Whisper of the Heart (1995)

directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

Miyako Singer

Two months ago, I moved to New York City.

I packed up three suitcases and a duffel full of my most precious belongings (ill-fitting thrift shop button-ups, a sculpture of a skeleton taking a bath, a small but not insignificant collection of stuffed animals) and left the apartment I’d lived in for eight months with my boyfriend and friend, comfortably watching a movie a day and drinking a lot of Olympia beer. My destination was a pea-sized apartment in Greenwich Village where my knees hit the bathroom door when I sat on the toilet.

I moved because I had to do something. Roughly 11 months into the pandemic, a gloomy sense of stasis had settled itself over me like a weighted blanket (maybe. I wouldn’t know because weighted blankets cost a minimum of $200, so maybe it was more like those rainbow parachutes kindergarteners play with). For years, it had become increasingly obvious that I was content to do nothing. Not nothing-nothing. After all, I had a good job and a recent promotion. But day to day, I was fine going to bar trivia and abusing my AMC A-List membership, and then when the pandemic took hold, “making my way through filmographies” and caramelizing onions with no particular sense of purpose.

There’s a TikTok trend where people film “conversations” with their younger selves. These range from inspirational (telling your younger self you are now a professional ballerina) to traumatic (telling your younger self you’ll meet the love of your life but he’ll die in a freak accident) to delightfully stupid (telling your younger self that you WILL touch a real boob someday). When I thought of what mine would look like, I felt ashamed of my aimlessness.

*

When I was younger, I wanted to be like Shizuku Tsukishima, the 14-year-old protagonist of Yoshifumi Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart. That’s not entirely accurate. When I was younger, I believed I was Shizuku.

Shizuku is a bookworm who reads fiction exclusively (like me), is smart but sometimes forgetful (like me), eats lunch with her friends in her favorite teacher’s classroom (I ate in the Spanish classroom even though my California high school had a nice big outdoor quad), and is enchanted by a mysterious and romantic antique shop (this is the same trait as only reading fiction, and also the same as being a fan of the 2008 Panic at the Disco! album Pretty. Odd., as I was).

Whisper of the Heart is, like many Studio Ghibli films, a coming-of-age story about a smart, plucky young woman. Unlike many Ghibli films, it is not a fantasy. It is also the only film directed by Yoshifumi Kondo, a longtime Studio Ghibli animator frequently described as the chosen successor to the studio by his colleagues and mentors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, before he died suddenly at 47 years old. Whisper of the Heart is a quiet, sun-dappled movie about a bookish girl who follows a cat named Moon from the train to an enchanting little antiques shop, where she encounters a debonair cat statuette named The Baron and the boy whose name she keeps coming across in the catalog cards of her library books. The boy, Seiji Amasawa, turns out to be an aspiring violin maker and the grandson of the antiques shop owner with whom Shizuku begins a sweet and very chaste romance with, and whose commitment to his craft inspires Shizuku to apply herself as a writer.

The movie is based on a manga of the same name (its Japanese title is: Mimi wo Sumaseba which means “If You Listen Closely”) by Aoi Hiiragi, with a screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki himself. Though the film is largely faithful to the manga, Miyazaki infuses the final product with his own fixations such that this lowkey story about young love, listening to your heart, and following your dreams becomes instead a story about the grueling work of polishing the rough stones of your artistic talent into something beautiful.

It is only in the movie that Seiji, now a violin-maker-in-training (in the manga, he’s an artist—I imagine Miyazaki preferred the physicality and specificity of carving a violin) goes to Cremona, Italy for two months to learn violin-making from the greatest masters, a show of dedication that drives Shizuku to complete an entire novel in his absence to prove herself. It is also only in the Miyazaki script that the story ends with Seiji asking Shizuku to marry him—in the original Seiji only says “I love you” but in truest Miyazaki form he said he wanted them to “commit to something.”

*

Nobody has ever called me a quitter, because usually I never start. It was easy for me not to notice this about myself back in school, when I was always busy writing papers and making fat stacks of neat flashcards and rushing off to club meetings. Now it’s been four years and I haven’t really done anything I said I’d do: learn to play the accordion, to sew, to draw, take tap lessons, improve my Japanese, roast a whole chicken, try to understand one sport so I could talk about it. Last week at a volunteer gig, the person I’d been paired with on a shift who was probably 20 years old said that I made them “feel better about things, if you still don’t have your shit together.”

Hayao Miyazaki would hate my guts. 

*

When Seiji leaves for Italy, Shizuku panics. “One’s going forward while the other stays behind,” she says, slumped over a pillow in her best friend’s bedroom. It takes roughly 24 hours for Shizuku to determine what her next step will be: write a full story to see if she has talent, with the anthropomorphic cat statue the Baron as her hero. She does this with the blessing of Seiji’s grandfather who asks to be the first reader, and hands her a misshapen black rock with a jewel hidden inside of it. The metaphor is obvious but effective: she must polish her writing to reveal the jewel under the rough stone of her inexperience, and the process will take time and effort and even when she’s done there may be yet another, finer jewel buried still deeper, and this is the way art is made.

