“I hope I die before I get old.”
– The Who, ‘My Generation’

A Silent Voice begins with an ending, as Shoya Ishida settles his affairs and prepares to end his own life. Saturated in a cold, otherworldly light, he runs through a list of final preparations: give notice at his part-time job, sell off his belongings, close his bank account, repay his familial debts. Trembling, uncertain piano keys offer a murmur of anticipation like slipping off into a dream; bathed in soft focus, he floats like a ghost towards his terminal destination. It is a somber moment, but also an oddly liberating one. After this moment, he will no longer struggle, no longer suffer, no longer labor under the weight of guilt and self-hatred and despair. Stepping up to the edge of the bridge, he prepares to reenact a familiar ritual of his childhood, leaping out into space in a final prayer of escape. 

Then, down on the riverside, he spies a miracle. Entrenched at the river’s edge, three friends are setting off fireworks, waving sparklers while tiny rockets challenge the sky. Brave glimmers of light rising, exploding, receding into darkness; a pattern to which Shoya can no doubt relate. It is tempting to see our lives as wobbling ascents to a single peak, and from that peak to believe all joy is behind us; that whatever spark lifted us into the stratosphere has been fully expended, and that there is nothing left but to fade into the dark. But in that moment, Shoya does not see himself in the fireworks. He instead sides with their onlookers, who have found this moment of community in spite of all the world’s disappointments. He decides to live another day.

It might seem odd that a director who first came to prominence through gentle stories like K-On! and Tamako Market would adapt a story about bullying, depression, and attempted suicide. But in truth, Naoko Yamada’s work has always been tempered by an understanding of impermanence, an acceptance that the fireworks of youth always fade into the sunset. Her productions strike deeply in their yearning for a lost simplicity, tempered by an understanding of life’s inevitable complications. And A Silent Voice fits neatly within her philosophy of embracing joy wherever it can be found, while also holding tight to sensitivity and kindness in the face of sorrow – a philosophy she would continue to elaborate through the magnificent Heike Story. 

Beyond Yamada’s fascination with the ephemeral moments that make up a life in retrospect, her work has always prioritized the ways we communicate without words, how our body language and quiet, unconsidered expressions tell a fuller story than our spoken interpretation of intent. Yamada prioritizes the earnest space between language, the sidelong glances and sighs that cut to our true feelings; a difficult-to-realize yet perfectly appropriate fascination for animation, where every flourish of movement must be conceived and executed with perfect intentionality. From character acting to blocking and recreations of a camera’s inconstant focus, Yamada finds truth in the seemingly empty spaces of personal interaction, making her an ideal scribe of Shoya and his classmate’s private world.

To explain how he arrived at that bridge, we turn back the clock a number of years, as Shoya rambles wild and free to the chords of The Who’s “My Generation.” For as much of an international rights hassle this licensing undoubtedly represented, its effect seems worth the effort; racing and rampaging to a youth anthem from ‘65, the universality of the experience is made undeniable. Every generation experiences its own carefree halcyon days, the giddy high of the firework’s ascent, when you’re too young to fear you’ve strayed from life’s proper trajectory. Before you’ve experienced regret, the concept is as alien as the fatigue in your parents’ eyes; untethered from responsibility and loss, death can indeed seem preferable to touching the ground. Of course, not all of us get to enjoy such idyllic, unconditional youth.

Advancing on Shoya’s carefree world, his new classmate Shoko Nishimiya arrives like an acknowledgment of mortality, puncturing his bubble of effortless adolescence through the necessity of accommodating her disability. Shoko is legally deaf, and thus often forced to look to others for guidance, forever attempting to match the standard of her peers. To Shoya, who sets his own standards of behavior and leads his group of friends with confidence, Shoko is near to an alien creature. He feels invulnerable, and any sense of invulnerability can easily migrate into cruelty; if you feel your ease of navigation in life is the natural state of being, it is a short step to believing those who lack such ease are deficient in some fundamental way.

“You need to be smarter about things, or people will start to hate you,” he at one point offers, gesturing towards a level of communal social understanding he sees as common sense, but which is impossibly beyond Shoko’s reach. Denied the easy camaraderie of companionship preceding self-consciousness, Shoko cannot help but recognize herself as an imposition, and thus seeks a level of earnest, intimate friendship that her middle school peers neither desire nor understand. Shoko’s peers are friends of convenience, egging each other on through easy diversions, whereas Shoko herself has no choice but to seek genuine mutual vulnerability. When her classmates catch a trace of that vulnerability, they are initially curious; but fear of isolation ultimately trumps that call to genuine connection, and Shoya and his friends retreat to the cozy validation of bullying the outsider.

