A Silent Voice

So I literally just got the title of the series and I'm reeling.

TO ANYONE WHO HASN'T READ THIS MANGA–What are you doing??? Go read it! This is gonna contain spoilers abound and it really is too good of a series to miss out on. Please! I beg you!

OK SPOILERS BEGIN IN

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OK there we go.

A Silent Voice. I'm still processing what I just completed because I literally finished the series a couple minutes ago. When I first saw the trailer of the movie was like "hell yeah, another definitely going to be critically acclaimed anime like Your Name!" That was literally what I thought. So when I finally found a copy and sat down with my sister to watch it (because unlike whole anime series she will come around for the occasional feature film). After it was finished...we were kind of in shock. So much happened in the span of two hours and...I didn't really get it. It was difficult, it was sad, it was bewildering. It felt like I was an outsider watching a group of people that new each other their whole lives. Except it wasn't happy nostalgic times; it was trauma, it was painful memories, it was regret and guilt and shame and I just was so confused, more disbelieving, actually, that this group of people were still talking to each other? Seemed to tolerate one another? And even seem like they were trying to be friends with one another. Once the movie finished, aside from the beautiful finally, admiring the symbolism in the falling of the crossed out faces, and my sister's commentary of the great cinematography and animation, I kind of forgot about it. The story, in all honesty, made me almost scared, and uncomfortable. I couldn't really process what I saw and it just made me really sad because the content was heavy. I knew it was a lot deeper than I took it for, but for some reason I wasn't so inclined to understand and dig deeper into it. I left it at that.

However, one of my friends told me she read the manga, and it was a story really close to her heart. She also said the movie unfortunately didn't do the manga much justice, because so much character development had to be rushed that made it hard to keep track of, one thing I thought made the movie a bit hard to understand.

I took me a little over a year to finish this manga, frankly. I read the first three volumes after seeing the first one at the library, and promptly followed up with the next two. I kind of forgot about it for a while, since so far the story seemed really similar to what I'd seen in the movie. Seeing it show up on Netflix again got me thinking about it, so I decided to check out the rest of the series and see what was different between the books and the adaptation. Though the exact details of the movie are kind of slipping my mind, the ending was different. I really liked the ending of the movie, at the school festival with Shoya and the gang, after the X's fall off of all the faces (at least I think that's where they ended it). The manga ended with us seeing kind of where each character ends up going, and concludes with a Coming of Age Party, a reunion that takes place in the year all of them turn twenty. I liked seeing that–thinking about the future and being hopeful for it was something both Shoko and Shoya had to realize in their lives, and the fact that they both have something to pursue and look forward to was admirable.

Other than that...it's been a while since I saw the movie so I'll have to get back to you about other major difference between the book and movie...(definitely gonna have to make this analysis a two-parter)

But while it's still fresh I need to talk about the real selling point of this whole series - the characters.

I don't think I've ever seen such grey area in a cast before. You can't really describe them as good or bad and it's sort of a brain breaker to try to make that call yourself. Shoya, the protagonist, was horrible when he was younger. The way he treated Shoko was inexcusable and honestly it's kind of difficult to believe they could have mended their relationship the way they did. Along with the rest of the class: Naoka, a loud, speaks-her-mind victimizer who had a crush on Shoya since they were young; Miki, a goody two-shoes who ignores the part she played in Shoko's bullying and is now desperately trying to gain confidence in her own appearance by the validation of Satoshi, and Miyoko, Shoko's only friend in middle school who eventually transferred being unable to handle the bullying she in turn received for being close to her. In addition to that, we also have two other friends in this group: Tomohiro, a chubby aspiring filmmaker that adopts Shoya as his best friend after he saves his bike from getting stolen, and Satoshi, someone who was bullied as a kid for his bushy eyebrows and decided to take a stand and not just be a bystander. This motley group of broken misfits just kinds of falls together and you just feel like it could blow up any moment just because of how threadbare their connection, and how unwillingly everybody seems to hold together, everyone has ulterior motives for joining this group, and a lot needs to be talked about in order for them to officially move past what happened before.

And at the center of it all is Shoko.

Shoko was born deaf, lives with her mother, sister, and grandmother. Her father left after discovering her disability when she was three. Her mother is protective, but at the same time harsh and cold to her and her sister Yuzuru, and since the bullying in middle school, she's become even more quiet and reserved. She gave up on hearing aids, and doesn't have many friends until her past comes walking back into her life. She's apologetic, submissive, has a quiet strength, and at first glance, there really is no bad quality to her. You can see she's a genuinely kind person. When confronted by Naoka, who outwardly admits her hatred fro Shoko, slapping her and beating her multiple times, as well as speaking nothing but harsh words for her, unapologetic for her actions, we know to hate this character. There really was nothing to like about Naoka from what I remember in the movie. Her immaturity, her laughable excuses for the way she acts, her inability to understand and her stubbornness made her a perfect villain. I didn't get why they still had to make up and be friends in the end because don't you really oughta cut those toxic people from your life? But as I read through her accusations you kind of do realize Shoko is just letting herself get beat like this, not making a stand for herself–accepting what she is being called and being sorry for it. She truly believes she is a burden, that the lives around her are being ruined by her existing in them, and the only worth she has as a person depends on how everyone else feels around her. For so long, she never stood up for herself, and allowed herself to take the blame for everything. Her lack of self worth lead her to attempt to kill herself. No one was able to get through to her that she had to be stronger than that. I think Naoka was ultimately trying to get that through to her, in a, granted, abusive, and manipulative way.

