Consider: it is a summer evening in 1994, in a suburb in Tokyo, and Shizuku Tsukushima, a junior high school girl, looks through the checkout cards of her library books and is amazed by a pattern: each book was previously checked out by a person called "Seiji Amasawa." The name burns into her mind, along with a muddle of other worries and concerns. High school entrance exams are coming up and everyone is in cram school except her. She's restless and doesn't know what to do about her future; the only thing to excite her is the prospect of borrowing a new book (and doesn't that sound familiar!), and even this excitement has paled. Still, she makes her way to the library and borrows a new book of Fairy Tales--she's the first one to borrow it--and is pleased and astonished to find the name "Amasawa" stamped onto the book, probably the name of a previous owner.
Later in the day she leaves the book behind on a bench in front of the baseball field. She comes back to get it. Enter a curiously good-looking but sardonic boy, who looks to be about her age, and who is sitting at the same bench and looking through the same book. He calls Shizuku by name--her name is on the library card after all--and refers mockingly to a translation of a song, "Concrete Roads", on a piece of paper folded into the book. "Forget 'Concrete Roads'," he says, and leaves Shizuku fuming. "Baka!" she says as she storms home.
This is the first of a handful of encounters--either spotting each other at school, by the public library, or at the curious antique shop that Shizuku has discovered by following a nomadic fat, gray cat from the train and through the city.
Shizuku and the cat-of-many-names aboard the train.
One day, after a terrible time after school, she goes to the shop again finds the same boy, who turns out to be the grandson of the shop owner. He takes her inside the house and the shop and when she learns that he's studying to be a luthier, she's awestruck by the ambition and purpose she never expected to find in someone her age.
Shizuku and a mysterious boy, whose name she doesn't know--but she feels like she's known him for years...
It comes as no surprise to the audience that the boy turns out to be Seiji Amasawa, and that he knows perfectly well who she is. "I had to read all sorts of books so I could check them out before you, and you would see my name," he tells her later on, when they are alone. "I even sat with you once, but you didn't notice."
The movie goes on--about two hours of it--and follows Seiji as he wins the battle with his parents to go to Cremona for an apprenticeship to be a luthier, and follows Shizuku as she lingers restlessly at home, hating her lack of purpose and perceived lack of talent. A conversation with Seiji's grandfather convinces her that she has just as much potential as Seiji--she just has to find what she's good at and to polish herself, as one would purify a beryl ore. She makes the decision to start writing a story--to finish it, to work on it day and night, even to the detriment of her studies, because she has to test herself, to see what she's got. Her parents are supportive but cautious. "It's not easy when you walk a different road," her father tells her, after she blurts out that she's working on something more important than even school, and that if this means compromising her chances at high school, so be it.
The morning after Shizuku finishes her story and accepts that it's not enough to want--one must do, she looks out the window and finds Seiji standing outside. And the reunion is really too beautiful to be written down--you have to see it for yourself.
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This is Hayao Miyazaki's 1995 film Whisper of the Heart or Mimi o Sumaseba. I am not a big fan of everything Hayao Miyazaki does--part of me still can't forgive him for the travesty that was "Howl's Moving Castle"--but I remember watching "Mon voisin Totoro" (My Neighbor Totoro) and Kiki's Delivery Service when I was little, and was so pleased when I gave this one a try two summers ago. Miyazaki has a beautiful way of portraying children. He sees into their secret world and understands, and never trivializes, their worries and feelings. And as always the animation is beautiful, the details are incredible, and the music is simple and appropriate and dear.
Mimi o Sumaseba has the advantage of being perhaps the clearest, most coherent of Hayao Miyazaki's plotlines. It doesn't try to be more than what it is--it's a coming of age story if there ever was one--and it actually makes sense, which is more than I can say for other films! But my favorite part about it was how it wasn't just a story of a romance, though it is that. Shizuku was surprised and pleased and flattered and enchanted, but her affection for Seiji Amasawa didn't turn her into a moonstruck idiot--it made her confront things about herself, and made her force herself to grow, when she had been fighting this growth for so long. It made her understand that she had to step up, not only to be worthy of the love and admiration that she wanted, but to have, too, the ability to stand before the person she loved and know that she was a whole person with or without him--completed by love rather than diminished by it.
Doesn't it make you wish Bella Swann, and her ilk (of irritatingly lampa damsels in distress), had taken a cue from a high school bookworm with short messy hair, and an awkward way with boys? Sometimes young children know more about true love than their elders.
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