The callousness of youth is presented without ornamentation or judgment, the cruelty of Shoya and his classmates articulated with unflinching sincerity. Those who cannot parse the interiority of others see only their own desires reflected or denied in their behavior, and though Shoya leads the brigade, both his classmates and even their teacher reflect the casual cruelty with which we treat those who we cannot see as like ourselves. Shoya is in truth not exceptionally malicious; his classmate Nao is far more invested in the philosophy of self-sufficiency that is the font of most human cruelty, while his teacher has had far more time than his students to grow into empathy and moral courage. But it is Shoya who sticks out, and thus Shoya who is struck down, the fragility of his prior bonds proven through how quickly he becomes his classmates’ newest target. 

“I tried to stop him, but he…” quail his one-time accomplices, initiating his own era of unpersonhood. As Shoya grapples with the guilt of his unconsidered cruelty, and the stress his actions have introduced to his mother’s life, he is isolated and antagonized at school, a target of ridicule whose moral deficiencies make him all the more satisfying to torment. Only Shoko, who he considered so frail and unfortunate, possesses the strength to defend him. Only Shoko was brave enough to seek friendship from a position of vulnerability, knowing the consequences it might invoke. There is no teacher like weakness or vulnerability; those who flee from such experiences often fail to grow into fully empathetic people, while those who embrace them can become the best of us.

Shoya cannot find such solace in his experience; hated by both his peers and himself, all he knows is that the glow is gone. The firework has ascended, peaked, and is trailing towards the earth. There is no future for him anymore; having caused such misery and stumbled so far from grace, there are only debts to be paid before he turns out the lights. There are experiences so intolerable that they carry with them an understanding it will all be downhill from here; in the wake of such experiences, it is nearly impossible to find any value in your continuing existence. The complexity and variability of life flattens to a dull, consistent gray, affixed with a certainty that this is all there ever will be. Sometimes we take a fall and there is no ground to break it.

A Silent Voice articulates Shoya’s self-hatred and suicidal ideation with claustrophobic acuity. The film’s loose approach to the passage of time, wherein the past often crops up at random points in Shoya’s ongoing experience, is entirely true to the way we experience life in the wake of intolerable, world-shaking experiences. Our crimes and regrets are always right there beside us, sitting on our shoulder, refusing to let us break free and experience new moments with any sort of presence or authenticity. That’s the tragic contradiction of “moving on” and “forgiving ourselves” – our feelings of guilt, grief, or general loss have a tendency to hold court in our mind indefinitely, constantly drawing our eyes away from the present or the future, and thereby preventing us from appreciating the inherent cleansing influence of new experience.

Middle school dwindles in the rear view, but high school presents no alterations or opportunities. “I realize that your sins always come back to bite you,” admits Shoya, “and that I have to bear that cross and the punishment that comes with it.” Only the necessity of bearing his cross gives Shoya the strength to move forward, if for a time. He must pay back the money his mother spent on Shoko’s hearing aids, and he must apologize to Shoko in her own words. A half-torn calendar marks down the days to his release, when debts are paid and he can finally escape. But then, that moment on the bridge – a moment of unexpected, incidental beauty, offered to him in spite of his crimes. He has done nothing to deserve it, but there it is. He tapes his calendar back together. He decides to stay alive.

In that moment, Shoya stretches towards an understanding he has yet to fully grasp: the true scale of a life story, in all of its inevitable failures and unexpected gifts. As it turns out, life lasts a pretty long time, and in spite of depression’s myopia, the only true certainty we can rely on is that everything inevitably changes. If you give up and step off the path, you might escape your immediate pain, but you’ll also miss out on all the endless unknown opportunities coming down the line, all the futures you might experience, and all the time you need to make amends. As long as you keep walking and marking off days, there is always time to heal, to change, to forgive.

