Review of The Garden of Words / 言の葉の庭, directed by Makoto Shinkai

My first Makoto Shinkai movie was when I was seventeen, and it was Your Name. I was recently revisiting his work after rewatching Suzume for the third time, as I had reviewed it for my film critic job when I was doing that, and I was thinking a lot about the underlying feelings and tensions he puts within his storylines.

Then I started thinking about his work I hadn’t seen, and I went down the rabbit hole when it comes to Wikipedia. I spent a lot of time reading up on his other films, as well as Japanese cinema and animation in general.

Anyways, this became ingrained in my brain, and when I opened Kanopy one day, it was suggesting to me The Garden of Words to watch. And because I had been thinking of Shinkai’s work so much, I ended up just watching the film right then and there.

Here’s my review! This is a short and sweet film, but there’s certainly a lot packed into it.

A high school student and a woman form a bond through literature.

In this movie, one of our protagonists is Takao Akizuki. He’s fifteen and attending school, while his dream is to become someone who makes shoes for a living. That means he’s not super keen in the math and science classes of high school department, and at the beginning of this movie, he skips class.

He heads to a garden to sketch some shoe designs, and it’s there he meets a woman named Yukari Yukino. She’s almost thirty (I believe she was 27, if we want to be exact), and she also is skipping work. The two of them kind of just coexist in this space, and when she leaves, she tells him a tanka. They never exchange their names, or personal information really.

Takao doesn’t really understand the tanka or where it even came from, and they continue their little routine of skipping class and work to meet in the garden. They still don’t share their names, but they start bonding as they chat more and spend time together in the park.

Eventually, Takao decides to make her a pair of shoes, and when the rainy season ends in Tokyo, he decides to stop going to the park. He’s a professional, and he wants to focus on his craft and passions.

But when the summer break from school ends, Takao goes back to school and realizes she is a teacher there. She teaches literature, but throughout her time at the school, she has been subjected to immense gossip and bullying. That’s why she went to the park, but she soon quits her job.

Takao goes to the park searching for her, then reads a poem from a famous collection. It turns out that is the proper response the original tanka she told him, and the two end up fleeing from a random thunderstorm. He confesses, which is weird as I don’t know what, but she is gentle in telling him the power dynamic.

She also says she is moving back to her hometown, and then he gets upset by all of this, telling her that she should have opened up to him. They end up crying together, and she confesses all of those times they were in the park saved her from her own demons.

After this, Takao finishes school, and Yukari moves home. The film, after the credits, has a scene of Takao going to the park to bring the shoes he made her, promising he will come back better and with a career.

Overall Thoughts

Although I am not a fan of the romance in this, if you can even call Takao’s crush that, I can see why it happens. He’s a boy who finds something to admire in an older woman, and he doesn’t understand that she’s older and there’s a professional boundary to be crossed here.

Regardless, I find their platonic relationship to be powerful. Sometimes we feel alone in the world and like we need to confide in someone, and strangers, if in the right time and place, can become someone we trust and care about deeply. We need to give them a chance (but remember stranger danger does exist—not fully being like go make friends with someone with major red flags).

That said, I enjoyed this movie a lot. It’s simple and short, but that’s all it needed to be to tell this story. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

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