Transcending the Victim’s History: Takahata Isao’s <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i>

39 Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), a film directed by Takahata Isao in 1988 and based on the Naoki Award–winning short story by Nosaka Akiyuki (published 1967), was paired as a double feature with Miyazaki Hayao film, My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro).1 These two films, however, could not be more dissimilar. Miyazaki’s work is a gentle fantasy of childhood imagination in the pastoral setting of 1950s Japan, a time seemingly untouched by war. Grave, on the other hand, set in Kobe 1945, in the waning days of World War II, is a realistic drama, focusing on the suffering and eventual starvation deaths of fourteen-year-old Seita and his four-year-old sister, Setsuko. The film opens with Seita’s sore-ridden, emaciated body falling over in a train station. His voice, emanating from a spirit bathed in red light, tells us that on September 21, 1945, he has died. A worker looking through Seita’s belongings finds a beat-up tin can, which he throws into the bushes. Pieces of bone roll out which turn into Setsuko’s spirit, likewise cast in red light. She sees her brother’s body and rushes to go to him, but she is restrained and then joyfully reunited with his spirit. The film then retraces how the two of them reached their moments of death.