A list of things I enjoyed over this past year includes Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Isao Takahata’s critically-acclaimed film Only Yesterday.
This is not a coincidence.
In a world where I couldn’t leave the confines of my apartment, I turned to starting over on a new island and building a community in Animal Crossing. When I lost my job later on in the year, I turned to Stardew Valley, where the impetus for a drastic job change and move to the countryside is summed up beautifully in a letter: “If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of change.” Only Yesterday, a love letter to and advertisement for pastoral Japan (specifically Yamagata Prefecture), fits within the same ongoing pandemic coping mechanisms. Protagonist Taeko Okajima leaves Tokyo, to escape city life and visit a farm in the bucolic countryside where her brother-in-law’s family harvests safflowers on an organic farm.
If I had the means, I would escape to a rural farm tomorrow.
Yet, Only Yesterday differs from the other two pieces of media I mentioned — and not because it’s a film while the other two are immersive, community-building video games — in that it both revels and wallows in Taeko’s past. Her past isn’t something to escape from, but something to cherish, even when it hurts.
The original manga of Only Yesterday (Omohide Poro Poro) is a simple collection of short stories about 10 year-old Taeko and her adventures. Takahata adapts this as a fairly melancholic look at one woman’s memories while she’s obviously still struggling to find her place in life. The memories themselves are simple — a first taste of pineapple, a first crush, a part in a school play — but the direction adds weight.
When Taeko looks back on tasting pineapple for the first time, it’s also about how she so rarely was able to do things that her (more affluent) friends were able to do like try exotic fruits for dessert or go on a trip during school vacation. It’s that pineapple was so rare, that her family didn’t initially know how to cut it. Their entire experience with it is disappointing compared to expectations and Taeko, as the one who requested it, ends up eating their leftover portions as an odd penance while the rest of her family eats bananas instead.
Only Yesterday has one of the most accurate representations of how memory works. It’s not just that Taeko routinely roots through her own memories in nostalgic regret. Somehow, Takahata adds the appropriate importance to the simplest of 10 year-old Taeko’s actions while retaining the straightforwardness of her actions. Memory is complex because our brains add context that others, even while hearing you tell a story from your own memory, will never understand because they’re not you and they didn’t have that experience. As viewers of the film, we are privy to Taeko’s actions and memories, but her experiences still feel like hers and hers alone. At the same time, it reminded me of how I remember events from my past, especially those that involve regret or unfulfilled potential.
Much of this narrative weight comes from attention to detail and the ease with which Takahata and team swap back and forth between Taeko’s past and her present. What could have come off as a series of random memories from when she was younger have just enough of a tie-in to her participation in the safflower harvest and developing relationship with the countryside itself that they too reflect her emotional growth. Everything in this movie is purposeful, but it feels natural.
In flower language, safflowers are used as a symbol of catching or finding good luck and love. Like many yellow flowers, they also symbolize happiness. In Only Yesterday there’s the obvious implications of Taeko choosing to stay in Yamagata because of potential romantic interest Toshio, but I’d like to think of them as more of a symbol for Taeko’s new beginning and her happiness with that choice.