If you read this post and feel heartsick about real children who are starving and / or living in war zones at this time, please donate! If you reply to this email with a receipt for a donation to a relevant charity I will comp you for a year of Notebook. (If you already have a paid subscription, that means a year will be tacked onto your current subscription.) World Kitchen would be one possibility.
Let’s spread the love,
BDM
Let us begin this newsletter with a statement that may strike you as obvious: Grave of the Fireflies is not a movie about America. It is a movie about Japan.
You might think that goes without saying, but I don’t. I After all, none of this movie happens without the American practice of bombing Japanese cities with incendiary bombs. (Japanese buildings, being wooden, were so flammable that these bombs were immensely destructive.) I will go out on a limb and say that many, perhaps most, people reading this do not agree with the way the firebombing of Japan was conducted, nor with the decision to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not relevant to this particular movie, but always looming in the mind). Americans can feel guilt and shame about all of these things, sure. But this movie is not about them.
Grave of the Fireflies is not about what America did to Japan. It is about what Japan did to Japan. It is a movie by a Japanese director made for a Japanese audience based off a Japanese short story and it is about Japan. And war is hell, but this movie is not simply about the general truth that war is hell—though of course it is also about that.
Grave of the Fireflies follows two children, Seita (fourteen years old) and Setsuko (four), who live in Kobe, as they prepare to hide before an air raid. Their father is absent (he’s in the Navy) and they’re parted from their mother just before the bombs hit, but all seems well—they know the routine. In fact, their town has been completely destroyed and their mother, who has been horrifically burned, is only technically still alive. Soon she’s been dumped in a common grave and Seita and his sister travel to Nishinomiya, where a relative (referred to as their aunt)1 is living. At first, the aunt, under the impression that their mother is still alive, takes the children in with minimal fuss. She takes the food that Seita brings with him from home.
But she realizes that their mother is dead and begins to suspect that their father’s dead, too, and her attitude toward the two children becomes suspicious and resentful. Eventually, the children leave and move into an air raid shelter. There, at first, they live happily, but eventually they begin to die of starvation. Seita tries and fails to steal enough food for the two of them. One day he goes into town to withdraw some money his mother had saved in the bank, and he discovers Japan has lost the war. He comes back with food for his sister, but it’s too late. She dies. He dies a month later.
That these children will die is a foregone conclusion. Seita dies in the film’s opening moments and we see that he’s reunited with his sister’s ghost. They are our guides through their own past. There’s a moment when a group of boys stumble across their home in the air raid shelters and then run away because one of them says he’s seen a ghost. Setsuko and Seita are both away—so who could that ghost be? Surely it’s one of the ghosts we know.…
There’s a lot of lying in this movie. Everyone lies to Setsuko, because she’s so young, but they lie to Seita, too. They avoid saying things to him, leaving him to find out the hard way. (Their neighbor tells him to go see his mother because his mother is hurt without even indicating that his mother is badly burned and barely alive.) Nobody wants to admit what’s real, because the adults are lying to themselves, too. Throughout the movie we see children whose parents have lived and who have homes to return to, because they were lucky. At one time, Seita, as the son of a soldier, was on the lucky side. When his mother died and his home burned down, that luck ran out.
Should Seita lie so much to Setsuko? It’s ambiguous, but the lying is also pointless. She knows more than Seita thinks, as when she digs a grave for the fireflies and reveals that she’s known their mother is dead for some time now. She’s seen the corpses of people who were burned alive. She finds a dead man on the beach. The two of them are locked into a mutual performance where he’s the strong older brother and she’s the protected little sister, and while this performance is the only way they stay alive as long as they do, it’s not enough. Seita tries to turn his life with Setsuko into a never-ending game that distracts her from what’s happening, and she plays along, and these games are some of the movie’s most charming sequences: playing in the ocean, building a home in an abandoned air raid shelter, capturing dozens of fireflies so that for one magical moment your improvised home is full of light. As an act of make believe and as an act of love, his attempt to protect her is heroic.
But he’s still a child and so is she. So they die.
