Shunji Iwai’s Love Letter is not only a debut that corroborated his talent and re-affirmed the potential he showed with his television drama Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom? (1993), which won him the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award, but also turned to be a success with Japan and far beyond.
The mark of a true classic, however, is the fact that its appeal does not wane with the passing of time. That the appeal of his Iwai’s debut has not waned thirty years after its release is corroborated by the celebratory events within Japan and outside. Now, thanks to Film Movement, the 4k remaster of Love Letter (1995) can be experienced in its full glory in selected theatres around the states.
Shunji Iwai’s narrative starts with Hiroko Watanabe (Miho Nakayama) attending the memorial service of Itsuki Fujii, her deceased fiancé. Shigeru Akiba (Etsushi Toyokawa) and his friends are absent, still plagued by a sliver of guilt over the unfortunate mounting climbing incident and unable to face the others. Itsuki’s father soon gets drunk and, just when Hiroko is about to leave, the Buddhist priest pushes Itsuki’s mother (Han Bunjaku), who developed a sudden headache, into her car, asking her to drive her home.
In the car, however, the mother disrobes the display of grieving sadness, telling Hiroko her husband is merely looking forward to drink his fill and that she faked her headache to escape the memorial party (Narra-note 1). At his parental home, his mother invites her to peruse through his junior high year book. She discovers that the he used to live in Otaru and decides, writing down his former address, to write a letter to him, despite knowing that the house has been demolished. Much to her surprise, she receives a reply from Itsuki Fujii (Miho Nakayama).
Love letter is not simply a tale of a circulation of letters, but a narrative that explores the subjective effect of the (written) signifier as it is circulates between two subjects. All begins with Hiroko’s letter, a letter that is, in essence, addressed to the Other, to Itsuki as a disembodied symbolic existence, to him as mere symbolic name. The fact that she, despite knowing his parental house was destroyed, still decides to post a letter affirms this; she sends the letter because it cannot reach its destination, because it can only be received by the Other, received by the symbolic place carved out by subjects to enshrine the names of their deceased – the place Hiroko rightly calls heaven.
Due to a radical contingency, the letter literally arrives at the name. Itsuki Fujii finds herself the addressee of the letter addressed to male Itsuki Fujii because Hiroko, unknowingly, chose the wrong address. For Hiroko, the arrival of a response arouses a subtle illusion of fate, a willing misrecognition of contingency for pre-destined necessity (Narra-note 1). The circulation of letters opens a space where Hiroko is able to receive her own message in reverse form. The exchange of letters will, with time, allow Hiroko to accept and inscribe her loss, a loss that continues to cling to her and renders her unable to commit herself to a relationship with Shigeru Akiba.
Akiba’s intervention – he writes a letter to Itsuki Fujii to ask him to prove his identity, puts Hiroko’s choice to consider the letter as coming from heaven into jeopardy, endangering her attempt to utilize this exchange to work-through her loss. Her attempt is also complicated by the realisation that the female Itsuki Fujii resembles her a lot; the minimal narrative they wrote together as a couple gets a mendacious aftertaste – Itsuki loving Hiroko via the image of Itsuki; the visual markers of the past create the phallic trap that snatches our desire.
Despite the puncturing of the illusion of fate, the willingness of Itsuki Fujii to share her memories of Itsuki – beautifully brought to life via marriage of fragmentary flashbacks and verbalized shreds of written speech – enables Hiroko to continue her attempt to give her loss a place and work-through the reality of her resemblance to Itsuki’s female namesake.
She asks for Itsuki’s written signifiers to spin more narrative around the signifier of remembrance – i.e. his name, to collect more signifiers around his name to try and defuse the inhibiting impact of her loss. What follows is an exchange of signifiers that might – or might not – open up the possibility for her to finalize her mental cenotaph – the entombment of her loss within a network of narratives – that can crumble by being subjected to the forces of forgetting and the internal need to keep writing one’s own narrative (Psycho-note 1).
