Expressing the Ether, or Mitski’s Implicit Beauty
What Shunji Iwai's "All About Lily Chou-Chou" & Mitski’s “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” say about the worth of a soul.
TRIGGER WARNING: Please note that the latter half of this article dives into an analysis of the film “All About Lily Chou-Chou” (Shunji Iwai, 2001). The film details traumatic lives of teenagers in Japan, and certain plot points could be triggering. These include CSA, child prostitution, and rape/sexual assaults. Warnings will be added before any paragraph/section that mentions these topics. Please read with care. The video above, included as a visual companion but not necessary viewing, does not include any imagery of a sexual nature.
Do you remember what you were doing on July 26th, 2023? For me the nostalgia is immediately placeable: a Wednesday spent at the office, as our project was coming towards its conclusion and therefore the work was beginning to wane to a slow trickle, providing ample time to listen to music while completing equipment manifests and finalizing assets. On repeat, my headphones doled out what soon became a familiar, sentimental tune: Mitski’s new single, freshly dropped just that morning, titled “Bug Like An Angel”.
Like the rest of the songs on the album that would be released later in September 2023, the song boasts a unique take on Americana, with its haunting folk feel that begs for it to be listened to alone, intimately. Insatiable for her sound, I listened to “Bug Like An Angel” over and over again, day and night, feverish over the friendship it offered me. It was a hug, offering acceptance and understanding. It took hold of me and said it knew me. This instant feeling of camaraderie is exactly what I love so dearly about Mitski’s music. She has an ability to capture wordless emotions that have no proper descriptor, digging into the human experience in a way I haven’t (personally) been able to track down in any other artist.
My favorite part of the song, by far, is the sudden surprise of the choir being brought in just after the first verse. It’s unexpected, and provokes a sort of exhilaration in the listener - a heartbeat-jolting surprise that resets your senses to invite a deeper connection to the sound, moving beyond the confines of your headphones. It’s like a cold shower releasing a shock response that forces an expulsion of something or other (emotion, repressed memories, tension, self-guarded protections).
Seeking understanding of this album, of this artist, one could turn to the Reddit community dedicated to her (r/Mitski), rife with users who enjoy picking apart every ounce of meaning in the music. I first came to this Reddit while searching for more perspectives on “Bug Like An Angel” and felt a sense of mutual understanding when I saw so many hundreds of people thoroughly engaging with Mitski’s work, and furthermore, expressing the emotional impact that her music had on them.
User Ok_Armadillo_1690 commented underneath a post that encouraged discussion on “Bug Like An Angel”, bringing up a significant cultural reference that could find some holding in Mitski’s work that I had never learned about before. The user explains, “it’s struck me for a long time now that Mitski’s poetry has the quality of ‘yūgen.’” They go on to describe what yūgen is, in a general sense, and reference Kamo no Chōmei’s take on the genre: “There’s a beautiful passage from the work of the Japanese poet [Chōmei] where he describes yūgen as the importance of what is ‘left over’”. With such a lovely interpretation, it was a natural progression that I became obsessed with researching the crux of yūgen, and its principles.
My research first led me to a website for “Art Nomura”. Art Nomura is an art dealing company that specializes in traditional Japanese art, namely kakejiku which are hanging scrolls. In their aim to share traditional art and Japanese aesthetics with the world, they provide some insightful commentary and information on particular schools of aesthetics. They describe the history of yūgen (for starters, how it originated in China in association with Buddhism, etc., and eventually, in the Heian era, became utilized by Japan’s poets and critics), and defines the term as “suggestiveness, lingering memory, aftertaste, or implication”. 1
Yūgen is not a thing we see right in front of us, but rather an implicit significance and beauty. Artists promoting yūgen might leave room for a sense of imagination, encouraging audiences to see meaning in between the lines, so to speak. Art Nomura’s website provides an example, which I won’t risk butchering by paraphrasing:
“For example, we think a flower is beautiful when we see it. This beauty is the superficial beauty. The flower has a past of withstanding wind, rain, and snow until now, and will someday wither, however beautiful it is now. Although the beautiful flower itself impresses us, the beauty will be more impressive than the superficial beauty, when we can imagine its past and future.”
Yūgen takes the negative space, all the things that aren’t there, and suggests that those are equally important to what we see before us. It asks us to consider something’s past, present, and future and know that this, too, is a part of that “something” - and therefore, a facet of its beauty.
On another thread in the r/Mitski Reddit community, a user began a discussion by posting a video from Mitski herself, describing the production of “Bug Like An Angel”. By her own account, the song is about the cycle of addiction. Apparent in the repetition of chords, and the odd surprises which go against that nearly comforting progression, she’s cultivated an ambience of a paradoxical uneasiness & familiarity. She mentions that she “wanted to do a little twist, a little change, a little surprise, by actually having the vocals come in in the middle of what we think is the chord progression”. Mitski subverts the audience’s expectation of the song’s beginning, warning you of the discomfort that awaits beneath the surface of folksy sentimentality. The lyrics, butting into the composition, echo the title:
There’s a bug like an angel, stuck to the bottom
Of my glass, with a little bit left
As I got older, I learned I'm a drinker
Sometimes a drink feels like family
And then comes in the jumpscare, a choir lifting up the word family; an emphasis, an acknowledgement, an agreement. Perhaps, behind the voices, which appear like apparitions at the end of a dark hall, is the very family being referenced by the singer. This is the turning of the faucet, to return to my earlier metaphor - pouring from Mitski’s showerhead are freezing droplets of water meant to shock our system with a forceful, and necessary, reset. This song, this moment within it, sets the tone for the entirety of the album, and begs you to embrace it uneasily but readily.
