He struggles with the idea of avoiding conflict. But in truth, there’s nothing very interesting there. The film was mainly experienced from her POV for the first half so we missed a lot of this stuff. It tells the story of Taki in Mitsuha’s body trying to pass as her. The first chapter is closer to what I expected this book to be.

It doesn’t help that it isn’t so much narrative as stream of consciousness thoughts. All these stories basically say the same thing: Mitsuha’s acting weird what should we do about it and how should we explain it? While it interesting to learn more of these people’s backgrounds and characters, I don’t feel particularly thrilled by anything I’ve learned. We get to hear from most of Mitsuha’s family (her sister and father) as well as her friend Teshi. Which means that there is actually very little left for them to do with the concept beyond expand on the secondary characters. All those interesting avenues to explore were alternate routes that the film could have taken. And it didn’t last long enough to my mind.īut here lies the mistake in my interest: this book by necessity follows movie continuity. The bodyswapping story seemed ripe for all sorts of incidents surrounding their insertion into unknown yet preexisting social The film had a lot of room for expansion I thought, particularly in the early days. I enjoyed the film and was curious to see what parts they expanded on. This novel is a collection of side stories connected to the events of Your Name and as such doesn’t really tell a coherent story of its own. I am curious about light novels (a pretty uniquely Japanese thing which we’d probably classify as young adult novels) so I thought I’d give this a go.

Your name another side earthbound