Light Novel Review: Your Name by Makoto Shinkai

Light Novel Review: Your Name by Makoto Shinkai

Quote: 'My name is Mitshua!'
The girl shouts, undoing the cord she'd used to tie back her hair and holding it out to me. Without thinking, I reach for it. It's a vivid orange, like a thin ray of evening sun in the dim train. I shove my way into the crowd and grab that colour tight.

My third birthday gift was the second read yesterday. Came as a huge surprise and I was 100 pages done by end of lunch break! Rest of the evening I had to take it slow, I savoured the last 75 pages like lemons.

Your Name, a story by one of my favourite Japanese animator and storyteller Makoto Shinkai. I was surprised twice yesterday to find that he had written the book and made the cinema simultaneously! There was a light novella instead of manga inside this lovely hardback.

Shinkai, to be honest, is obsessed with loneliness and with adolescent love. Taki and Mitshua are geographically miles apart and equally lonely, surviving the busy Tokyo-Life, another tolerating passive country life. One day due to reasons unexplained, these two teens find themselves in each other bodies. But they keep forgetting the time spent in each others' bodies and use various means to communicate.

Tragedy looms on this story since I have watched the cinema it was not the ending I was intrigued for but the play of language. Cinema is from point of view of the observer, but the book was told from both Mitshua and Taki's point of view.

The book was a wonderful example of how we can challenge the limits of written language and typesetting. Using different fonts to channel emotions and characteristics of characters, finally, somebody used ellipses properly to represent lack of words and not to make the narrative look smart, the use of spacing to build-up the calm before the appearance of the comet tail was so visual.

The use of folklore elements that tell us the importance of preservation despite losing one's true history is what I feel is also the philosophy of Japanese society. Where you can advance without chanting nationalism.

Another surprise was the essay by Genki Kawamura at the end! An author I adore and had no idea that he is often partner-producer on Shinkai's projects.