君の名は

I revisited an old suggestion today, which was to photocopy some pages form the Japanese book I am using as a study tool. I am reading 君の名は (‘Your Name’ in English), which is actually has a central theme of the Red Thread, and connection not only across distance, but time. So it seems quite fitting in terms of theme and context. I scanned the pages, and then darkened the areas that I have highlighted (indicating I don’t know that word in Japanese.) This represents ‘gaps’ as well as the uncertainty of when Shinya and I can meet in real life again. The annotations where I have written the word’s meaning in English are also important, as I want viewers to read these and perhaps draw some kind of meaning from the combination of words that appear (of course, this would be pure speculation on the viewer’s part, but I would like them to engage in coming to their own conclusion about what the work means.) 

I also like the way that english fills the blank ‘gaps’ of the Japanese text. This is very representative of how Shinya and I usually speak. We either speak all in Japanese, or we use Japanese grammar with the occasional English vocabulary thrown in.

I also had a thought about the order of the images. I would like the dates of the SMS messages to be chronological, and I would also like the page numbers of the book scans to be in ascending order. But I also thought that as the book continued, perhaps the images of Shinya’s face become more and more pixellated? Perhaps to show how my memory of him gets fuzzy around the edges, or some such notion.