: Makoto Shinkai (新海誠)
Translator: Taylor Engel
Publication Year: 2016 (Japan); 2017 (United States)
Publisher: Yen Press
Pages: 192

This guest review is written by L.M. Zoller (@odorunara on Twitter).

your name. is a novelization of director Makoto Shinkai’s your name., an animated film that tells the story of Mitsuha, a high school girl from rural Gifu prefecture who wishes she could be a boy in Tokyo in her next life. After an incredibly vivid dream in which she wakes up as Taki, a high school boy living in downtown Tokyo, she discovers it’s not a dream at all – and Taki is also switching bodies with her. As the two teenagers try to navigate each other’s lives and relationships, only able to communicate with each other by writing notes in each other’s cell phones when they switch, they begin to unravel a mystery involving Mitsuha’s town.

First, a note about the style of the book: the film was not created for an unfinished book series, nor was it a post-release novelization. Rather, the novel was written in the late stages of the film’s production but released before the film debuted in Japan. In his afterword, Shinkai writes,

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.” (Kindle location 2177)

As a result, the novel doesn’t have to backfill the character’s internal monologue, nor does the film have to focus on getting the characters’ internal dialogue to come across visually; both works fill in gaps in the other.

The film’s biggest strength is, by and large, bringing the imagery and emotions of the characters to life. In a film, narrative exposition can get in the way of acting and using visual cues to explain emotions of the characters. While the movie is heavily visual and expresses the subtlety of its characters’ emotions by showing instead of telling, the novel (as well as the translation) gets off to a rough start because the writing style is overly descriptive in light novel/YA novel fashion. Shinkai’s attempts to describe physical reactions and facial expressions while simultaneously describing the characters’ underlying emotions sometimes make the opening chapters seem clunky. However, the novella really hits its stride after the third chapter. With the difficulty of the exposition out of the way and the setting and characters established, Shinkai’s writing shines and the pace picks up.

What I really love about the book, in addition to the mystery of why Taki and Mitsuha start and stop switching bodies, is how both characters come to experience themselves differently because of swapping bodies. Mitsuha gets to explore her sexuality – she, not Taki, is the one that sets up the date with his coworker Okudera-senpai in the hopes that she herself will get to go on it as Taki. This is a contrast to a common plot line in body-swap fiction: that one of the two swapped people has a date and is scared of being expected to kiss or have sex with the other person’s partner for a variety of reasons, chiefly the consent of all three parties.

Another body-swap trope that Shinkai averts is that Taki doesn’t learn to be more emotional just by being in Mitsuha’s body. Instead, he learns from her actions, especially how she treats Okudera-senpai while in his body. Eventually, he says, he’s given up on pretending to be her and just acts like himself when he’s in her body, though he notices that he has her memories and that he experiences emotional and visceral reactions to people in her life, such as feeling comforted by seeing her grandmother and friends and angry when meeting her father.

The book also deals with a number of existential questions. For example, what is consciousness and how tied to ones body is it? Does the spirit live on apart from the body? Related, but not explicitly spelled out, is to what degree sexuality and gender identity are consciousness or a physical body. As a queer nonbinary person who experiences social dysphoria (being read as the wrong gender in social contexts) but not usually body dysmorphia (the feeling that something about your body is wrong), the book and film versions of your name. raised a lot of questions for me. Would I experience body dysmorphia if my body looked differently than it does? Would I experience body dysmorphia if I woke up in someone else’s body? Would I experience social dysphoria to be called by the wrong pronouns but not the ones I was assigned at birth? Would it matter if the other person were built similarly to me or if they had a very different body shape? If I were in a binary person’s body, would it be weird to be called by the wrong pronouns? For cisgender people, who have the luxury of knowing their own gender and rarely have their gender questioned, would swapping bodies seem awkward but not dysmorphic or dysphoric?

Moreover, Taki and Mitsuha are two thin, conventionally attractive, and able-bodied cisgender teenagers. How would the narrative vary if one of them had a disability, or if one were trans or openly queer, or much younger or older? (For example, what if Taki and Mitsuha’s grandmother switched places?) your name. doesn’t answer Taki’s questions about memory or mine about gender, but the gentle manner in which it raises these questions is less of an existential crisis and more of a catalyst for self-reflection.

Along with the human characters, Mitsuha’s hometown Itomori is practically a character itself. Itomori is based on the city of Hida in Gifu prefecture, which is one of my favorite vacation spots. The descriptions of the town in the book and the visualization of the town in the film are vivid and gorgeously rendered, taking me right back to traveling to Hida-Takayama in the fall. While Mitsuha hates Itomori and dreams of moving to Tokyo, Shinkai avoids both painting rural Japan as either superior or inferior to urban Japan. Mitsuha’s complaints are ones many young people have: there are not many jobs, there are no cafes or places to hang out, and everyone knows your business, especially when your family is heavily involved in town politics (her estranged father is the mayor) and religious life (she and her sister are shrine maidens at her grandmother’s family shrine). However, there is merit in the traditions of the town, which preserve not just history for history’s sake, but important cultural and historical information.

Mitsuha’s grandmother, who is the head of the town shrine, repeatedly tells Mitsuha and her younger sister Yotsuha that the meaning underlying the shrine dances, braided cords, and festival rituals were lost when the original shrine and all its old records were destroyed in a fire two hundred years ago. What Taki realizes when he drinks ritual sake at a sacred location deeper in the mountains is that the braided cords and dances all told the story of how a meteorite created the crater lake in Itomori and destroyed the town a thousand years ago. With the records gone, the rituals survived without meaning, and this lacuna between history and folklore becomes crucial to the plot of Mitsuha and Taki’s story. As Shinkai’s focus expands beyond the two teenagers out into the larger environment they inhabit, I thought about not just the local dances of the places I had lived in and visited but also the tsunami markers on Aneyoshi.

your name., while not perfect, is an easy fantasy read that deals with open-ended questions of gender, memory, and rural depopulation. If possible, I recommend reading the novel as well as watching the movie, as Shinkai’s prose exploration of Mitsuha and Taki’s interiority complements and deepens the impact of the gorgeous artistry of his film.

L.M. Zoller is a nonbinary writer and former JET CIR with an MA in Japan Studies. All zir favorite manga and anime seem to involve gender fluidity and sword fighting. Ze blogs about media and gender at The Lobster Dance (@odorunara) and food, sexuality, and gender at I’ll Make It Myself! (@illmakeitmyself).