抄録
Many critics and scholars discuss the depiction of landscape in Makoto Shinkai’s works as central to his authorship, referring to Kojin Karatani’s “Discovery of Landscape” (fūkei) and the new materialist directions in contemporary thought. This essay first examines discourses on Shinkai’s landscape in terms of Karatani’s Cartesian dualism and post-Cartesian attempts to overcome it, and then argues that Shinkai’s Your Name is characterized by semi-transparency, in which the transparent virtual lens of live-action films and opaque characters produced by animation co-exist. By analyzing Your Name in terms of this semi-transparency, this essay describes the nuanced relationship between the film and the Great East Japan Earthquake. The film does not directly depict the disaster, but deals with the issue of forgetting the event by placing the opaque characters in a transparent realist landscape. As the beautiful view of the Tiamat comet preoccupies two protagonists with the feeling of loss at the beginning of the film, the depiction of the world in Your Name is not Karatani’s landscape (fūkei) where the two protagonists communicate with the world as modern subject. On the contrary, the microscopic mobility given to the depiction of the world in Your Name by Shinkai sculpts the subjects as nothingness. This essay calls the process a “scenery” (kōkei) in contrast to Karatani’s landscape (fūkei). From this point of view, while the film superficially presents the theme of “musubi” (connection) and a happy ending, Your Name represents the apocalyptic situation in which we forget that we are always already exposed to the crisis of forgetting disasters.