What Hiroko is seemingly looking for in Fujii’s narratives is a signifier that can function as a key to lock to tomb, the close off the space of loss. The final signifier to finish the construction of this cenotaph is missing. His sudden death left her, in a certain sense, with an open-ended narrative, a narrative lacking the signifier (e.g. a signifier of departure) that seals its own closure (Psycho-note 2). However, it could very well be that what she is searching is merely a way to unlock what lies silently in wait within her own subject, a way to enunciate the signifier out of herself and finish her cenotaph (Narra-note 3).
Spectators might feel puzzled by the fact that the female Itsuki Fujii refuses to seek help for her cold, despite knowing that her father died by letting a common cold become a harsh pneumonia. Her neglect can, however, be understood as an identificatory act with the father – a symptom that signals the unresolved nature of her own loss and turns herself unable to engage with the other at the level of romance. This symptom is the only indication that she, who otherwise functions well in the societal field, has not yet worked-through her loss completely. This reading is evocatively re-affirmed by what happens to Itsuki while waiting at the hospital: the sudden bursting forth of visual fragments related to her father’s death.
However, Iwai also underlines that Itsuki’s symptom is over-determined – a shocking event after her father’s death that pushed her to identify with the father and his untimely death. We receive visual affirmation of the symptomatic effect of these two events via the evocative image of the dragonfly trapped in ice. She lies, frozen in time within the strange spatial continuity of the library space, in wait for a signifier, for a letter.
Utilizing his aesthetic sensibilities, Shunji Iwai ensures that the spectator finds himself, from the very first image, embraced by a dreamy atmosphere defined by melancholic elegance (General-note 1). He displays a refined attentiveness (e.g. by using close-ups) to the poetic beauty of minimal movement (opening of the eyes, the movements of fingers, …etc.) as well as to evocative dimension of putting Hiroko in relation with the space she inhabits (e.g. wide shot).
Iwai’s choice to paint many of his narrative’s spaces in a blueish tint or cold faded colours does not merely elevate his compositions, but elegantly establishes that the umwelt the spectator perceived is but a reflection of the innenwelt of the main characters. The forlorn melancholy that lingers within the imagery and echoes through the dreamy musical accompaniment by Remedios makes the unverbalized emptiness of Hiroko present and colours the self-imposed romantic solitude of Itsuki (Acting-note 1).
Iwai contrasts this melancholic atmosphere with a few moments of reddish warmth. Given our emphasis on the way the umwelt reflects the innenwelt of the characters, it stands beyond doubt that the sudden blossoming of such warm colours reflects something of those who finds themselves within the frame. In the scene at Akiba’s glassblowing workplace, the warm colours, emanating from the furnaces to lighten up the faces of Hiroko and Akiba, signals both Hiroko’s happiness of receiving the letter from heaven and Akiba’s love for Hiroko (Colour-note 1).
The director interjects his dreamy composition with moments of shaky framing. In Hiroko’s cases, these moments always seem to signal the intrusive proximity of ‘the reality of loss’, a proximity that trembles Hiroko’s mental space and vibrates, consciously or unconsciously, the void within her (Cine-note 1). The shakiness within the opening sequence, in this sense, does not underline the way that Hiroshi’s absence affects those present at the memorial, but the way the proximity of loss, actualised by the symbolic rite as well as perceived ‘reality’ of the subjective effects it sorts, continues to affect Hiroko. In the scene where Akiba and Hiroko discuss the reason why the letters circulate, the shakiness highlights that merely talking about the possibility of him writing those letters from heaven makes his radical absence presence.
In the case of Itsuki, one could argue that the shaky frame signals the proximity of ‘love’, a proximity she seeks to escape from or does not act upon. This kind of shakiness appears for the first time when the postman (Ken Mitsuishi) tries to invite her to the movies. The fact that compositional shakiness lingers after the ‘love’ has left the stage echoes the after-effects of having been confronted with. In the flashback sequences, the moments of shakiness seemingly imply that the distance she kept with respect to her male namesake was not devoid of surges of romantic feelings on her part (Cine-note 2).
Love Letter, Shunji Iwai’s early masterpiece, delivers a moving and quite meditative exploration of the subjective effect of enunciating signifiers and the inability to do so – the acceptance of loss necessitates the spoken signifier. Iwai, moreover, illustrates, with incredible pathos, that the encounter with the written signifier can have transformative effects and break the inhibiting hold of repression on the subject (General-note 2). Love Letter, a film of ethereal beauty, an evocative melancholic account of a missed romantic encounter and the fact that our past gives the contingency of falling in love its radical necessity. Iwai’s film is not one of the greatest romance narratives, but one of the greatest films of becoming able to love again.
