Nothing is more heart-wrenching, than the distance between two people who once loved each other, but will never see each other again.
Strange, how something so real can also be so tragic. Thousands of people will learn of this pain every month, every year. Maybe someday I'll be one of them.
5 Centimeters Per Second isn't a fantasy. It is a story of reality where fantasy still dares to exists, and struggles to survive.
To submit to reality is tragic, isn't it? Here we are in the
fantastical years of adolescence, so fiery and ready to stand in the face of the
world. Reality will not take us by force. We will fight, for our fight
defines us. We are golden; while there is a way, while we are still young and crazy and our blood is still of fire, we will not be stopped. The world doesn't matter for the individual's sake. The individual is all. The world is about what we can make of it.
But there is a cold sad thing that we will perhaps come to know someday. Reality does not
take us, does not
wrench us away, kicking and screaming.
Reality creeps in, trickles like rain, drop by drop. We slowly let it take us--like death by the cold. We no longer fight, and we no longer hurt to know we will never have what we want. To lose the desire to hold on: that is tragedy.
The movie is about that slow movement into acceptance--that slow movement, away from all the possibilities, all that could be, in those early days, as they vanish one by one like candles by the wind--that slow movement into a steady path that will take us on only one way.
5 centimeters per second: that is the speed of the cherry blossoms as they fall to the ground. So we fall--fall in love, that distance we can only cross once. The cherry blossoms bloom early in spring when the snow isn't all gone; everyone comes to watch--in Japan, an entire celebration is dedicated to this yearly happening. When the petals fall, they turn the pavements and roads a shade of pink that speaks of innocence and fresh--brief--love. It's strangely glorious, for a single living species to incite such wonder.
The cherry blossoms die before the spring is over. They fade into the roads, as if they never existed, and leave them bare. So is love, when it does not actualise itself. Almost nothing eventually, only the bittersweet regret of happiness that was once in full bloom, and is now but a wasted shadow.
There is an irony in the way the story is presented.
The backdrops, the scripting, the characters' dispositions--are so much like the way an idealist would tell it, with
those fearless declarations, those bold pictures of sunlit roads and classrooms in summertime, the indulgent contrast of light and shadow and colour and emptiness--redder than red, bluer than blue. The way the main characters tell each other of their hopes and their fears, the way they voice out the truth of their fates apart, yet with all the unshattering faith in the world: it's plain heartbreaking.
As the story moves through its three episodes, it grows more and more vibrant, violent, in its telling.
Cherry Blossom is gentle enough. The story of Takaki and Akari's childhood is told in a time when the two have already parted ways. As Akari speaks of the scenery in her new residence far away from him, the story of how they met, grew close and separated connects the images: the quote that forms the title of the movie, the friendship that blossomed, their quiet love through the years of their youth. But the viewers know it's inevitably going to end, the taste of imminence is strong.
The dream of watching the cherry blossoms fall together, for one last time, is like the sound of departure almost. This is where the distance is first painted for how unfathomable it really is: Takaki is about to fly to a different city, a place where he can never see Akari again, for good. And for her he weathers the greyness, the cold, of what we see now as the unrelenting hold of reality and future, that which does not want their love to be fulfilled. Reality.
And he wins this battle, but ultimately he cannot win the war. He finds her, deep in the night, their faith in each other strong enough to keep them waiting. In the warmth of a simple fire, they share a last night--and while it lasts, while they are there, it might as well be an eternity. We watch, knowing this is where it ends. We know, there is no possibility of happiness this way again. They know it too. But still it happens, and they smile as they live this night together--live for the moment, the future be what it may, in the whirling cold snows of the dark. (The cherry tree is bare, because of the snow. The spring didn't come in time. But they make do, make do--the snow is beautiful in its own way, and Akari whispers that the snowflakes are a little like petals. They share their last kiss there. And it is, heartwrenchingly, also their first.)
The trains moves out of the station. The morning is beautiful, the most beautiful one yet. The spring seems ready to arrive. But here in the station, this is their very last sight of each other, for the rest of time.
They never gave each other their letters, farewell letters that must have spoken worlds. All those thoughts, still waiting to be said--never said, must vanish now. For the rest of time.
Here comes the episode
Cosmonaut. It has been a comparable while since--not long, not a short period either.
Because another lesson of life comes, and really only sets the scene for the last: Love is never reserved for one alone. Many will love one, but only one's love will ultimately be returned. Sometimes, you lose yourself, misplace your feelings--and suddenly you find yourself placing your heart in the hands of someone you never knew would never see you.
