Some properties, combined with the general act of writing anything, make it difficult to write about them. Others, you know for a fact that you’re completely beyond your depth at explaining, due to cultural reasons or the fact that the property itself is so remarkable that anything you do say will be inadequate.
In This Corner of the World is definitely the latter. Yet, it affected me more than anything else I saw this year.
(Major spoilers below the cut.)
In This Corner of the World plops the viewer directly into the world of Suzu Urano (Suzu Hojo once she is married) and begins as a gentle slice-of-life film. We’re introduced to Suzu, her family, her penchant for drawing,
This is all leading up to events that the viewer knows, due to their existence in a distant future, and that Suzu will live through. Dates are chronicled by the movie itself, passing by slowly at times and in a flurry of repetition at others. The effect is two-fold. It plays with the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of World War II and what is about to befall Hiroshima, but it also shows how time passes for Suzu: relaxed at times (even while her country is at war), quickly at others, and by a third or fourth repetition of Suzu leading her family’s air raid routine, wearily accepting of her reality. The war slowly creeps in on Suzu as she lives her daily life, transforming her slowly. By the end of the film, the core of her personality remains, but she’s irrevocably changed, an avatar for the Japanese populace as a whole.
Moments before the bomb hits, Suzu has just reconciled with her prickly sister-in-law, Keiko Kuromura. Keiko reiterates that Suzu has always gone along with what she was supposed to do, or what she felt was her duty, and that in this case, Suzu should choose for herself whether she wants to stay in Kure with her husband or go to her own family in Hiroshima. An astute viewer knows the bomb is coming, due to the date. Suzu mentions off-handedly that she would have gone to Hiroshima sooner, if it hadn’t been for the scheduling of a doctor’s appointment.
As Suzu changes her mind and decides to stay with Keiko and the rest of her husband’s family in Kure, the bomb hits. Everything goes white. Moments later, the sound of the bomb reverberates through the Kure countryside like an earthquake. It’s reminiscent of calculating the distance of a lightning strike using the seconds between the flash of light and the sound of thunder. Confused, the family tries to tune into the radio for news, but it’s not coming in.
The emotional climax of the movie swiftly follows. After the emperor announces the Japanese surrender via a country-wide radio broadcast, all of the older women around Suzu get up and move, continuing with their lives.
Suzu is furious.
Like Keiko said, Suzu has done everything that has been asked of her. When she was told to get married — despite not remembering ever having met her husband before — she does, moving away from her family to Kure. When she is required to learn household chores to aid her ill mother-in-law, she does to the best of her ability. When the war begins to erode at their few resources, she comes up with creative ways to feed her family. She does everything expected of her to keep herself and her family alive. When the surrender comes through, she rails out against it. The war has cost her myriad things, including family members (the extent of which she doesn’t even know yet, because she doesn’t know exactly what happened to her family in Hiroshima after the bomb) and her own arm. She yells that she still has one good arm and two good legs. What was it all for?
I’m wholly unqualified to talk about the cultural context of this film, but I can relate to Suzu in her moment of pure anger. There have been so many times, especially in recent years, where I’ve railed at things wholly beyond my control. Where I’ve asked, what is this all for? while knowing that people in power (be it government figures or mega-corporations) just don’t care.
This is where In This Corner of the World is most successful for me. It does the near-impossible task of showing systemic and societal issues through the individual — something that currently plagues our ability to have coherent conversations about anything important.