Suzume No Tojimari: My Smile's An Open Wound Without You

When we are neglected, carelessly tossed aside by someone else, it often incites within us an internal violence; a self-preservationist anger that yearns to be seen for our deepest and most vulnerable human devices. The natural reactions to such an experience involve pain, fear, distrust of future connections with others should we be thrown to the wayside and have to repeat that unwanted process all over again. It sticks with us, we remember, and after a while it shows itself in forms unbecoming of the self we want to be, those experiences coming back to haunt us. Beckoning to bring out a darker side than which we wish to express to others, self-awareness only mitigating our most combative responses.

Suzume No Tojimari is the final piece of director/writer Makoto Shinkai and CoMix Waves thematic “disaster trilogy” to go along with their previous works of “Your Name” and “Weathering With You.” Inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami, the film follows 17 year old Suzume Iwato who lives with her guardian Aunt Tamaki in a small town in Kyushu. One morning on her way to school Suzume encounters a young man, Souta Munetaka, searching for abandoned places with enigmatic “doors,” following him there she discovers a free-standing door in an abandoned bathhouse, which she opens to find a starlit field that she cannot enter. She trips over a cat statue on the floor, which turns into a real cat and flees, before rushing to school.

Later that day during lunch, Suzume notices a large cloud of smoke coming from the area of the bathhouse that no one else can see. She finds Souta struggling the shut the opened door. After a struggle in which Souta finds himself injured, they are able to close the door with a mystic old-fashioned key Souta had in his possession. On the way back to her home Souta reveals himself to be a “Closer” from a long lineage of people responsible for locking the doors (like the one in the bathhouse) in abandoned places. Before too long the cat statue come to life, fed by Suzume, taunts Souta and curses him, turning him into the old, broken, three-legged children’s chair in Suzume’s room he was sitting on. It is from there that Suzume and Souta head off on the trail of the cat across Japan to close doors that will be opened by the cat.

The characterization here is not only better than in any previous of the two disaster trilogy films, they might be the most well realized cast in any Shinkai film to date. Beyond the main two characters of Suzume and Souta, each character is given enough space to become more than a mere stop on the journey. They are given dimension, reasons to be the way they are through naturalistic intervals at which they express their character but through speaking mannerisms, body language, and how they have come to where they are in life. 

The broad aspects of Japanese life encountered and different strokes of people give the film a variety of backdrops. A single mother trying to raise her two children while balancing her work-life, a sardonic college student needing the right circumstances to show a more affectionate side, each goes beyond their archetype to feel like ordinary and organically real people. These perspectives inform a more grounded reality that life is passing and that the film could, in a manner of speaking, “continue on without our input.” 

Even Aunt Tamaki, who in films with lesser ambition and/or confidence would be present for the opening third before fading into the background until the resolution, is given space in the film, tracking Suzume through her phone, seeing the nationwide journey she is upon, frantically trying to get a hold of her as she tries to decide whether or not to go after her. Holding space for both the love that she holds for her deceased sister and the frustration of being forced into taking care of a child she did not see herself needing to raise.

Suzume is the narrative and thematic string that weaves itself through the story. The broken chair that Souta inhabits is a testament to Suzume’s loyalty. Built through the strength and guile of her mother and given to Suzume as a gift at a young age. No matter how much toil, sweat, and unspoken annoyance it may have caused, in an attempt to make her young daughter smile, she ran through all of those walls, something that has stuck with and remains in Suzume’s heart to the point where even 14 or so years later it remained a fixture in her living space, unusable and faded as it was, it was still loved. Forgotten as the people Suzume came across may have been by the people in their own lives, she still showed them gratitude for caring for her, taking a chance on giving her a safe place to be on her journey. In contrast to these large scale projects, housing the doors, that have long since been forgotten about, Suzume continues to remember.

It’s tone carries with it the zeal, swashbuckling misadventure, the warmly met reality of exhaustion, and the naturalistic levity that are balanced in such a manner that one never overshadows the other. Humor that doesn’t feel like it is forced or clumsily applied, being borne naturally of a situation, fatigue and disillusion of life that doesn’t feel overly melodramatic, and an unexpected odyssey of two souls that find each other to be inseparable the more they interact.

As always with Shinkai and the team at CoMix Waves films, the color grading is top of its class. Having a keen sense for when to imbue a scene with the warmness of a beaming hot orange sunset, a cold industrial blue and gray, a homely and natural green glistening with dew as the sounds of a gentle breeze rustle nearby foliage. Emotional direction is the understated element of art that gives us a deeper level of connection to a work than we otherwise would have were it not laser-focused on providing an canvas of feeling that is in synchronicity with what is attempting to be conveyed.

We spend so much time and energy planning, working, building upon the spacious natural landscapes of earth. Years of our lives are spend on these manmade spaces that populate our world, forgetting that without us our planet stretches itself out, creating new spaces of life all on its own for species other than ourselves that consider this planet their home. It should be only natural to expect that when we abandon these structures of industrial might and material for careless profit, forgetfulness and neglectful that our mother earth would push back against us leaving space it afforded to us unloved and discarded so casually, thoughtlessly, and unceremoniously. Rupturing at its very seams in a pain that can only be expressed through a language the human mind only selectively comprehends. An unintelligible upheaval beating back against our inharmonious decisions. 

These spaces held and still hold echoes of love, cherished memories, and for a comparatively short amount of time, life that should not be left behind in such callousness. They mattered to someone, beyond us humans and animals, maybe even the living breathing place we inhabit.