In Yamada’s careful hands, the great equalizer of time’s passage is realized with assurance and beauty. Her collected works stand as a testament to the ephemerality of summer breezes and winter storms, to the passing beauty of new flowers and late sunsets. Shoya’s bike ride to and from school, always captured from the same profile perspective, offers a persistent testament to life’s endless procession of days, each offering a chance to change, make good, or perhaps simply experience something like those fireworks on the riverbank. As his hastily mended calendar attests, life goes on even in the wake of the intolerable; it might not feel like we’re still on the rocket’s ascent, still accelerating towards some grand and perfect future, but days nonetheless continue to pass.

And given enough time, we might even begin to see some good in our existence, worthless and unfortunate as we are. Shoya’s journey of reassessing his value begins the very morning after his attempted suicide, when his mother threatens “if you don’t promise not to kill yourself, I’ll burn this money up!” Trapped in the haze of depression and self-hatred, it is impossible to see all of the major or minor ways we are essential to those around us. Our lives are not entirely our own, and if we keep walking forward, there’s no telling what new threads of connection and necessity might bind us to the world. So it goes for Shoya, who soon finds himself an essential “best friend” to the awkward Nagatsuka, and a confidant to Shoko’s sister Yuzuru.

Shoya’s journey is mirrored by Shoko, still trying her best to maintain a smile, still failing to connect with the world around her. Just as Shoya believes he is destined to conjure misfortune, so Shoko believes that “nothing good can come from being with me.” Through their twin journeys of self-hatred and forgiveness, and the bridge where they gather to throw bread to the carp below, we see how little it can take to find some meaning in this life, and how easily we can become essential to each other. Each pushes the other forward, their acts of repentance morphing into sources of strength and security, tempered by their persistent unwillingness to acknowledge their own value. Shoko might believe she is worthless, but it is her kindness and determination that keep Shoya striving. Shoya might believe he is condemned, but Shoko’s emergent self-expression is all drawn from his example. In the depths of self-hatred, it is impossible to see what we mean to each other, yet we must still journey on.

Of course, it is not quite so easy as simply waiting out depression. Learning to love ourselves and look towards the future with hope is a process that often leads in winding, self-defeating circles, as testified by A Silent Voice’s harrowing final act. It takes only one overly-optimistic amusement park outing with alleged friends to remind both our protagonists of their alleged worthlessness, and the fundamental unhappiness of their day to day existence. And so Shoya burns his bridges yet again, in a vocal reprise of his suicidal era, while Shoko begins to make plans for ending her own life. If we can falter and descend even from the high peak of the rocket in flight, what surprise is it that we might stumble on the painful road back to hope? It is to the story’s credit that recovery is not envisioned as a straight path towards a hopeful future; recovery is an active practice, and most of us will trip along the way.

Ultimately, what draws Shoya out of his second descent is a reminder of his unexpected, undesired importance: Yuzuru crying by the river, silently mourning her grandmother’s passing. When asked what’s wrong, she states “it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” to which he replies “It does, or so I’d like to think.” It’s an audacious, crucial step forward: Shoya at last believing he can be important to someone else. When we believe we are monsters, we also tend to believe we have no right to be important to others, and shy away whenever possible. But the world is full of lonely and unhappy people, and we should never deny the possibility that we might be important to someone out there who needs a friend. We must be brave in making connections, brave in asserting our ability to help and be meaningful to others. Ultimately, it is through embracing that bravery that Shoya reaches out to Shoko one final time, and rescues them both.

In the context of such vividly realized personal drama, Oima and Yamada’s call to forgive yourself and enjoy the time you have, an acknowledgment of ephemerality that permeates both their works, rings all the more clearly. Oima is a scholar of loss, and Yamada a shepherd of memories, carefully tending her flock of brief glances and transcendent afternoons. It is easy to recognize the good times, we believe, and so we let them dance without incident into the amber haze of the past. But such a carefree outlook can swiftly lend itself to first nostalgia, and then despair; we must both cherish the past and look forward with courage, knowing we cannot predict when it is our hand that will be precious and essential, holding out an umbrella for a friend in need.

Looking back, it is easy to see your life as a series of missed opportunities, moments you strayed from what might have been a “narratively satisfying” rise through struggle and into perpetual happiness. But no happiness is permanent, and not being able to make a coherent narrative of your life is no cause for regret. We stumble, we fall, we struggle to our feet, not knowing our destination, only certain the road is long and ever-changing. We are not fireworks, my friends. We can always rise again.

This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.