The self is a fragile thing. It is loath to remain isolated, yet even more loath to reach out and be pricked by the thorns of rejection. Once pricked, it never forgets the pain of the bleeding. When faced with the uncertainties of human interaction, and the impossibility of ever being completely sure of how others will respond, it instinctively pulls inward, withdrawing from trying to understand others and consumed with an endless cycle of self-loathing.
This is the situation the two leads of A Silent Voice find themselves in. Shoko Nishimiya, born deaf, faces a continual lack of understanding and sympathy for her disability from others, and has internalized all that hatred into herself. She blames her own inadequacies for everything around her, and rushes to apologize even before others can get angry at her. Shoyo Ishida was once the cool kid at the center of his elementary school class, and as such led the rest of his class in their bullying of Shoko. But after Shoko is completely beaten down by the bullying and transfers away, the rest of the class makes Shoyo into the scapegoat for the whole situation and casts him out of their midst as well. In the end, his own spirit is hollowed out. By the time he reaches high school, he is sullen and withdrawn, unable to look others in the eye. He avoids acknowledging the others in his school, as illustrated by a bold X covering their faces. Partially this is a self-defense mechanism. If he keeps himself from getting close to anyone again, he doesn’t have to risk experiencing the pain of rejection again. But it is also a penance.
Shoyo is consumed by guilt. He knows that he acted unjustly towards Shoko and caused pain for her and many others by his actions. His desire to atone for his sins defines his life. When we first meet him, he is busy putting his plan for atonement into action. He quits his part-time job, sells all his possessions, puts an envelope filled with money by his sleeping mother’s pillow – to pay back the money his mother spent to cover the cost of the hearing aids Shoyo ruined when teasing Shoko – and heads to the bridge he will leap from to end his life. For Shoyo has determined that the only way he can achieve atonement is death.
This is a warped, self-absorbed way of thinking. But I can understand where it comes from, for it is a way of thinking I struggled with for many years. Once the delusion of insurmountable unworthiness and failure takes hold, it develops into a black hole, its massive gravitational force pulling in all aspects of the self into its void. You close yourself off to the beauty of the world around you and the love that others want to share with you. You become deaf and blind to reality, for your hatred for yourself is all you can hear or see. The film vividly and deliberately illustrates this situation. Director Naoko Yamada said, “All of the young characters would be troubled, but the world they live in and around them wouldn’t worry them. For that reason, we showed flowers and water beautifully.” Shoyo lives in a beautiful world, but it is a world he is unable to see, for he is only looking at himself.
How does one escape from that situation? It is no easy task. Counteracting the force of a black hole requires immense effort, time, and the willingness to keep trying to pull yourself out even after repeated failures. It is not impossible, however. Hope always exists, no matter how many times you have fallen. At one point, Sahara, a girl who had fled Shoyo’s elementary school class after being bullied for being willing to make friends to Shoko, tells Shoko in sadness, “I couldn’t change. I couldn’t protect you again. I was the same coward.” Shoko responds with a simple yet profoundly important truth, “You can change from now on.” For years I thought the same as Sahara, that I couldn’t change no matter how much I desperately wanted to. I would keep trying, and keep falling back into the same pit. But I had people around me who, like Shoko in this moment, didn’t give up on me and kept believing that change was possible for me. I didn’t believe them. I kept digging myself into deeper and deeper pits, lashing out at others as Shoyo lashes out at his friends at a climactic breakdown on a bridge, falling into deeper patterns of self-destructive behavior to vent my anger at myself, eventually landing in the hospital in a coma, just as Shoyo ends up in the film (though I was more in Shoko’s place in the situation that led me there). Even then my family, my friends, my God, did not give up on me. And they were right. I was wrong. I could change, even if it took nearly killing myself to get the place where I could feel like it was possible.
Not that this change was an overnight process, or a process that I have finished or expect to ever finish in this life. Still, my fundamental being right now is dramatically different from what it was a few years ago. It is a difference that the film vividly illustrates in two parallel scenes. When we first see Shoya enter his high school, we see how he has chosen to live his life, by blocking out others. As he walks through the halls filled with life he refuses to look at, he reaches up and places his hands over his ears, silencing the sound of their conversation and isolating himself into the world of his own self-loathing mind. The film’s final scene plays this out in reverse. Shoya, having tentatively reconciled with the friends he has made, is walking through his school’s festival when he slowly removes his hands from his ears and lets the sound of others into his life. He becomes willing to listen and see outside of himself. Now, the film is under no illusions about the potential for hurt that comes with this action. Among the snatches of conversation Shoya hears from his schoolmates is one boy saying, “How can he come to school?”, which may be a disparaging remark directed at Shoya – though then again, it may not be; it’s not made clear. Even so, by opening his ears to the world around him Shoya opens himself up to the beauty found in his environment and in other people. The catharsis when the camera pulls back from him, the X’s fall off the crowd’s faces, and the music swells, is immense, and indeed overwhelms Shoya, who breaks down in tears. For all the pain and cruelty that exists in this world, at the same time it is filled with beauty and love as well. We can hear the full spectrum of sound that is all around us, waiting for us, if only we can escape from the black hole of the self.
Reflections in Motion 