Suzume is the story of a 17-year-old girl named Suzume who accidentally unlocks an ancient evil that threatens to sink Japan through a series of monumental earthquakes. Alongside Sōta, a “Closer” who can seal the chaotic worm spirit away, she travels across the country, closing each door to the spirit world before disaster can strike. When Sōta must sacrifice himself to hold back the evil, Suzume takes it upon herself to find a way to bring him back, confronting her traumatic fears of loss.

Makoto Shinkai is a storyteller whose work lives on the intersection of fantastical and character-driven. Both of his past two works, your name. and Weathering With You, explore supernatural twists on romance and coming-of-age stories where disaster threatens the future of a young couple-to-be. Shinkai's latest film, Suzume, continues this trend. It features all of the heart and disaster-fueled love of his recent hits while pushing his lush, vibrant visuals to new heights. But while his past films are concerned with natural disasters in more metaphorical ways, Suzume approaches the traumatic anxiety of disaster head-on and does so beautifully through Suzume's conversation with her younger self.

The overwhelming power of nature and the disasters that can come with it is one of Shinkai’s chief creative explorations. It’s present in the destructive comet in your name. as well as the flooded Tokyo of Weathering With You, and now, in Suzume’s spiritual earthquakes. Shinkai’s disasters are beautifully portrayed with sobering wonder. They’re large-scale focal points that demand attention and shift the whole story. But in these shifts, Shinkai is careful not to tread on the hopeful, spirited tone of his storytelling. They may be deadly and terrifying, but Shinkai’s disasters are ones that can be overcome through tenacious action and a hard-working community.

During press tours for Suzume, Shinkai was upfront about his own disaster-fueled anxieties. He recounted experiences huddling with family as earthquake warnings rang, unsure if the coming quake would barely shake a teacup or turn life upside down (1). Earthquake warnings are a common occurrence in Japan. Japan sits in a seismic hotbed, leading to an estimated 1500 earthquakes that rock the country per year (2). Much of Shinkai’s anxiety comes from the impact of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, which was the strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history and resulted in the deaths of nearly 20,000 people (3, 4).

In its aftershocks, Shinkai’s worldview shifted. “It's that unknown,” Shinkai says about the next big quake. “We can't know if it will come tomorrow or if it will not come for quite some time” (5). The fragility of life became all-too obvious, especially living in Japan, which Shinkai describes as “living next door to disaster.”

Shinkai and disaster

All of the spiritual doors Suzume and Sōta must close are located in rundown places like abandoned towns or closed amusement parks. These balance the immediate fear of natural disaster with a more-drawn-out sense of forgotten humanity (they're also gorgeous to look at).

(Top): Comet fragment falling towards earth from your name.

(Bottom): Flooded Tokyo cityscape from Weathering With You

While the DNA of the 2011 earthquake has made its way into past Shinkai films, Suzume is the first one to face it head-on. As the movie progresses, we learn that Suzume’s mother died during the tsunami of the 2011 earthquake. The trauma of this sudden loss is what ultimately fuels Suzume’s intense desire to prevent further disaster and save the sacrificed Sōta. What plays out in the film is as much an individual processing of trauma as it is a collective, cultural processing of trauma.

On the surface, Suzume is spunky, hard-working, and friendly, but under the skin, she’s still burdened by the loss of her mother. Suzume maintains a comfortable distance from her aunt and guardian, Tamaki, and is traumatized by the tsunami that resulted in her mother’s death. She bottles this up quite well, though. The only clue we have about her trauma early on is from the film’s opening scene.

I adore the design of this chair. It's cuter than any rectangular wooden chair has any right to be.

Suzume’s dream-like memory directly reflects the directionless state her mother’s death leaves her in, helplessly crying and lost. As a young woman, the distress orphaned Suzume finds herself in is a slurry of emotions she’d rather not face but can’t quite shake.

In the opening of the movie, Suzume relives a memory of herself as a young child wandering through a desolate landscape. Sobbing and scared, Suzume calls for her mother. When she runs into a woman who young Suzume thinks is her mom, the woman hands Suzume a small chair that her mother had made and points her towards a door that leads Suzume out of the memory. For the rest of the film, Suzume operates on this understanding that her mother helped direct her home, creating an unreconciled need of guidance.

