Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013) is, among other things, the story of tragic lovers Jiro Horikoshi and Nahoko Satomi. They first meet on a train the day of the Great Kantō earthquake when a sudden gust of wind blows Jiro’s hat toward Nahoko—who nearly falls from the train trying to catch it. Having caught the hat—having been caught, herself, by Jiro and her caretaker—Nahoko quotes Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin, saying, “Le vent se lève!” to which Jiro rejoins, “Il faut tenter de vivre!” completing the first line of Le Cimetière marin’s final stanza: “The wind is rising! We must try to live!” This is the second instance of the line in The Wind Rises; it also appears during the film’s title sequence, where it functions as an epigraph—a means of access which, like an open door, directs the viewer to consider at the outset what relationship these two exclamations, conjoined as a single line of poetry, might have to one another.

There is no conjunction in the line—no point at which any definite, positive relationship between the rising wind and an attempt “to live” ever materializes. Instead, Valéry simply arranges the two discrete sentences within the arena of a line. As they inhabit one space, they affect each other the way that wind might affect a human body: inspiring—imparting—a certain feeling of liveliness. Throughout The Wind Rises, the wind moves unsubordinated to the whims and wills of human characters—the wind moves with the autonomy of a complete sentence, sharing borders with other such sentences.

And the film’s human characters, like the second sentence in Valéry’s poetic line, are profoundly affected by the first line even though the wind cannot pass into or through them any more than one sentence can pass through its end mark into the next sentence. Miyazaki splits the line between Nahoko and Jiro and thereby reconfigures it as a call and response, which further emphasizes the line’s dual nature as a cohesive whole comprised of discrete parts—the grammar embodied, now a symmetry carried across two voices. Arguably, Miyazaki’s attention to (and treatment of) this line contains in miniature what the film writes large: that human drama and the natural world are two sentences inhabiting a single line.

The Great Kantō earthquake strikes six miles beneath the floor of Sagami Bay, not far from Tokyo, just as Jiro and Nahoko arrive. Miyazaki declines to animate or even to suggest the hundred thousand casualties that will occur, but does depict the wind and fire that will claim most of these lives. Tall columns of smoke rise from the collapsing buildings. In other scenes, smoldering leaves of paper fly like clouds (or souls on their way to heaven) through the air and thereby track the invisible wind. In Biogea, Michel Serres briefly undertakes to answer the question of who, in such violent intersections of human life and nature, should stand accused, writing:

After the Tsunami of Lisbon, in the XVIIIth century, Voltaire and the Enlightenment reached a verdict and accused God whose creative act permitted these horrors. […] The Loma Prieta quake which I suffered from but which enlightened me, caused some material damage and fifty-seven victims, whereas two hundred and fifty thousand Haitians died in Port-au-Prince, recently, for less intensity on the Richter scale. Human, collective, political, economic, social conditions—poverty for example—prevail, and by far, over the purely physical cause. Voltaire and the Enlightenment were mistaken: only society can be accused.¹

The relationship existing between the natural world and human life is, again, not a coalescence in which nature becomes an arm of the human experience (nor is the human willingly subject to inert matter) so that the two can become one, but, rather, a cohabitation in which two vital spheres affect each other—sometimes gently, as in the case of the wind that carries Jiro’s hat to Nahoko; and sometimes violently, as in the moment when that same wind carries enormous fires across Tokyo.

Just as Miyazaki declines to animate any of the hundred thousand casualties caused by the Great Kantō earthquake, he, similarly, turns away from the actual wartime application of Jiro’s planes: the word kamikaze, now the subject of some infamy in the West, once referred not to suicide attacks but to the Kamikaze of Genko, a gale that, in 1281, destroyed an invading Mongol fleet before they could make landfall on the Japanese coast. The word combines kami—the divine spirits who, according to Shinto tradition, brought the world into being through the force of their interrelationships—with kaze, the Japanese word for wind. Of course, the word kamikaze invokes a different image in the twenty-first century: we see the Second World War and, like Jiro in The Wind Rises, imagine black clouds with undersides lit orange by fire—frenzied winds lifting embers and debris skyward—the mangled wreckage of Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters (among other planes) smoldering where the pilot was shot down or became the divine wind himself via suicide attack. The word has changed: the Kami have not sent a wind to save Japan; the Japanese have built airplanes that cut the air with powered engines and have, themselves, become the wind to which kamikaze refers.

What Miyazaki declines to animate is, therefore, of comparable importance to that which he animates: the white space between stanzas, a line itself, bears the weight of elision—a joining, an omission—here, an omission that joins the human will and the natural world in unspoken/redacted lines of devastating violence. Like the graves in Valéry’s graveyard by the sea, Miyazaki’s omissions entomb bodies—a historical multitude of bodies—in the quiet of their unmention. The effect of these stark omissions is a film that either cannot or will not reckon beauty with carnage; Miyazaki does not animate a single dead body over the course of a film that portrays the Second World War, the Great Kantō earthquake, and a fatal case of tuberculosis. Visible death is, in other words, the unspoken line between visible stanzas—the quietus disincluded from a world in which all matter (and thought) breathes—as if visible death were the one thing irreconcilable to or cast out from this filmic world. The fabric of the film is, in this sense, life stitched together by unseen deaths, and that which is visible is always that which is living.

