First loves can haunt us a lifetime and affect so many others
Creative Staff
Story: Makoto Shinkai
Art: Yukiko Seike
Translation/Adaptation: Melissa Tanaka
What They Say
Love can move at the speed of terminal velocity, but it can only be shared and embraced by those who refuse to see it stop.
Takaki Tohno quickly befriends Akari Shinohara when she transfers to his school. They grow closer to each other due to similar interests and attitudes; for instance, they both prefer to stay inside during recess due to their constitutions. As a result, they form a strong bond. Upon ending their school year, Akari moves to Tochigi, due to her parents’ jobs. The two keep in contact by writing letters, but eventually begin to drift apart.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Originally released as two volumes in Japan, 5 Centimeters Per Second is the manga adaptation of the feature film by Makoto Shinkai. The adaptation follows some of the usual rules in that it uses the script and doesn’t change all that much in the end, but reframes it in terms of the visuals and gives it a different feel as adapted by Yukiko Seike. With Shinkai’s visual works so striking with its color design, a black and white adaptation has its work cut out for it. Seike, for her part, captures the look of the characters well but has a very challenging job and one that she pulls off beautifully in making sure that the focus is more squarely on the characters. I adore Shinkai’s films, but it’s easy to be wrapped up in the overall mood of the moment because of the animation, music and color design of so much of it. That softens what you take in of the characters and you get a very different feel with it. Going to manga form, we get a lot of detailed artwork and scenes here with some great backgrounds, but we get in the characters heads far more and they feel more grounded and real, not quite so dreamlike.
The book, clocking in at 462 pages, is really about one young man and several women that come into his life. But they’re all well connected as it unfolds, starting when he was in the seventh grade and shifting to adulthood over the course of it. But like so many people, it’s those middle school years that can be the most defining with who we are when it comes to relationships, where the mistakes made can carry on and hold in your heart for years or decades to come. For Tohno, he ends up transferring into a school where he becomes friends in a sort of mildly distant way with another transfer student who comes in a year after him when they’re in the seventh grade together. He helps her adjust to the place they’re in and they have some mild fun, but it’s a lot of tentativeness that has others wondering or simply believing that they must be dating because of how they act. But with Tohno having already transferred twice before this, he knows he’ll end up moving again just as the two get closer.
But like many young potential lovers in this situation, they try to find ways to stay in touch with each other. There’s some good emotion and feeling that comes from all of this as we see how they try to write each other, text and eventually meet together after they had moved apart some considerable distance and as each moved into the eighth grade. While you hope for a good reunion and a way for the bond to survive, instead we get some pain as it falls apart on both sides . We do get to see Akari again here and there as the book goes forward, but this missed connection is what haunts Tohno for another twenty years. He continues to move with his parents and going from Tokyo to another small area brings him a different set of issues as young girl there falls for him, not realizing that the heart pain he’s felt has left him more disconnected from people than he already was.
With Kanae, we get the high school hopeful romance falling into place as we see things from her perspective as she does all she can to get closer to him with a proper social distance involved. She’s unsure of herself and places a lot of her fears and hopes on him because of how he came from a big city and she feels like she’ll never escape the small island that she’s on. With Tohno seemingly have these big yet understated dreams of space travel that comes up into play at times, it’s something that she finds appealing as he has this sense of purpose about his future while she’s completely uncertain about what she wants to do with her life. The tentative nature of their relationship, where she never says she’s actually interested in him and just becomes a good friend from his point of view, has a really poignant feeling as it unfolds and as the next phase of change comes into their lives.
While we get the young romances, or some semblance of potential for them, we do get something a little more real with an adult romance as well. Tohno ends up spending three years with Risa, though the relationship isn’t too clearly defined as it’s hard to see whether it really becomes a relationship or just a strong friendship that didn’t make it past the final hurdle. While Kanae could only admit her feelings when Tohno was leaving, Risa pursues him a little more in her own shy way and that leads to a relationship that takes time to develop but one where you never feel like Tohno committed to it or was really connected to it. You can really like Risa and that she does do her best to try and get through to him, but there’s a real moment of honest from Tohno that truly defines him and many people, unfortunately. When he talks about how he views his life, where he feels like he’s being watched from outside his life, as if the real Tohno is just checking in from time to time to see his progress and then going on his own way. There’s a true and deep sadness that comes from this that can be haunting as you realize that his laid back personality is far more disturbed than that in a way and his inability to connect makes his life all the harder in a way that’s just simply sad.
In Summary
Following Tohno’s story as he gets involved with different girls and women, you really come across all of them in different ways and hope that one of them is the one that he ends up with and finds the fulfillment that he feels is lacking. It can be one or all of them as each brings something different to the table, but Tohno himself is still a cipher through much of it. The explanation of how he views himself is quite illustrative and something a lot of people can relate to. I definitely enjoyed reading this incarnation of it, having been disconnected from the film for awhile now, and could read it on its own merits. Yukiko Seike makes all the girls easy to connect with through their inner monologue and with the callbacks that happen and the hopes that they all have from their particular perspectives, you hope that Tohno gets it and figure it out, or makes that connection back to someone from the past and comes alive. The story is one that leaves you wanting at the end, but it’s like life in a lot of ways in that there is no true ending but just a series of middles until the finality of it all. And it’s important to live those middles happily and as best as you can.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Vertical
Release Date: June 26th, 2012
MSRP: $18.95`