Shizuku puts everything of herself into writing. She researches for hours in the library, stays up deep into the night writing, forgetting to turn the lights on. She stops emerging from her desk for family dinners and eats less. Her grades slip and in an argument with her sister, she declares she isn’t going to high school at all so she can focus on her art (she does later retract this statement).

*

While I mostly think my lack of post-graduate ambition is a fundamental personal flaw, I don’t think I can ignore the influence of that tweet from @thetrudz that reads “My ‘dream job’ is...not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor.” Maybe it was okay to just go to the movies and the tiki bar and to picnic by the lake and have a nice little job that covered rent and 50% off Blu-rays and Uniqlo linen shirts. I was, after all, a victim of capitalism and all jobs were toxic, and if I wanted to spend my limited free time (roughly 4 hours a weekday once I calculated my commute, my shower, and the time I spent cooking) lying around refreshing my Twitter feed, wasn’t that my right?

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning here that Studio Ghibli is rather famously a difficult place to work. Hayao Miyazaki is a curmudgeon and pessimist, a self-professed “20th century man” unwilling to adapt, supremely diligent, and prone to saying things like “The future is clear. It’s going to fall apart.” In the 2013 documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, an employee admits that Miyazaki is difficult to work with, that many talented people have burnt out and quit, and that “if there’s anything in you that you want to protect you may not want to be around him long.” Takahata too was reportedly terrifying—a co-founder of Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki, gave an interview in which he admitted that Takahata severely overworked and mistreated staff. Suzuki also makes the claim that the stress of Takahata’s demands led to Yoshifumi Kondo’s death from an aneurysm 3 years after the release of his first and only film, Whisper of the Heart.

*

In October 2020, I was locked down in my Oakland apartment, awaiting any kind of development in Covid vaccines, and in this state I decided to rewatch Whisper of the Heart.

I hadn’t seen it since at least high school and my primary concern was the question of whether it would hold up or not. It did, of course. It was still a lovely, understated film that finds the charm in the cramped, domestic spaces of the Japanese suburbs. It remains my favorite, if slightly inexplicable, use of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” a song I heard for the first time in this movie. I still thought Seiji was impossibly cute (a grumpy violin maker! Perfect.).

It wasn’t the same, though. For one, this time around I recognized Shizuku not just as herself but also as the “lofi beats to study and relax to” girl, perhaps her primary claim to fame in this century. For another, it kind of made me feel like shit.

I didn’t learn any new lessons that day. I already knew it was better to create, however imperfect it may be. I knew that effort is a wildly humiliating but also very beautiful human trait, and that you have to be willing to make things that are awkward and ungraceful if you want to make anything worthwhile. I knew that it was better to try and fail then to sit around wondering what it would be like to try something. I also knew that work was valuable—not hustle culture or checking emails at 9pm—but working toward something for myself.

I knew all of that and yet there I was, doing nothing.

*

I watched the movie again to write this piece. I kind of hoped I would accomplish something very cool in the last few months that could provide this a satisfying conclusion, but I’m sorry to say I’ve mostly been eating $18 plates of pasta and sweating.

My boyfriend, however, is doing something. This morning, he flew to London to begin a masters program in audio production. Like Shizuku, I am being left behind.

On this latest rewatch, I was struck by Shizuku’s translated lyrics to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Usually I am too distracted by the charm of the scene in which she sings it to take much notice. in the cozy, wooden basement of the antiques shop, a space fit for dwarves or Pinocchio, Shizuku asks Seiji to play the violin. He starts up “Country Roads” and asks her to sing and in the middle of the song, Seiji’s grandfather returns home with two friends (one is wearing a bow tie and the other a bolo tie) and they scramble downstairs to join in with a mandolin, cello, and recorder, lending richness to the music. The scene feels like Christmas.

This time though, I listened to the lyrics. The original John Denver song is about a homecoming, though an entirely imagined one as Denver himself is not from West Virginia; it just sounded better than singing his home state “Massachusetts.” Shizuku’s rewrite is about leaving home, striking out on your own. Her first line is: Had a dream of living on my own / With no fear of being all alone. This of course made me cry, alone in my living room, in a still-strange new city.

The part that really gets me though is this little portion: 

If my feet are moving faster that’s because I only want to
Push away memories. 
Country road, this old road
Could go right to my hometown. 
I won’t go there, I can’t go there. 
I can’t go down that country road.

I’ve done nothing, but I did do something. Two months ago, I moved across the country alone and for the first time in many monotonous pandemic months I felt energized. Those first hot and rainy weeks were hard and I missed the life I had built for eight years on the opposite coast but I didn’t want to go back. While it’s embarrassing to feel like this city of all cities will change my life, it’s hard not to feel like this time I mean it, as my feet move faster than ever, dodging rats and AC droplets on these concrete roads.

Miyako Singer is an AMC A-Lister living, watching movies, and very occasionally writing in New York City. She is the publishing operations associate at Catapult, Counterpoint & Soft Skull Press. You can find her tweeting about Martin Scorsese and being sweaty on the subway @miyasinger.