During the Karuizawa scenes, the entire frame bristles, vibrant with the energy of a space that is more than inhabited—a space, self-inhabiting, wherein a sea of grass is no less living than the sea of human faces that churns, roiled, in the wake of the Great Kantō earthquake [20:52]. The living grass is a body comprised of bodies just as the crowd is a body comprised of bodies—particular, active, a realized subject—inattentive to the film’s overarching narrative, and yet participating in the same filmic reality as Jiro and Nahoko, as much the fabric of it as they are, as much the embellishment of it as they are. Arguably, the self-habitation of space in The Wind Rises serves as a reconfiguration of the usual filmic hierarchy, wherein background elements are rendered subordinate to the characters and props that more overtly drive the narrative—driving it pointedly toward an end, as if the uncountable host of living organisms in a meadow scene could really be like the parts of an engine: instrumentalized, mere territories of the will.

That said, these elements exist in the same filmic reality as the narrative and, as such, can provide insights into the narrative just as easily as narrative items (the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter that Jiro designs, for example) can explain changes to the “background” world (the fiery horizon and sky blacked out with smoke [1:59:22])—just as easily, again, as the two sentences of Valéry’s poetic line permeate one another without ever breaking the border of their punctuation. In this way, the clouds that populate Karuizawa’s skies join with Miyazaki’s trees and grass, all engaged in the revelatory act of moving rightward. Behind the characters, underneath their dialogue, above their actions, the wind moves always, shot by shot, from left to right—a graphic choice that confirms what we might have already suspected: the wind that carries Nahoko’s parasol to Jiro also carries rainclouds on its back.

“Who has seen the wind?” Jiro asks in a voice-over [1:18:37], quoting Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Who Has Seen the Wind?” Proceeding through the first stanza, he continues: “Neither I nor you: / But when the leaves hang trembling, / The wind is passing through.” Meanwhile, on screen, Jiro begins to fold a paper airplane—the first of several—which will loop and spiral its way from his balcony to Nahoko’s and become the basis of their courtship in Karuizawa. The whimsically intractable paths of Jiro’s paper airplanes, like trembling leaves, reveal the movements of the wind but also, perhaps more importantly, provide a new means of accessing the epigraph: “The wind is rising! We must try to live!” If the natural world presents human beings with a set of intractable circumstances, an attempt to live responds to those circumstances. Deborah Breen, distilling the film’s guiding theme, puts it this way: “Circumstances, suggests Miyazaki, are not of our making, yet we must still rise to the challenge of how to live.”²

It might also be said, however, that what Gossin and Miyazaki consider “complexity” and a force of life could, in fact, be an irony that functions much more like a crashing wave—a philosophical statement that moves by falling over—by taking its own feet out from under it. Jiro loves Naoko yet relegates her health to a secondary concern, Jiro is an ostensible pacifist yet readily accepts military funding to design war planes, and so on—the film wrestles with itself, unresolvable, a system of ideals undercut by actions. We might say that the film is “animated” by a vitality that overwhelms its mechanical parts and does not seek to kill the messy contradictions therein, and neither does it insist that all of the film’s ethical questions find answers; or, alternatively, we might say that the film is like the windswept tops of graves (white sepulchres, full of dead men’s bones³) and that its absolute philosophy of animating life unduly or morbidly inters the deaths latent within this world.

Of course, The Wind Rises complicates this ethical imperative by depicting a variety of human responses to the natural world: Jiro’s airplane designs weaponize the realities of air pressure, the Japanese military instrumentalizes naturally occurring elements to build their war planes, and the environmental devastation (which is also human catastrophe) that stems from these responses disturbs the otherwise-lighthearted visual track with intense, violent imagery. Jiro also folds paper airplanes to amuse Nahoko, revels in the beauty of mackerel bones, and allows the wind to bear up his romantic and artistic loves. This complexity, perhaps inherent to a film about the creation of Imperial Japan’s most infamous fighter plane, may stem from what Pamela Gossin calls Miyazaki’s disinterest in making “‘message’ films, eco-friendly or otherwise.”⁴ According to Miyazaki, a “message” film is like “a big, fat dried-up log, propped upright.”⁵ And he is not interested in dead logs; but, rather, in living trees—in films that arise organically—in films characterized by mysterious root systems and branches that sprawl autonomously in search of sunlight.

Miyazaki’s philosophy of animation foregrounds and reiterates the life that exists, already, in bodies of (so-called) inert matter. The sense of animation in The Wind Rises, which emphasizes the wave-like rippling of grasses—the winding paths of smoke—the living mise-en-scène—envelopes all matter in the sensation of breathing. In their essay, “Introducing New Materialisms,” co-authors Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write that “Materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.”⁶ The Wind Rises, with its thoroughly living filmic world, combines, as Pamela Gossin writes, an “aesthetic of nature” with an “ethic of nature and human nature” in affirmation of Valéry’s poetic line. The human drama lives alongside the mise-en-scène, the human alongside living matter, the living alongside the dead, and, in each case, they twain form the line.⁷