The most hateful person in this movie, by far, is Seita and Setsuko’s aunt, who takes all their food and resents them from the moment they arrive at her home.2 Like the man in the fire, she too spouts propaganda: about the war effort, working hard for Japan, and Seita’s eventual destiny to become a soldier. She scolds them even for singing, since there’s a war on. It is possible, intellectually, to see her in a kinder light: she’s afraid of starvation herself and in other circumstances perhaps she would have been kinder. Maybe she isn’t naturally this way. But I can only see her with contempt. She has no love for little girls or boys who are still too young to be soldiers. She is part of a grotesque society that is devouring its own children.
Not that the kids see it this way. They don’t like how she treats them, but the bigger picture eludes them. They’re kids. Seita believes in his war hero father, who will make the Americans pay for what they’ve done. He sings nationalistic songs and pretends to shoot down planes. When he discovers Japan’s surrendered, his first thought is about the fate of the empire before the reality sinks in that his father’s probably dead. What else is he supposed to do or think? An adult calls him “crazy” after his distraught reaction to the news, but the world in which Japan is the glorious empire that will surely win is the world he lives in, it’s what everybody has insisted he believe, and he’s not going to live to see another world. He loves his sister and he devotes himself to taking care of her because the adults around them either can’t or won’t.
The early scene of the dead soldiers (at least one of whom looks like he’s still a boy), the cowering civilians, and the man in the midst of the burning city yelling “long live the emperor”—this is a key scene, very early in the movie, which says that what happened here is the product of an insane regime that had so much contempt for the people within it that it preached that they should all be honored to die for the emperor and practically ashamed to live. There is immense stupidity and waste contained in this scene. The sense of obligation that people ought to feel toward one another has all been directed in the wrong places.
A question I had rewatching this movie is why it’s framed and narrated to us by the children’s ghosts. In a movie that is otherwise brutally realistic, why is there this slight fantastic touch? One reason: a movie in which we could hope until the end that the children would live would simply be unwatchable. But I don’t think it’s quite that simple, because opening with Seita’s death would be possible without the ghosts, nor would it be necessary to return to the ghosts as often as Takahata does (even showing their reactions to difficult memories). I think it expresses a hope that there’s some eternal realm in which the suffering of these children, and the others like them, is as brief as the life of a firefly is to us. They’ve gone someplace where fireflies never die, a permanent version of the paradise they built in the air raid shelter. That is a flinch on the part of an otherwise unflinching movie, but a necessary one.
Isao Takahata, the director of Grave of the Fireflies, is the other founder of Studio Ghibli after Hayao Miyazaki—though, as Alex Dudok de Wit points out (below), he actually refused to be on any of the paperwork, believing that “an artist had no business putting his name on such documents.” While early in their careers Takahata took Miyazaki under his wing, after Ghibli roles switched and Miyazaki became the powerhouse we know today.
Actually, when I was a teen / in my early twenties—i.e. when I was paying attention—I don’t think any Takahata movies except for Grave of the Fireflies were even available in America, even though I desperately wanted to watch some of them.3 It looks like releases of Takahata’s other movies started coming out here in 2016. By that point I was no longer paying attention and didn’t realize.
I strongly recommend Alex Dudok de Wit’s book about Grave of the Fireflies. His argument (as I understand it) is that the movie ultimately blames Seita for what happens to him and his sister, because Seita refuses to go back to the aunt once it becomes clear he and his sister cannot survive on their own. So the ways in which the adults are in denial (that harm him) are mirrored in the ways in which he is in denial (that harm Setsuko).
