What Is Your Name? / Always in My Heart / Kimi no na wa (1953)

A man and a woman meet in an air raid. After leaving the shelter they talk for a moment on the nearby bridge and promise to meet there again in six months if both are still alive. A second air raid separates them before they learn each others’ names. They do both survive the war but circumstances prevent their meeting in six months, thus beginning What Is Your Name?, the most phenomenally popular Japanese movie of the post-war era,¹ eventually lasting six hours in three separate episodes, and arguably the most popular movie in Japanese history given the difference in ticket prices between its appearance and that of Princess Mononoke.

Lovers who miss a rendezvous are a staple of romantic melodrama, but Euro/American films generally take one of two approaches: An Affair to Remember, in which the meeting is missed and the couple go on to separate lives, eventually reunited only after many years; or Waterloo Bridge, in which the lovers meet but one is so humiliated by what has happened in between that she (and it is almost always the woman) refuses to continue the romance. Kimi no na wa takes neither of those routes, though they are offered.

She misses the meeting in November 1945 because her uncle has taken her away from Tokyo back to Sado Island, so far from Tokyo that it is almost untouched by the Occupation. He arranges a marriage for her with a civil servant, which She declines, while He returns to the bridge again in May ‘46 and again in November ‘46. However, He publishes a poem about their meeting which eventually is brought to her by a friend, so She learns his name. The Betrothed offers to take her to Tokyo to help find Him, but the magazine has gone broke and He has disappeared. They follow His trail to His sister’s in the south, where they just miss each other again and suddenly She agrees to the arranged marriage after all.

But – She still shows up at the bridge in November ‘46, to tell him her name and to tell him She has decided to marry another. The reasoning here completely escapes me, I must admit; if She was going to go to the bridge after all, why not postpone her wedding until She was sure He had disappeared completely? Any American feature of course would have had her stand in the fog for hours watching him on the bridge until he left and she went away with tears rolling down her cheeks (and most would have had this happen after, not before, the marriage as well).  Here, they talk and bid a stoic farewell but without so much as a hug, much less a kiss. We resume their story in 1948, when the Husband is transferred to Tokyo and discovers that He is working on the magazine produced by the Husband’s department. The Husband grows increasingly jealous, though She has made not the slightest attempt to see the other man. She leaves her husband and just misses Him again at his home and returns to Sado. He follows and finds her again on a bridge in the mist where She appears to be contemplating a jump, but He stops her and She tells him She must go back to her husband because She is now pregnant. He leaves, but the end titles tell us that the story is not over.

When they first made the promise to meet again, I thought the movie would take the Waterloo Bridge approach. After all, prostitution was the most likely route to survival for a woman alone in Tokyo in 1945. This is in fact visualized by another woman, whom He saves after her attempted suicide; she is pregnant and can’t face the shame of a blue-eyed baby.* He finds a laundress job for her and her fellow prostitute friend but keeps everything at the casual friendship level despite obvious hints from the pregnant girl. When we find She has been taken home by her uncle, I thought we would then launch into a survey of the Occupation years as seen through their separate lives, but the Occupation is hardly mentioned. The prostitute lives in a slum and the old soldier across the way gets involved in the black market to help with money for the baby, but that happens off screen. An editor makes oblique references to things that might upset the Americans, but we see no Americans, even though in 1953 all the old restrictions about Americans on screen had been lifted.  As in so many Hollywood movies, the individual settings suggest a prosperity far above what we know would have been plausible for a civil servant at any time, but especially in the Occupation years when space in Tokyo was so limited, with lots of western furniture in Her home and western cars and taxis and movie-set streets. While being set during the Occupation, it seems to exist outside that same Occupation, in Movieland rather than reality.

What we are left with then is a series of sacrifices – He ignores or completely misses other offers of love, She decides to get married before meeting Him and apparently makes the rendezvous only to punish herself. When She could at last go with Him, She decides She must sacrifice herself again for her child’s sake. (So little explanation is given about this that it is unclear why She can’t have the child with her true love, who would accept it along with Her. Perhaps it is the idea that the child actually belongs to the father, which we have seen in many other situations, but if so, neither of them ever indicates that is part of Her decision.)

The movie is very well-made in the studio manner. Except for the cardboard bomber overhead, the opening air raid scenes are extremely vivid and convincing. Otherwise, there is nothing in the production itself that obviously raises it out of the ordinary. Keiji Sada is as handsome and considerate as anyone could hope a true love to be, and Keiko Kishi is as beautiful as you would want your dream woman to be and can cry with the best of them, and the supporting cast is generally fine.

Keiko Kishi

There is the expected love song that I assume became a hit, and the music, despite the heavy reliance on the soap-opera organ, generally manages to not distract from or overwhelm the scenes. The end title indicates that the studio planned a trilogy from the beginning, suggesting a popular novel as the original source.**

While the movie still holds the viewer’s interest, the real mystery is why, of all the hundreds of movies about women making sacrifices for love or for family, this became the one that grabbed a generation.

* I had wondered in Kiku to Isamu how the illegitimate children of White Americans had fared compared to those whose fathers were Black. From the way the toddler is treated here, it is clear that there was just as strong a prejudice against them; the Japanese just needed to stand a bit closer to recognize them.

** My copy does not translate any credits beyond the cast, and IMDB lists only a screenwriter, but it credits the “story” for Part II to Kazuo Kikuta, whose works were adapted to film more than thirty times. Making a guess, the story probably began as a popular novel or newspaper serial by Kikuta, for it would have been very rare for a studio to commit to a trilogy without material already pre-sold to some significant amount of the audience.(Update: as several commenters indicated, the movie had in fact been pre-sold by a radio serial; it was so popular it was once joked that no women could be found in the public baths during the time it was being broadcast.)

¹ Jasper Sharp,  Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (Lanham, MD, 2011), pp. 224-5.