Notes
Narra-note 1: Shunji Iwai opens Love Letter with quite a strange revelation, showing the spectator that subjects attending a given social event (e.g. the Buddhistic memorial service (Hōji)) generally act in accordance with the perceived yet silent expectations of the societal Other. Mother and father present themselves to the others as mentally wounded because they feel that, subjected to the Other, they must present themselves as ‘visibly grieving’, showing the subjective impact of the death of their son to the Other to affirm.
This introductory sequence is important as it introduces the centrality of the Other, the symbolic field of signifiers, which forms the prerequisite for Hiroko and Itsuki being able to overcome their inhibition with respect to love.
Narra-note 2: We can also read the way Hiroko approaches the arrival of the letter as a Pascalian wager. The arrival of the letter confronts her with two possibilities: a bad joke or a letter from heaven. She chooses in accordance with what, subjectively speaking, appears more profitable – there is more gain to be made by accepting that the letter comes from heaven.
Narra-note 3: What Hiroko writes in her initial letter is the signifier that she cannot yet enunciate. In this respect, the letter forms a vain attempt to finalize the cenotaph, an attempt that fails because Itsuki, as Other, remains radically absent – his absence is not present. Shunji Iwai delivers, in this sense, a reaffirmation of Freud’s statement that it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie (Freud, 1914, p. 108).
Psycho-note 1: The mental cenotaph forms a complement to the tombstone and often finds its support in this material and physical inscription of the name and loss.
Psycho-note 2: This way of approaching loss shows that absence is not only external/material – a body turned to dust, but also internal/subjective – the libidinal investment in the other and the relational narrative loses its speaking support.
Hiroko does not only utilize Itsuki’s narratives to give a place to the analytic fact that the past colours the people we fall in love with, but also to accept that Itsuki’s narrative is not her own, that the truth of her romantic relationship with Itsuki lies beyond the doppelgänger effect, beyond the visual phallic trap that links desire to its (false) object.
General-note 1: We must also celebrate cinematographer Noboru Shinada for allowing Shunji Iwai to deliver such evocative atmosphere.
Acting-note 1: Miho Nakayama, by delivering a nuanced performance as Hiroko and as Itsuki, allows Iwai’s narrative to hit all its emotional notes with ease.
Colour-note 1: We ask the spectator to pay close attention to the way Shunji Iwai utilizes shadows within his composition. By letting shadows spread over the character’s faces, he alludes to the presence of a subjective conflict – Hiroko’s inability to fully commit herself romantically to Akiba.
Cine-note 1: The spectator will notice that Iwai surprises him by seemingly not following his own rule. In one sequence, when Akiba offers Hiroko proof that Itsuki Fujii, the addressee of her letters, is a woman, there is a notable absence of shakiness. In our view, this absence echoes Hiroko’s attempt to protect herself against the truth offered by Akiba; her vain attempt at protecting her belief in the name that writes back from heaven.
There are also sequences where, quite unexpectedly, Iwai reaches for shakiness. These moments demand interpretation from the spectator – how is (the proximity of) loss present within moment? How is loss made palpable, palpable enough to vibrate the subjective position of Hiroko?
Cine-note 2: In some cases, the proximity of ‘love’ signals itself after the flashback-sequence has ended – the fleeting effect of remembering the proximity of ‘love’.
In framing Itsuki’s perspective, there is notable exception where shakiness does not respond to the proximity of ‘love’. Yet, one could argue that this shakiness, beyond merely amplifying the dramatic nature of the sudden narrative turn – the way Itsuki’s collapse affects her widowed mother (…), also echoes the brutal finality of her symptomatic behaviour – of her continuous attempt to avoid ‘love’ and the confrontation with the father as loss.
General-note 2: That Marcel Proust’s In Search For Lost Time is featured within the narrative should not surprise anyone as Iwai structures Itsuki’s narrative around the Proustian ‘involuntary memory’, the recollections bubbling up from the unconscious pregnant with the essence or the repressed truth of the past.