Suzume’s Secret Twist and Shinkai’s magical realism trilogy

*Spoiler warning for “Suzume”, “Weathering With You” and “Your Name”*

The first sequence of “Suzume”, Makoto Shinkai’s latest feature-length anime, features the titular protagonist as a child walking through a ruined town. Catching a glimpse of a boat on top of a house, I was convinced that “Suzume” was going to be a direct continuation of the Shinkai universe, which seems to have started with the star-cross lover of “Your Name” and continued to Tokyo being put underwater in “Weathering With You”.

I couldn’t have been the only one expecting that. After all, Mitsuha, the main character from 2017’s “Your Name” reappeared as a store clerk in “Weathering With You”, and since that movie ended with such a historical event – Tokyo becoming submerged under water – one would expect that any subsequent films in that universe that is taking place in Japan would have to address that event.

As it turns out, the ruins at the beginning of “Suzume” had nothing to do with the ending of Shinkai’s previous film. Rather, it’s related to something remarkably more real and grounded this latest Shinkai feature in our own reality.

This seems like a diversion. Shinkai’s first film is about a star cross lover and a magical comet. The second is about a girl endowed with the power to control the weather. And in this latest film, Shinkai addresses real historical events… what’s that all about?

Well, it’s not a diversion. Shinkai may be referencing a real event in “Suzume”, but the film is still filled with fantastical elements. The core story of “Suzume” follows, well, Suzume, a girl who lost her mother 12 years ago (the movie takes place in 2023) and had to move to a seaside town, far from where she was born. She lives peacefully with her aunt. Then one day, a handsome man shows up whom she soon found out is tasked with closing magical doors hidden in various ruins across Japan. Failure to close the door means an earthquake would happen. The story follows Suzume accompanying the man, who had been cursed to transform into a three-legged chair (yes, really), to close all the magical doors across Japan.

This is fantasy. Much like most of Shinkai’s films before. But actually… no. This is not even fantasy. This is “magical realism”, a school of literary fiction that employs fantasy elements in realistic settings, often allowing the core drama to take center stage, and using fantasy to illustrate certain points.

Looking back at Shinkai’s filmography, his strongest story has been the most personal. Garden of Words is a 45-minute film about an unlikely romance. In what might be his best directorial effort, Shinkai does not even allow the core drama to overflow just a bit. He does not try to extend the story into a 90-minute feature. Shinkai nurtures the heart of the story. And that’s what really makes most of his films great, even as they grow more and more fantastical.

Take “Your Name”, his most successful film to date. While the story of the comet and the body switching are great, they are hardly the point of the story. Rather, it’s the romance between the protagonists. In “Weathering With You”, the romance is weaker, but that’s because the character development focuses on something else. Hina is a character who has a habit of trying to save everyone. In the end, she chose to sacrifice herself to the gods, so that Tokyo would not face constant rainfall. But then the male protagonist saved her, and reminded her that she had to live her life.

It’s a bold choice. A divisive one. But it shows two revealing things about Shinkai. First, he cares about his character; he cares about where they end up; their journey has to make sense. Hina gives too much of herself to others. She is too much of a hero. So, it makes sense that the story ends with her losing, by being happy instead of saving everyone.

Secondly and more importantly, it shows Shinkai’s defiance of fantasy tropes and his commitment to magical realism. He eschews the classic hero’s journey so reminiscent of Tolkien and King Arthur and wanted to merge the fantastical with the realistic. He lets Tokyo be submerged in rain and showed society to move on with the new normal.

This is the key to Shinkai’s brand of magical realism, he uses fantasy to show the truth about reality. He shows the relationship between the human and the divine, but where the divine is an allegory for nature.

The comet in “Your Name” is on the one hand imbued with supernatural power, but it is also not motivated. The only thing that separates it from the natural is the fact its power is not something with which we are familiar. The comet in “Your Name” is not the villain; it is about as villainous as nature, or as the three-year rainfall in “Weathering With You”.

The characters in Shinkai might as well be dealing with nature. And if you think about it, they are! The characters from “Your Name” faced a comet that destroyed their town. In “Weathering With You” the city faces a catastrophic weather event. In both cases, humans cannot change the minds of the divine. They cannot change nature. They have agency to walk down certain paths, but never to change the rule of the divine.

This is why I think Suzume’s secret twist is so great. As the movie goes on, we realize that we are making our way back to the first sequence of the film. The final door that Suzume has to close to prevent an earthquake is the hometown she left. The ruins with the boat on the house, that we saw.

The characters begin to refer to her hometown as the place where no one has gone for years. That’s the first hint that this is somewhere real. Then the character drove past a truck filled with “contaminated soil” driving in an opposite direction. Then we see a walled city. By this point, I have a fully formed theory of where Suzume’s hometown really is. Then comes the confirmation. The day her mother disappeared, Suzume wrote a diary that was dated March 11th, 2011.

That was the date of the Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami, which would trigger the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, causing the contamination of an entire town.

This was when the entire story of “Suzume” became utterly profound for me. Shinkai had touched upon a hidden trauma. The name of the event was not mentioned once, but clearly, it was a cultural trauma that left a mark on a nation’s consciousness. The most visceral scene in the movie was seeing the young Suzume scratching out an entire page of her diary with a black crayon. When we first see this flashback, I thought this was something supernatural. But we were looking at the most natural thing of all – trauma.

This ability to blend the natural and the fantasy is a power that Shinkai really does master. Even though Suzume is the least competent of the three movies – the romance is weaker, and the pacing is sometimes off – it still has some of the most hard-hitting sequences in Shinkai’s filmography. No, I did not cry when Suzume and the handsome magical man were reunited – the romance had been badly undercooked. But I did feel tears welling up when Suzume had to fulfill the pre-requisite for closing the magical door by seeing the memories of the people that were once here. So we see people leaving their houses, saying goodbyes to their loved ones, in the morning before that disastrous earthquake hit.

The opening sequence was the young Suzume walking through the real ruins of her seaside town, trying to find her mother – a nurse who had gone missing in the throes of disasters.

Shinkai’s brand of magical realism isn’t as modern as one may think. A country like Japan, which faces a heightened threat of natural disasters is bound to invent cultural coping mechanisms for collective traumas caused by mere happenstances. Much like the faceless gods in his films, nature does not care for Shinkai’s humans.

Shinkai has cited Haruki Murakami as one of his inspirations, with “Kafka on the Shore” being an inspiration for “Suzume” in particular. I have gone on record as saying that he is the most suited person to direct the aforementioned Murakami film. Even though I hope he can go down a darker path than the ones he’s been on.

I still think Shinkai has a lot to grow. But he already showed great promise as a magical realist filmmaker. Hopefully, I will see him helm a Murakami adaptation one day. Or at least, we will get another original and wonderful blend of the magical and the real.