Kanae is the subject of this; she is the one who hopelessly falls for one who she can never amount to anything for. Another reality. She swore that on the day she learnt to ride the waves, she would confess. Because to learn to ride the waves was something she had never been able to do, for so many years--the insurmountable challenge of her life. She swore, if she defeated this inability, she could be anyone, do anything.
But sometimes, however passionately you feel, however you swear the happiness of these days is enough to grant you the right to that love, however certain this crazy emotion--akin to drunkenness--makes you feel, it is, in the end, mere delusion. Then you realise, you were always overlooked; Kanae, always like the sea, the blue sea, vast and wild and grand, so passionate and powerful and brilliant--she was nothing, really, beside the sky, and the cosmos beyond, towards which he was gazing, all the while.
Sometimes, you are looking so far that you fail to see the things that were so close by, things within your reach. You aim forward, into a distance that you're unsure you will ever reach--but endeavour nevertheless, because without hope and without that dash of recklessness, there is never the possibility. Takaki continues to dream of Akari; he is the spaceship whose destination is indeterminate. Somewhere out there, somewhere in that unreachable, impassible distance, lies a dream of a life he still believes he can live.
But in that belief there is crippling fear. He writes her messages on his phone--but never sends them. The unspoken words haunt him, and he continues to feel shadows of that desire, to tell her the things he never did.
Perhaps he is as much a victim of that passionate blindness as Kanae is; he believes and dreams, long and tireless--the money is spent, the work is done, the spaceship is launched into the darkness beyond the sky. From here on earth, we see only points of lights--distant stars, nearer planets, the moon and its brilliant face looming so close to us. Where is it headed? Somewhere amongst those beautiful lights lies its destination, a place that it might never reach, but travels towards nonetheless. Because no hope is worth living if the dreamer does not first endeavour--desperately, recklessly, hopelessly--for it.
Episode three,
5 Centimeters Per Second.
Often, you are told to let go and move on, because moving on is the only way you can survive thereafter. But sometimes, letting go is only impossible. Because someday, sometime, long ago, you left a piece of your heart behind, with someone--and she left a piece of her heart with you. And you will never meet again. Never lay eyes on each other again.
They come so tantalisingly close. Is it a dream--as the train passes, and erases that possibility, absolutely, from memory? He turns, but only in time to watch a train--that very
thing that first took him away from her, those years ago, in the train station--eradicate that last chance.
The train, which means departure, goodbye, the windows flashing with the sun, taking its passengers to some far-off place. Just like the passengers as they travel away from the ones they love, his dream--everything he still carries as a burden from his past--is taken away, to an unreachable place.
Everyone knows the lesson. Things change. People change. Allegiances shift. Time moves on. Life must as well.
Takaki finds himself a job, the ultimate aim of his education as a child--the education that he had, with Akari, with Kanae, and on his own. He finds himself a girlfriend at the workplace, a marriage of convenience, and contents himself to believe that he has forgotten his past.
But it continues to return--sometimes, when he sees beyond the ceiling and remembers a desire he once had, an aching deep in him, that led him to ride halfway across the country. just to spend a night with a person he once, distantly, loved so.
That love, he realises then, is something absolutely irreplaceable, something--as he looks at his new lover, perhaps a desperate replacement, and feels his heart not moving--
she cannot be, however much she tries. Some things are just that way; there is no reason to them, and nothing a person can do to change them. But Akari, too, has moved on, beyond his reach. She has another man, a new home, a new happiness. The rocket never finds its destination; it travels still.
He remembers everything now, though the memories have been distilled to simple scenes, images. He remembers, in the comforting warm of spring--a day in frigid winter when he dreamt of seeing the cherry blossoms fall. He remembers, a cold night, a long journey--a few hours sleeping in the warmth of a small dinner and a love he didn't want to lose. He remembers a barren tree, so dead in appearance.
So many things one must pass by in life; so many things one must shed, in order to welcome the new and move forward into what the world has planned--be it grey or cold or dreary--so many things must be destroyed, without hope for revival. Like it or not, we will lose and forget our childhood someday. Individual events become a blur in the vivid picture of the past; where things once mattered, they are only sweet, fading impressions. The joy and that optimism of youth is a faint remembrance now.
He remembers, still. It is spring now, and at last, the cherry blossoms are falling--the same as every year, the same as every year before that. Those same wondrous flowers, dressing the roads in the a glorious pink, the colour of life and love--that will soon melt away, to be lost and forgotten, long before the week has come to an end. He remembers their first kiss; he remembers the train that took him away.
And somewhere far off, lost as she is in her own different future--she is trying to remember the fading fragments of that very same day, somewhere deep in her buried childhood.
