Your Name.

The Name We Have Forgotten: On Your Name and the Mourning of Aura

There is a moment early in Your Name when Mitsuha, dressed in shrine-maiden white, performs the ritual called kuchikamizake: she chews rice and spits it into a small wooden vessel, where over weeks it will ferment into sacred sake. Three of her classmates pass by, peer at the scene, recoil, and laugh — disgusting, antique, the kind of thing only a backwater town and an old woman's granddaughter could still bother to take seriously. She is mortified. And so the film stages, with very little fanfare, the entire crisis of modern art: the collision between ritual and indifference, between cult value and the snicker that registers no value at all, between what one is born into and what one merely walks past on the way somewhere else.

Makoto Shinkai's 2016 phenomenon — which became, briefly, the highest-grossing anime in history — is in many ways an extended meditation on this collision. It is also, more uncomfortably, a participant in it. A digital animation about handmade things. A mass-produced commodity mourning what mass production has eroded. To watch it carefully is to feel the strange double pull of late-modern aesthetics: the film wants to return us to a world steeped in cult value, in the unique appearance of a distance, in the auratic — while being, itself, the very kind of object that has rendered such a world all but unrecoverable. The classmates who laugh at the ritual are not interlopers in the film's universe. They are the film's own technological alibi, set in motion so that we, watching on our own screens, might be permitted to forget that we are the ones really laughing.

Consider, then, the phones. Across the film's first act, Taki and Mitsuha leave one another notes in their handsets, scribble across each other's palms with felt-tip pens, log the days like ethnographers cataloguing a stranger's life. The phone is the privileged medium of the swap precisely because it is the medium most likely to dissolve any sense of what is unique, present, here. And so the film constructs a quietly devastating joke: the magic that crosses three years and several hundred kilometers leaves its traces in the same device on which we cannot remember what we watched yesterday. The body-swap is, in this sense, a private experience of the conditions Benjamin associated with cinema itself — the technological dissolution of bodily presence, the dispersal of the self across reproducible images. The lovers reconstitute themselves nightly by reading their own logs, as if memory had become a paid subscription one had forgotten to cancel.

The grandmother's lesson about musubi — "connection," "binding" — is the philosophical center of Your Name, and also its most explicit theoretical gesture. Time, she explains, is like the braided cords (kumihimo) she weaves: it twists, knots, doubles back on itself, sometimes severs, sometimes rejoins. This is not the time of clocks. It is not the homogeneous, empty time of the workweek and the calendar. It is constellatory time — the time in which distant moments can suddenly align, in which a comet that fell some twelve hundred years before and a comet that falls in 2013 illuminate one another, in which a girl in rural Gifu and a boy in Shinjuku can occupy the same body across a three-year gap and never quite know it. The film knows that this is the kind of time tradition once offered us, and that modernity has taken away. It also knows, more painfully, that it cannot really give it back. The kumihimo cord that Mitsuha presses into Taki's hand is the film's central object precisely because it is the one thing in the story that cannot be digitally produced — it must be passed, in person, through time, like the body itself.

The film's most exquisite sequence takes place at kataware-doki, that liminal moment at dusk when, as the old word suggests, things lose their proper shapes, and one might encounter what should not be there. Taki and Mitsuha finally meet, in the body, on the rim of the ancient mountaintop crater that the comet had carved twenty-four centuries earlier — two full turns of its orbit before the disaster that will, in their own moment, undo everything. They have only minutes before the dusk passes and reality closes over them again. This is, in any honest sense, a messianic moment: a small door through which the impossible walks. The continuum of history — in which Mitsuha is already three years dead — is blasted open and a now-time opens inside it. For one shimmering instant, the catastrophe that has already happened becomes, again, something that has not yet happened, and might be averted. Almost all of the film's power lives in this scene, because it dramatizes the wish that lies underneath every form of historical thinking that refuses to accept what has occurred. They do not kiss. They clutch at one another, briefly; they agree to write their names on each other's palms so they will not forget; and when Taki, scrambling against the dying light, finally finds her hand with the pen, he does not write his name. He writes I love you — a confession Mitsuha will discover only later, after the light has failed and the moment has irrevocably passed. It is the perfect inscription for this film: legible only after the encounter is over, addressed across a gap the gesture cannot close.

And then there is the comet. The cleaving body of Tiamat that splits in the sky and falls on Itomori — destroying a town, killing five hundred people, including Mitsuha, her younger sister, and her grandmother — is too overdetermined to be merely a plot device. Shinkai began the film three years after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, three years after Fukushima, and he has been candid about what he was thinking when he did. The comet is a disaster from the sky, certainly, but it is also a stand-in for every disaster of the historical record, every accumulating heap of wreckage that the angel of history sees behind him as the storm of progress blows him backward into the future. Your Name attempts what that angel cannot. It wants to turn around. It wants to awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. This is the film's most beautiful gesture, and also its most suspect — its fantasy that with enough love and the right ritual sake, history might be quietly rewound, the names struck from the memorial wall, the inert list of victims thawed back into the warm bodies it once was.

And yet — this is where the film earns its complications — even within the rewound history, something is lost. Taki and Mitsuha forget each other's names. They forget the body-swap, the comet, the embrace at twilight, the half-finished inscription on the palm. What survives is a feeling without a referent: the conviction that someone is missing whose absence cannot be filled by anything else. This, more than any of the film's mystical machinery, is its truest insight. Modernity does not simply abolish aura; it leaves behind the trace of aura's absence, the dim awareness that something used to be there, that something is owed to us, that we are searching for a name we have forgotten how to pronounce. The film has already given us its purest image of this condition, earlier on, at a roadside overlook gazing down at the still water that had swallowed Itomori: Taki, having just been told by a Takayama ramen-shop owner — who recognized the place in his sketch because he had once lived there — that everything below them was destroyed three years ago by the falling comet, watches the lovers' notes on his phone vanish in front of him, line by line, as the "correct" timeline closes over the anomaly of their connection — as the catastrophe asserts its own historical primacy and the messianic detour is annulled in real time. The medium of connection is also the medium of forgetting. Every push notification is a séance whose ghost has already left the room.

What, then, are we to make of the film itself, watched as I am watching it: on a laptop, streaming, having paid some algorithm somewhere for the privilege? Your Name is and is not a critique of its own conditions of existence. It mourns aura by manufacturing a gorgeous simulacrum of aura — the carefully animated steam rising from the sake vessel, the lovingly rendered shrine forest, the digitally painted twilight in which every pixel of dust hanging in the air has been placed there by a tired technician in Tokyo. The cult value of ritual is converted, with great skill, into the exhibition value of a global commodity. One can hear the film's enormous box office in the very texture of its compositions. And yet this is precisely what art under late capitalism is condemned to do: to gesture toward the lost world it can no longer inhabit, to traffic in the iconography of presence while delivering only images of it. That the gesture can still move us — that the final scene, in which two adults glimpse one another through the windows of parallel trains, recognize across moving rails some intolerable absence whose shape they cannot quite recall, bolt into the streets of Tokyo, and meet at last on the long stone staircase of a small shrine in Yotsuya — that this still levels us, after everything, is the real evidence of what is at stake. We are still hungry for what we have already eaten. We are still running up the stairs. We are still trying to remember the name.