I can see this reading and am persuaded that it’s what Takahata wanted to communicate, but I can’t really subscribe to it. To me, Seita is still a child and that ultimately means that it’s the responsibility of the adults to do something. But fourteen is I suppose an ambiguous age when it comes to responsibility. However, de Wit also gathers together a lot of information about the movie, so it’s just worth reading if you want to know more about it.4A story from de Wit’s book: “Once the US Air Force had disabled Japan’s major metropolises, it set its sights on smaller cities. On 29 June, the campaign reached Okayama, 70 miles west of Kobe. Awoken by the bombs, nine-year-old Isao Takahata found his home empty but for his older sister. Their father had dashed to the school where he was headmaster—protocol required him to protect the ceremonial photograph of the emperor. The rest of the family was in the backyard shelter. Unaware of this, the pair panicked and fled into the blazing city. When his sister was injured by a blast, Takahata tended to her; she’d later say he had saved her life. They were reunited with their family after two days. Although relatively fortunate, Takahata would rank this experience as the worst of his life.”
Also from de Wit’s book, on why Takahata did not consider Grave of the Fireflies an “anti-war” film: “Fireflies was intended first and foremost as a study of how people interact, specifically in a crisis. Takahata refused to call it an ‘anti-war film’ on the grounds that he didn’t think it could contribute to world peace. In his view, a film worthy of the label would have to examine the particular causes of past wars in depth; scenes of suffering alone wouldn’t deter audiences from supporting future conflicts, as these scenes might strike them as remote, irrelevant—after all, no country enters a war expecting to lose.”5
Infamously, Grave of the Fireflies played in a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro. They do have some points of overlap. They’re both about children faced with the loss of their mother and nobody knows how much to tell them. The older child is trying to be the adult in the situation because the other adults are not really around. They are both (as de Wit points out) set in Showa Japan. Anyway… I would not want to experience that double feature.
The animation on Setsuko is remarkable. To single out two moments I love: her carefully taking off her clothes and folding them at the beach, and her running around under a sheet in the series of flashbacks that play after she dies.
Akiyuki Nosaka is the author of the story “A Grave of Fireflies,” which has recently been translated and published in the UK. There’s another translation available, which I haven’t read outside of quickly checking whether or not the ghosts were in there (they are not)—but I did read this collection of stories, The Cake Tree in the Ruins, and I recommend it. For some reason that collection has also been published as a children’s book, and I cannot stress enough… do not read these stories about animals and children starving to death to your kids. Even morbid kids. Do not do this. No. Perhaps once they’ve passed a certain age you can leave it on a low shelf. That’s it. Leave it there.
Nosaka was, let’s call it, “a character”: here is a clip provided by myken of Nosaka punching a friend in the face on live TV:
(context)
Something funny: de Wit’s book, this newsletter, and Roger Ebert’s review all open with a description of firebombing. Guess it’s just the right way to do it?
I am probably an outlier here but I don’t think this movie has ever made me cry. That is partly because I rarely cry at movies unless I’m sick, at which point I cry at everything and anything. (I cried at the John Patrick Shanley movie about the man who is a bee.) It also just makes me more angry than it makes me sad. The situation these children are in is not unusual, children are dying all over for these reasons, and things could be different but they won’t be.
I’ve got some good news about the next couple months, which is that I managed to find relatively affordable DVD copies of Beautiful Dreamer and all three of the Oshii-directed Patlabor installments (the OVA and the two movies).
Totoro on December 20! See you then.
Though the connection seems more distant.
Even her moments of apparent generosity are fake: she suggests they sell their dead mother’s clothing for food, but when she returns with the rice, she only gives them some of it, saying “this is yours.” Up until that moment, you would think either that the rice would be everybody’s or that it would be entirely theirs.
I remember there being a lot of discussion online because one of them, either Only Yesterday or Ocean Waves, mentions menstruation, meaning Disney (which did Ghibli at the time) would never have the guts to put it out etc etc etc. I doubt that this was the reason, but who knows? I mean I guess somebody knows.
He has a Substack though it’s inactive.