Throughout this hero’s journey, Suzume directly combats her fears of directionlessness and disaster-tied trauma. She chases a mischievous, magical cat across Japan and keeps a demon worm from sinking the whole country. Suzume holds back these disasters by leaning on the help of the new friends she makes along the way, reconciling the lack of agency one feels as they stare down forces of nature while also opening herself up to new connections and allowing them to assist her.

These feelings are the emotional undercurrent to the whole film. And like Suzume herself, the film doesn’t present them right away, instead enticing viewers with a fantastical hero’s journey that leads to a quieter, introspective family road trip where Suzume’s fears are finally aired out.

Once Suzume is cut-off from her partner Sōta, she’s forced to finish the journey alongside Tamaki. Stuck in an awkward road trip that’s muddled by unspoken frustrations festering in both parties, Suzume finally airs out her fears. She begins to recognize her own need to process her mother’s death and the turmoil it threw her life into.

In doing so, Suzume comes to understand that she isn’t the only one whose life was turned upside down by the tsunami. In the immediate space, Suzume’s life is uprooted, but in the larger view of the nation itself, Tamaki is left responsible for her wayward niece, sacrificing the trajectory of her own life in order to give Suzume a new home on the other side of Japan. Tamaki acts as a reflection of the nation’s own efforts to care for its people, complete with the messy bitterness that can come from the shouldering of sudden responsibility. Suzume’s realization of this matures her perspective and makes her capable of fully confronting her own trauma through a conversation with her younger self.

Processing trauma through ~adventure~

I really like the exploration of Suzume and Tamaki's relationship. It's cool to see a discussion of bitterness handled in a healthy way.

In a spiritual dimension called the “Ever-After,” Suzume runs into her younger self– the one from the memory. As tears streak down young Suzume’s face, she asks her older self, “Have you seen my mommy?” and proceeds to describe her mother in a rambling manner that is equal parts adorable and heart-wrenchingly sad. Older Suzume comforts her younger self. She gives younger her the old, wooden chair her mother had made and tells her that things will be okay and that she will “fall in love with herself.” The message calms young Suzume but isn’t enough to erase her fears– not right now. What’s more important is that it’s exactly what the older Suzume needs to admit to herself.

By the time she sees her younger self, Suzume realizes that she’s become a strong and capable woman. She comes to terms with the loss of her mother through the recognition of her new friends’ help as well as her own strong-willed resiliency. For the first time we’ve seen, Suzume is able to tell herself that things will be okay through a tender admission of self-love.

The culmination of Suzume setting her younger self on a path of healing and growth, while also accepting that she herself has confronted and overcome her trauma results in a beautiful scene. Suzume speaks to herself as much as she speaks to the viewers– this young woman who’s endured grief and hardship puts on a smile and assures us all, herself included, that it’ll be okay. It ties together the film’s messaging of resiliency with its themes of regrowth in a heartfelt way, cutting straight to the emotional core of what makes Shinkai’s stories shine.

Suzume talks to Suzume

The Ever-After is a fairy tale-ish translation of the mythological Japanese realm "Tokoyo." Tokoyo (or Tokoyo no kuni) is a timeless realm of eternal night where dead spirits live. There's also a mythological connection between tokoyo and kataware-doki (twilight/golden hour), which is a prominent magical aspect of your name. and explains that film's melding of time (Shinkai's clearly got a thing for these connected realms (and so do I)).

Bathed in grief and loss, Suzume is a hopeful meditation on trauma. Its exploration of Japan’s anxieties towards disasters resonates sharply through Suzume’s journey as we watch her hold back evil at abandoned towns, resorts, and amusement parks as well as the foundations of washed-away homes. The conversation she has with herself is the reassurance Shinkai has conveyed throughout his recent films– that Japan is a nation that can overcome anything. Whether it’s a comet strike, an endless deluge that floods Tokyo, or the very real 3.11 disaster, Shinkai champions a spirited sense of resilience in the looming shade of disaster.

1. https://www.vulture.com/2023/04/suzume-director-makoto-shinkai-on-his-message-of-hope.html

2. https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/earthquakes-in-japan#:~:text=Japanese%20Archipelago%20and%20Seismic%20Activity,-The%20islands%20of&text=This%20means%20that%20Japan%20experiences,tidal%20waves%20(called%20tsunami).

3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/13/japan-tsunami-earthquake-power-cuts

4. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/day-2011-japan-earthquake-and-tsunami

5. https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/makoto-shinkai-interview

References

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