- Hiroko Kawatani
The possibilities of climate fiction: Makoto Shinkai's Tenki no Ko / Weathering with You
In this post, I explore the possibilities of climate fiction by focusing on a Japanese animated film and its novelization, Tenki no Ko / Weathering with You (2019) by Makoto Shinkai (1973-), one of the most popular animation directors in Japan. Climate change, culture/nature, and orphaned children are key concepts in my discussion.
First, this film and novel capture people's imagination in the age of climate change. Shinkai gives most of his works titles in both Japanese and English. The Japanese title of the work is Tenki no Ko, which can be translated as "A Child of the Weather," and the English title is Weathering with You. As the Japanese title suggests, the weather is one of the key factors in the film. Extreme weather events inspired Shinkai to put climate change at the center of the film, and he depicts the relentless rain in a powerful way. For the film, he assembled a production team of experts, including meteorologist Kentaro Araki, to describe the raindrops, which helps to recreate the reality of the weather event.
The term "climate fiction" refers to a relatively new genre of literary works. Adam Trexler examines a wide range of works related to weather and climate change, and he provides an overview of the aspects of these works in his book. According to Trexler, "fictionalizing climate change is not about falsifying it or making it imaginary, but rather using narrative to enhance its reality" (75). He points out that nature writing and romantic poetry do not fully describe the challenges of climate change. The setting of climate fiction should be "urban centers" because cities are "dense networks of affective bonds between people and place (76)".
The use of an urban center to manifest the threat of climate change applies precisely to Shinkai's film. The setting is a large city, Tokyo, where people are complaining about an unusually long rainy season, just like the summer of 2019. The main characters are Hina, an orphaned girl, and Hodaka, a 16-year-old boy who has run away from home. The girl and the boy meet on a rainy night in Shinjuku, Tokyo. They work together to survive in the big city. Hina confesses that she has a strange power to bring about sunny weather by simply praying. Hina and Hodaka start an online business to sell nice weather, "Sunshine Girl Business," to please people who are tired of the long rainy season. However, they discover that Hina must be sacrificed in exchange for the good weather. Hodaka refuses to allow her to sacrifice herself for the benefit of others, and he brings her back from the heavenly world, breaking her magical power. In the end, the people have to live with the perpetual rain, and part of the capital is flooded. The people experience climate change as an immediate threat to their lives.
The second point is culture/nature: Tenki no Ko shows us that culture cannot be separated from the land. Since the film depicts the culture of Tokyo, such as popular events, as well as the state of the city in detail, including streets, buildings and transportation, viewers can share the cultural experiences with the characters. The film also inspires viewers to visit the film's locations. For example, many people visited Koenji Hikawa Jinjya, known as the weather shrine in Japan, and prayed for clear skies. In the last part of the story, Fumi-san, a former customer of Hodaka and Hina's online store, explains the transformation of the land: That part of Tokyo was an ocean in the Edo period, so the land itself might be familiar with water (166-167).
Finally, orphaned children serve as an important point of contact between society and identity. Orphans play an important role in the literary world as protagonists, especially in children's literature. In Cultural Orphans in America (1998), Diana Pazicky argues that orphans represent the independent spirit in American culture: "As the young nation shifted its filial allegiance from the parent country to the Founding Fathers, orphanhood seemed to represent an opportunity for self-creation rather than a loss of identity"(XV). Although Pazicky very specifically references American culture, her discussion inspires me to compare Hodaka with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, who, as a cultural orphan, runs away from his father and guardian to break ties with the closed society in order to save his friend Jim.
In Tenki no Ko, Hodaka, who also runs away from home, tries to save his beloved Hina, who has a destiny to sacrifice herself for the sake of others, even if it turns the whole world against him. That is a question and one that receives special emphasis in Japanese culture: Whether or not the needs of society should always come before the needs of the individual. Hodaka answers the question by shouting: "I don't care if the sun never comes back!..." "I'd rather have you than a blue sky!" (156). That is Hodaka's decision; however, Shinkai does not indicate whether his decision is right or not. People seem to accept living in perpetual rain, even if part of the capital is flooded, in the last part of the fiction. Hodaka himself has just begun to search for a new answer. Tenki no Ko / Weathering with You leaves the viewer or reader to draw their own conclusions.
References
Shinkai, Makoto, director. Tenki no Ko / Weathering with You, produced by CoMix Wave Films and distributed by Toho, 2019.
Pazicky, Diana Loercher. Cultural Orphans in America. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998.
Shinkai, Makoto. Weathering with You. translated by Taylor Engel. New York: Yen On, 2019.
Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in A Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia Press, 2015.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: My name is Hiroko Kawatani. After earning my BA at Aoyama Gakuin University in 1998, I earned MA in English literature from Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan in 2021. I work as a part-time lecturer at several colleges in Japan. I have studied children’s literature from an environmental perspective. In my paper “Talking Plants: Rereading Botanical Worlds in Children’s Literature” (2015), I argue that talking plants in children’s literature should not be just fanciful characters. According to scientific research, plants share DNA with humans, and they communicate with each other within their species, like humans. I believe science makes literature more interesting, and vice versa. I am a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Japan (ASLE-Japan) and the Japan Society for Children’s Literature in English. I am co-author of Themes of Multicultural Children's Literature in English (2011) and Children’s Culture in English-speaking Countries (2013). Both books are written in Japanese.