真夏の夜の夢
Oh, hi there movie I totally forgot about for over 10 years!
No seriously, it was 11 years ago when I wrote about the trailer for this movie and despite having bought it the moment the DVD was released (in fact I remember pre-ordering it) and having watched it, I totally forgot to write about it.
Maybe it was because the story was very difficult to understand given the strange dialect the characters were using, especially the Spirits/Fairies/Gods, or maybe it was because of the ending, which again, like MY SUMMER OF LOVE, it now doesn’t seem nearly as bad as I think I remember it! Nay, it wasn’t bad at all, it just didn’t have the ending we all wanted!
But speaking of that ending, it plays well into the subject of the movie and what one is willing to do or not do for love! The story too is very different from what I remember, which I guess is because now I understand it better so let’s start from the laydown of that!
Gays ahoy, thanks to Majiru’s Love portion!
We begin with in the past of our main character Yuriko, who runs into the young Spirit of the island she used to live in back then named Majiru – our other girl. I call it young but when she met young Yuriko she said she was over 200 years old. People aren’t supposed to or can’t see Spirits so Majiru was surprised that Yuriko could see her! They make a promise then for Yuriko to not forget Majiru and Majiru promises to make candy rain for Yuriko with three magic words, something she couldn’t do then as she was still inexperienced I guess.
Skip to the present and Yuriko is all grown up and is having adult problems which she is running away from by going back to the Island from Tokyo, the place she had been living in all these years!
When she gets there, upon saying the magic word three times, it rains candy, like Majiru promised all those years ago which prompts Yuriko to remember her and thus makes her visible to Yuriko once more.
And thus begins the shenanigans of the two as they cause some havoc on the Island and have some fun together which has side effects on either of the two!
But there is a problem before we proceed! This problem is that all the things that happened on the Island in the present, were all not real! It was all an illusion created by Majiru! The Island was probably never habited again since Yuriko left it when she was like, 7 years old or something. The house she used to live in is all jungle. All the people we saw since she arrived were all not there!
So you see the problem we have here!
More complicated is the thought that all that was within a dream and that Yuriko was asleep all this time since she arrived, which isn’t days like the illusions would have us believe, morel like hours really, as the lover Yuriko was running from arrived to the Island as soon as she woke up!
But even with that short of a time, what she and Majiru experienced within the dream (I guess this is where the title comes into play) was real because we see a different Yuriko from the one that arrived at the Island!
And so we enter the part where I gush over a certain aspect of movies that I love – Characters changing one another from when we meet them to when the movie ends!
Majiru is the more complex and interesting one, which I guess makes sense seeing as she is a God! We see within the dream that her elders disappeared because people forgot about them, probably from having left the Island and since there were other Spirits, some even younger than Majiru, yet we did not see them within the dream, can only mean that they too disappeared and thus meaning that Majiru too was not safe from disappearing!
So, why didn’t she?
Despite the fact that she says Yuriko forgot about her, which she might have a little bit, I mean, she was just a little thing then and growing up she might have thought it all childish fantasies, but I think and believe that deep down she did not forget which is why she ran to the Island when seeking solace from the world!
That feeling deep down I believe is what kept Majiru around and when we see it within the dream where Majiru loses some of her power where she couldn’t even walk on her own, it was her telling us the state of her all this time!
Within the dream, when Majiru finally manifested her own feelings, not the ones she reflected from Yuriko, and her tears mixed with a sleeping Yuriko’s tears, almost like a visual representation of their hearts becoming one, that was Majiru being saved as she got her power back.
Like the Captain of the boat said, it was as if Yuriko was in part called towards the Island by Majiru and seeing as Yuriko too was at a crucial place in her life, it was almost like their hearts were calling out to each other for help. And they did!
In Yuriko’s case, the Yuriko that came back to the Island was a door mat of a girl, who let people walk all over her but when she got to the Island, she learned to be self confident and independent, something that while we see in the dream manifesting, we really get to see the difference after she wakes up and she sees the Guy that she was running from go to hug her and she just emotionally side-steps him! The Yuriko that arrived at the Island, like we saw within the dream, would have let him sweet talk her into getting back together and she would have agreed without a thought but that was a different person.
A point to strengthen the belief that Yuriko did not forget about Majiru before is that even as Majiru uses her power to make Yuriko forget about her, while she does on the surface, the memories come back fast, showing that she would never forget about Majiru, not even with the power of the Gods at work!
Speaking of that, why did Majiru want Yuriko to forget about her when her whole meaning of existence is about belief and someone believing in her? Well, it is because she knew that Yuriko was only human whereas Majiru was not. But she probably did not think of the consequences until Yuriko brought the subject up when she asked what Majiru would do when Yuriko grows old and dies.
And so in a sense Majiru chose for Yuriko to go and live a normal human life over her own existence but what hits the most is the fact that she was not thinking of that and neither was Yuriko. Yuriko was happy to stay with Majiru and was angry when Majiru told her to go back to Tokyo. They loved each other but the life of a God was not meant for humans. For them years pass like seconds but to humans that would be a very boring life and we see glimpses of it with the short time they two live together alone on the Island within the dream after everyone leaves.
Speaking of that, I did not notice it the first time but I loved the fantastical touches of the moon moving alongside them as they did. It was a nice touch!
Anyway, love is really complicated, isn’t it! Even as Majiru sacrificed her life to let Yuriko go it was actually a GOOD END now that I think about it. Even as she erased her memories, Yuriko never forgot about Majiru which means that despite living apart, Majiru will still live on because Yuriko will never forget her and it seems they are doing some kind of long distance relationship thing when we see towards the end as Majiru grants another of Yuriko’s wishes of eating delicious snow, which Majiru makes in Tokyo for her!
I am willing to bet that were Yuriko to have children in the future, she most certainly will tell them about Majiru and within the legend Majiru will live on. Who knows, the Island might be inhabited again down the years!
Anyway, yeah…This might not be enticing to most of you but I told you already, to me it’s more about the details between the pages not the course on the silver platter!
Any who, that is all…
Ja
百合 Goggles 