An Ode To Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden – Garden Of Words By Makoto Shinkai
With his 2019 movie Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai gained international recognition and success.
His works are known for their gracefully drawing style and their profound yet youthful stories. While his most acclaimed works Weathering With You, Your Name, and 5 Centimeters per Second, are all coming in feature-length, Garden of Words is a 45-minute short movie circling around the topics of loneliness and bittersweet love.
Released in 2013, Garden of Words [言の葉の庭, Kotonoha no Niwa] tells the story of a 15-year-old student and aspiring shoemaker, Takao Akizuki. The plot beings on a rainy day at Shinjuku station, where Takao decides to skip class to sketch shoe designs in nearby Shinjuku Gyoen. He encounters a mysterious woman who’s skipping work and day-drinking n the same pergola he draws his designs.
Over the rainy season, the two meet in the garden regularly, however, without formally introducing themselves. With the summer approaching, Takao stops visiting the park to concentrate on his work. As the rain returns, the two meet again, and Takao finds out more about the woman to whom he increasingly feels attracted.
A central theme of the film is loneliness. Shinkai wanted to reinterpret the traditional meaning of the word love in Japanese – koi. Originally, it was written using the kanjis 孤悲 [lonely sadness]. Garden of Words wants to emphasize the original meaning as in longing for someone in solitude but in a modern setting. Therefore, the director chose rain, shoes, and the Japanese garden as the main motifs. Shinkai uses rain to show that something usually seen as sad can make the world more vivid and bring people closer. He adds that there’s also a parallel between rain and love as they neither can be controlled nor stopped. With the shoes, he shows the subtle character development and their relationship.
The original idea for the film was to show the serenity of Tokyo and the Shinjuku Gyoen. Shinkai took thousands of photos to remodel it in the anime movie. His desire was to preserve the garden’s beauty if one day it should no longer exist.