Self-loathing isn't...fun. Shoko and Shoya both exhibit this characteristic of unparalleled guilt that leads them both to see reality as an unconquerable darkness. For Shoya, his first experience with a group of friends is nothing like what I would call a group of friends. These friends all have secrets, and grudges, and hidden intentions. Yet he still still feels happy to even be able to argue about little harmless things, still admits that he'd want to stay with these people forever. But when his secret it out, that he bullied Shoko, that this is all his fault–he knows it. He'd been living with the guilt of his actions every since then and now that it's out, thinking he could have friends, the dream of having people to laugh with and hang out with dissipates. On the bridge scene he calls out all his friends for their past mistakes, you can tell he doesn't really mean what he says–he knows he doesn't know everything about these people and yet in this instant, in his clouded judgement he tells everyone what they've made themselves out to be: gunk, scum, people who run away. Filthy. Disgusting. That's what he seems himself to be too. He's inflicting his own punishment on himself, giving them reasons to hate him based in truth, revealing what he really thinks of them, a line of thinking he knows is wrong, he still punishes himself by saying it.

Shoko. There is a chapter in the sixth volume in her perspective. The words are all half cut-off and the overwhelming panic from not being able to understand what's happening is frightening. And this is Shoko's reality. Jumping between past and present, she is suddenly reminded of every good thing in her life, times when she was happy and had fun with her friends at school, times when she wasn't so scared to use her voice to communicate, times when her notebooks weren't yet full of the painful words, times after they were drowned in the river. When Naoka confronts her at the hospital, she takes the beating. She doesn't doesn't do anything and lets herself take it. Punishment. A punishment she thinks she deserves for being selfish, for deciding to jump, not thinking it would matter to anybody else. But her friends, her family, they step in. And Shoko has decided to live. Even if she can't completely change her mentality overnight, she decides that in this moment she will try to lift the burdens she thinks she's put on everybody. That's why she still tries to be nice to Naoka, and wants to help resume production on the film. She cannot hate anybody else and how they treat her because she still believes she deserves it, and it's all her fault.

Both of them are stuck in this endless cycle of self-hate that they don't really know how to be free from. That's why, when they start talking about their futures, when they start dreaming about making something of their lives, when these characters enter competitions and study hard and think about life in the big city–gosh, that broke me. Even though some of them still didn't know, they were still hoping. They were still putting their trust in something. Trusting that one day they'd find the motivation to chase after what they were really meant for. Because that's something to hope for too.

I don't know, I guess...this was just a really golden time for me to revisit this story. I'll put it that way. I don't know about you but I hate it when I see myself in the negative traits of a character. I hate seeing myself on the screen, in the book in my hand–Naoka's cruelty and blaming, Miki's vanity and victimizing, Satoshi's desire to feel better about himself by being around someone he figured worse than him; Tomohiro's unrealistic optimism; Miyoko's cowardice. Shoya's guilt. Shoko's silence. There it all was in black and white and colour. And while I wanted to hate them all to a certain extent, it was in a story like this I recognized them all as human. And I recognized myself as human. As flaws and confusion, and no straight answer. As mistakes and anger and moving past it. As wanting to escape. As wanting to grow.

The day you realize you're a sucky human being is the day you either begin a downward spiral or an ethereal climb. I realized that in ninth grade, when my selfishness prompted drifting friendships, when my conceit prompted my isolation, when what I thought was smart turned out to be really. really dumb. Today I'm scared for a living. Today I can't even open the messenger app without turning off my wifi so that no one knows I'm online. Today I can't even tell people when I don't want to do something because I'm overwhelmed. Today I can't have a casual one-on-one conversation but neither can I be in a group of more than that without shutting down. Today I blame myself instead of others. Today I consume more food than is healthy because I know it's not like I'll be pretty tomorrow anyways. Today I regret yesterday and yesterday and yesterday for not being who I wanted to be today.

And it's petty. It's selfish. It's illogical even. So why, why, why am I like this?

Can a voice be silent? Can you say something without actually saying anything? You can change someone's life just by passing through it so why do you think you can leave it so easily?

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I think everybody needs to read these books. Really take the time to let it sink in. And then reflect on themselves. Because maybe then we'll realize that people...are really both as bad and as good as can be.

Alrighty, so I feel like I really need to follow up on this analysis, maybe discuss things with friends who have also read the series because my mind if kind of all in a jumble and has some serious thinking to do. I think maybe I'll try to do individual character analyses, because really every character needs a good essay's worth of words to really understand what they're all about. Maybe English class was useful something eh? Anyways, we'll see how this goes.

Stay saltful.

#recommendedreads