Takahata’s proposed next film after Fireflies was Border 1939 “an epic tale of adventure and intrigue set in Korea and Manchuria, against the backdrop of Japan’s expansionism in Asia. It was to feature a Japanese student who’s caught up in the anti-Japanese resistance movement and comes to have misgivings about his country’s actions.” However, Border 1939 was never made.
man, you utterly killed it with this review!!! alex dudok de wit’s book is fire and i'm so glad you ref'd it here... you really hit all the substance and put a cone around every pothole that reviewers tend to hit. seriously fantastic work!!!
takahata in interviews is unsympathetic toward seita to a degree that almost beggars belief (saying, essentially, that he sucks because he reacts to everything like a modern child would, fuck them kids). i genuinely have no idea if he's fronting, or what his damage is. you don't accidentally make a character this nuanced and sympathetic.
toshio okada did a video review (i think the translated version is partly paywalled? it's been a minute) in which he infers from one shot that seita ate the remainder of the watermelon after setsuko's death, then cites kuleshov effect to essentially say, gee, if you look really really closely, there's no evidence that seita is sad about these events at all -- you're just projecting that onto him as the viewer. bro, what? is your next gotcha going to be about how these still pictures aren't really moving? 'he ate the watermelon.' my god, these receipts. seita is my little meow meow, cope harder.
i may have ranted about this before, in which case, please indulge me, but nosaka had so much guilt from his own experiences that the short story was written as a fix-it fic for his life. the fix, in a nutshell: seita makes every effort to save his sister before himself, *doesn't* beat her unconscious for crying, and finally, does the proper thing after his failure and dies. even in his later years, nosaka seems to be on his "i'm kind of a piece of shit, huh. i probably should have died" even in interviews totally unrelated to this work (source: my friend verbally translating tv discussions to me in real time.... sorry lol)
growing up in the wake of the immense futile play-act of wartime nationalism that you capture so beautifully here, nosaka and his generation experienced a total collapse of trust in adults or any authority, which is why i find it interesting that after nosaka spent so many years in the artsy edgelord literary bad-boy posture that he never really shed (clinging to an eternal adolescence? refusing to become part of the corrupt adult establishment?) he went into politics in his later years. there was some family basis for this, but other than that... seems like it breaks the facade a bit, right? there isn't as much about him available to read in english as i wish. ok now i'm done.
thank you so much for this amazing review!!!!
i watched this movie in high school - by the memory of which house i watched it in, i couldn't have been more than sixteen - and have not been able to bring myself to revisit it since, because of... well... y'know. i was surprised by how familiar it felt reading about it here, which probably says something to the movie's credit, but i would not describe it as a movie whose particulars i remembered very well.
so your note on the question of fault was interesting, because i would say that maybe the number one thing i remembered about watching the movie was the sense that what made it so emotionally unbearable was the idea that setsuko's death was in some ways seita's "fault" - not in the sense of moral culpability but in the sense that... hm... the movie does not foreclose the possibility that if seita had made different choices, setsuko would have lived. (to my recollection it suggests this pretty strongly - and it seems de wit's reading suggests that's true - but i don't remember the specifics well enough to assert so myself.) this stuck with me i think because to me it seemed a level of unbearable beyond what i had expected going into a famously extremely sad movie that tells you in the opening scene it's about watching two children die. i don't think i made any connection to the movie's societal criticism at the time, and i certainly didn't "blame" seita for what happens. i just felt: how awful to watch your sister starve to death; how much more unfathomably brutal to watch her die and think that maybe you could have prevented it. would that really matter, in a circumstance so horrific? i'm fortunate enough to say i'm not sure. but that was how i felt at the time - possibly, it occurs to me now, because i am also an older sibling, and i would have been around seita's age when i watched it (although i felt much older than the character i was watching- but that's kind of the trick of that age; he felt older than he was, too).
i don't think i cried watching it either, but i welled up reading and thinking about it now... i'm historically also not a big movie crier but i seem to become more sensitive to certain things with age and i wonder if i'd cry now. (reading your reflections on it and taking some time to reflect myself has given me a fresh appreciation for it that almost makes me want to brave it again but... i mean...) but also what does make me cry is not really correlated with anything as easily identifiable as "sadness"... the last movie that made me cry was one i mention because i think you said you're planning to cover this director in this series at some point - satoshi kon's millennium actress, which had me weeping at a critical moment - but not because i was sad.