A medley of rainy and sunny stories and songs, inspired by the strange weather of Makoto Shinkai’s “Weathering With You.”
🌧️☀️🌧️
In 2020 I went and saw the seriously gorgeous film “Weathering With You” and sort of figured I wouldn’t catch it in theaters again. And then Ragtag Cinema brought the movie back to Columbia this month for a showing presented by Science on Screen, featuring a lecture by Dr. Zack Leasor about Missouri’s fickle hydroclimate. So I got to rewatch the movie, this time with intensified attention towards the wildness of its weather. As the rain beat down on 16-year-old Hodaka I sunk into my hoodie. And when the sun broke out on screen I could almost feel it on my face.
I’m writing this on a Thursday in March, a flat blue afternoon with the kind of sunshine the residents of “Weathering With You”’s Tokyo would have prayed for. The city is under a months-long spell of rain when Hodaka arrives, the showers broken up every so often by Hina the Sunshine Girl. Hina performs her miracles of sunshine at a great cost, which she hides to make everyone happy, including Hodaka — she doesn’t realize Hodaka loves her more than any blue sky; that he would gladly weather storm after storm in her company.
🌧️🌧️🌧️
Sheltering with someone special is a cozy thrill familiar to the narrator of “10:04,” a novel by Ben Lerner set in Brooklyn. The story is bookended by hurricanes, beginning with Irene and ending with Sandy. Ahead of both, the narrator takes shelter with his best friend Alex, a woman he knows and loves deeply. These nights are precious. He feels time become emancipated from institutions like on childhood snow days. He feels a new intimacy form around himself and Alex, then fade again when the storms spare Brooklyn — “Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future… they’d faded from the photograph.”
“10:04” is prismatic and poignant, like an excellent composition of music. Reading Ben Lerner brings to my mind the singer-songwriter and producer James Blake, another master of storytelling who splices and refracts the voice to create something completely original. I love James Blake always, but especially on cloudy days. His 2023 album “Playing Robots into Heaven” builds like a storm and beats down like hard rain. He sings about those frantic, internal shifts in weather that wear the heart out (“So tell me, what is it all for? / I’m feeling so low, high, low, high, low, high” — from “Tell Me”). Still, he believes in a love that can survive such storms: “True love lets you break / And stays around” (“Asking to Break”).
☀️☀️☀️
Before Ben Lerner wrote “10:04” he gave us “Leaving the Atocha Station,” a novel that reads like summer or a dream (slow and syrupy, then gone in a flash). While “10:04” begins with a protagonist seeking shelter, “Leaving the Atocha Station” opens with a man exposed to the elements, sipping espresso and smoking on the roof. This man — Adam Gordon, our main character — is a young American dirtbag and poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid who spends most of his time sweating (at clubs, art galleries, protests), slacking off (on a daring and complex historical project, allegedly), and spiraling (about language, about love). After a while, the sunny plotlessness of his life abroad begins to cast shadows over the mind: “I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Or was it cloudy?”
I started writing to you on a sunny day in March and I’m finishing on a rainy one. It’s late morning but you wouldn’t know it; outside it looks and sounds like a car wash. Sometimes I like the music to match but today I might put on something lighter, like Hiatus Kaiyote’s summer 2024 album “Love Heart Cheat Code.” Lead singer Nai Palm is the highlight of any Hiatus Kaiyote song. Her voice is wild and warm with the energy and agility of an animal playing in the sun. If James Blake is begging of the sky “So tell me / What is it all for?” Nai Palm is bursting with brighter questions: “Didn’t you notice? / Don’t you know love? / Don’t you know everything is beautiful?” (“Everything is Beautiful”).
To be clear: Sad songs aren’t just for rainy days and happy songs aren’t just for sunny days. Sad days are good days to sing everything is beautiful and on happy days it’s ok to still wonder what is it all for? If there’s one thing I learned from “Weathering With You,” it’s that happiness doesn’t always look or feel how we expect it to. Happiness sneaks up on Hodaka, in fact, on a disastrous night that takes nearly everything from him, including his safety and livelihood. But it is in this darkness — taking shelter in a hotel room with Hina and her little brother, the three of them suddenly fugitives — that Hodaka finally understands what it is all for; that joy and love are worth seeking no matter the weather:
“Dear God, if you really exist, I beg you. This is more than enough. We don’t need anything more than this. We’ll manage somehow. So please, don’t give us anything more and don’t take anything more from us. Dear God, please, I beg you. Together. Forever. Let us be like this” (“Weathering With You”).
“If you sit still / Tilt your head right / Click your heels three times / You may find atonal wonder” (Hiatus Kaiyote, “Dimitri”).
🌧️☀️🌧️
