Finished this week’s reading. Some thoughts.
- It occurs to me that since Mitsuha’s plan stations Saya-chin at the school, she’ll be safe even if everything else goes wrong. I idly wonder if that was intentional or just a coincidence.
- I like the description in the book of her response to Taki’s すきだ on her hand. In the movie, she just laugh-cries at it, gets up, and keeps going. Here in the book, it’s what actually gives her the strength to get up and keep going. Someone posted a YouTube video a few weeks ago of some guy’s interpretation of this movie (forgotten who that was, sorry) in which he said “He had to write “I love you” or his sacrifice wouldn’t have worked” or somesuch, but I think it’s more that if he’d written his name, Mitsuha’s thoughts in this scene would have been “… who’s that?”. Since he wrote instead すきだ, her response is now “there’s someone out there who loves me, even if I don’t know who it is”.
- The movie’s scene of Mitsuha returning to her father’s office was always a bit unsatisfying to me - I wanted to see more convincing, more evacuating. Here in the book, we don’t even get that much (though I guess the “Whatever may happen, whatever stars may fall, I will live!” is a bit more triumphant).
- The timing here has always bugged me a little bit. The first time we see the comet fall (at least in the film - the scene with Mitsuha at the end of Taki’s date doesn’t seem to occur in the book), little enough time passes between the splitting and the impact that Mitsuha is still standing where she was on the hillside. Here, the second time around, there’s enough time for her to return to her father’s office, convice her father, and then evacuate the entire town.