MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD (although the media is pretty old)

read at your own risk

So I read the extended novel by Shinkai and Kanoh on ‘5 cms per second’, and I think there are a bunch of things I truly disagree on.

In the second part, Cosmonaut, Takaki mentions how they didn’t want to add the feelings they felt under the cherry blossom to their letters, since, I quote, ‘It was a moment of absolute purity. … It was a moment that could never be put to words.’ Yet he also says that doing so would preserve it, which is why neither of them did it, since forcing a description on it would ruin and tarnish the beauty. Yet he acknowledges that words were all he could send her, despite language being a flawed tool. Maybe he was right about language being a flawed tool.

It drove them to hopelessness how the letter had no mention, no remnant of that experience. And that’s the reason why they evem stopped trying to describe their feelings and the letters became sparser and sparser, and also devoid of their depth, only containing everyday affairs.

BUT LANGUAGE WAS ALL THEY HAD. THE SHARED EXPERIENCE MIGHT BE PERFECT, BUT THEY HAD EMAIL! PHONES! LETTERS! THEY HAD TO COMMUNICATE! TELL EACH OTHER HOW WHAT THEY EXPERIENCED WAS PERFECT. EVEN THAT ALONE COULD’VE BEEN ENOUGH! THEY TRIED TO PRESERVE THE PERFECTION AND LOST WHATEVER THEY HAD!

I find this entire section to be a cheap and easy excuse and a way out of responsibility. Yes, love is a responsibility. It takes effort. A lot of it. But I can’t really blame kids for not having maturity in life I guess. But one would expect them to be better because they were supposedly much more mature, beyond their ages.

I do wonder, what would’ve happened if they were honest with each other? If they wrote their feelings, no matter how imperfect. Maybe things would’ve been different.

I truly think Shinkai and Kanoh fumbled here. But maybe that was the message. Feelings alone don’t preserve a relationship. It requires a constant effort and even more constant and clear communication.

However, the way the media was framed, the second novel in particular, makes it seem really, really weird. And the rest of the media just shows Takaki to be someone stuck in the past even though he found much success in his life in his own way (again, second novel).

Literary rant over