IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD (Sunao Katabuchi). 129 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (August 18). See listing. Rating: NNNN
I first watched In This Corner Of The World earlier this year, before it played the Toronto Japanese Film Festival. I thought it was very good. I still think that, but now Sunao Katabuchi’s elegant animated film – a drama about a young Japanese woman named Suzu, based on a 2007 manga series by Fumiyo Kono – carries a disquieting streak of immediacy.
The film is set in the years before and during the Second World War, you see. And Suzu lives in Eba, a neighbourhood of Hiroshima.
We first meet Suzu as a girl in 1933, racing around the city delivering seaweed. She’s resourceful and intelligent, and grows into a confident teenager and a gifted artist. (Suzu is voiced by Rena Nounen, who also goes by the name Non.)
The war begins, and Suzu marries Shusaku (Yoshimasa Hosoya), a clerk who lives in Kure, just outside the city. Living with him means she won’t see her family that often, but that’s okay. They’ll visit.
Katabuchi moves through the story at a deliberate pace, immersing us in Suzu’s life gently and without any heavy foreshadowing. Except of course that we know what’s going to happen to Hiroshima. Suzu can put the war at a distance – it’s all happening so far away, after all – but we know it’s coming for her. We even know when.
Watching In This Corner Of The World earlier this spring was a powerful experience, but watching it now – just after the spectacle of Donald Trump’s idiotic brinksmanship with North Korea – was chilling.
It’s a meditation on how tenuous life is, and how little control we have over our fates. Nations go to war innocents die by the thousands. And each one of their lives is as precious as Suzu’s.It’s not a spoiler to say Suzu’s story doesn’t end with the bombing of Hiroshima, but her life is profoundly changed by the event. Katabuchi’s film is about who she is before, and who she is after, and whether she can reconcile those selves. That’s a question sure to resonate with all of us now, whether or not we really are facing another Hiroshima.