Mitski’s soundscape is a unique beast; it offers its listener comfort and dissonance at once. This remains the case throughout the rest of “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”, her seventh studio album on which "Bug Like An Angel" is the initial track. There’s a false familiarity that is set up from the beginning, then immediately renounced, and yet as she sings to us with a gentle and melodic voice we still continue to ache for the safety of her Americana promises.
The second track on her album, “Buffalo Replaced”, begins with a concrete, easily-visualized setting: a nameless small town in the Great Plains, standing out in the cool air of night, moon-gazing as mosquitos pick at our protagonist’s skin. Of great importance to the context of this song is the history of its titular animal, the buffalo, whose population was decimated by forceful colonization and the emergence of the Transcontinental Railway. This history grants the song a stronger beauty; an example, again, of a yūgen philosophy.
Tens of millions of buffalo once roamed the Great Plains, and their numbers shrunk as mass killings and overhunting brought them down to a rough count of about 300 by the close of the century. Those traveling west, via the railway, came in the thousands to hunt buffalo not for food, but for sport. The thrill of slaughter. A 2012 article from Smithsonian Magazine, by Gilbert King, titled “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed” details “excursions” hosted by the railway where men would climb atop the trains and shoot at buffalo aimlessly; they left in the wake of their spree rotten carcasses. 2
The indiscriminate killing of the buffalo population was not only for the sake of appeasing rich men’s fantasies of abuse, but also served a concrete purpose dictated by the generals and politicians of the time. The effort to purge the Plains of buffalo was in large part to stunt the resources of Native American tribes of the area, particularly those who were daring to fight back against the harbingers of Manifest Destiny who brought ego, arrogance, and violence along with them.
Therefore, when Mitski describes the freight trains which have replaced the buffalo, she is inherently referencing the genocide of a people, and the hubris of colonizers. What makes it all the more tragic is that she specifies freight trains, which carry inanimate cargo. The Plains, rid of buffalo and Native Americans (who were not only killed in large numbers but also forcefully relocated, and who continue to face both tangible and systemic violence to this day), have now become empty fields designated for industry and capital.
In the second verse of “Buffalo Replaced”, Mitski personifies her own “blind hope” in the form of a sleeping woman (or perhaps animal - even, maybe, a bison), who is unreliable and oftentimes a burden, yet she still nurtures her, deriving comfort from her presence. Her assumed stewardship over this living being insinuates a sense of humanity that will outlast the “mad and wild” howling of a passing train, or the violence of an arrogant militia.
We move on to “Heaven”, the third track of Mitski’s album, which begins like an old country love song: a gentle drumbeat and dreamy synth. The nostalgic tune contrasts with the flatness of Mitski’s voice calling out the word “heaven”. In comes the bridge, which, at least to me, doesn’t sound as much romantic as it does like a fight up a steep hill. We then transition into the same gentle tone of the verses that came before.
“Heaven” is a romantic’s song. More specifically, it’s an erotic piece a la Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (particularly by way of Jeff Buckley’s interpretation, calling the song “a hallelujah to the orgasm”3). Notable in Mitski’s most orgasmic song is the fact it navigates the experience by poetically dancing around the descriptions of minor surrounding events: a shared coffee, rain heard just outside, the sound of her lover’s hushed voice. She pinpoints small moments of love, highlighting the romanticism in mundanity. It speaks to something that I believe begins in “Buffalo Replaced”, an ode to the natural world & humanity’s connection to it. In particular, in the second verse:
Now I bend like a willow
Thinkin' of you
Like a murmuring brook
Curving about you
Taking elements of nature (a willow tree, a brook) and likening it to the physicality of her own body, Mitski blurs the line where humanity ends and the Earth begins. Despite its depiction of a moment of intimacy, there is an underlying fear that muscles in by way of a storm just outside, inciting an anticipatory anxiety. Our protagonist becomes aware of the possibility of this loving aura coming to a conclusion, lamenting the inevitability of endings.
The next track on the album takes “Heaven”’s fear of being left alone towards its logical progression, thrusting us into a more sinister corner of emotion: “I Don’t Like My Mind” starts without hesitation. In many of her songs, Mitski begins with the description of a setting, almost as if to ease us into the world, but “I Don’t Like My Mind” instead rings out strong and instantaneous and leaves no room for the buildup. It continues “Bug Like An Angel”’s legacy of breaking expectations and provokes uneasiness in its listener.
The song delves into a feeling of stasis that is particularly visceral over the holidays, tapping into an ironic loneliness felt even amid familial reunion. The song harkens back to “Bug Like An Angel” in more ways than one, as it links over-consumption to memory, and particularly that of growing up. Mitski discusses in the second verse the experience of being plagued by a memory, which may have been dormant for years but springs up when, for instance, sitting alone in a room eating a cake while your family socializes downstairs. Surrounded by people you love, people who love you back, it’s somehow still a nearly universal experience that at least a small measure of dread will creep in as the New Year inches closer. Perhaps it’s a dread inspired by the memory of what could have been, or the memory of the hurt that brought you here.
On an inconvenient Christmas, I eat a cake
A whole cake, all for me
[...] And then I get sick and throw up
I recall returning to this song during Christmas of last year, while taking a hiatus from my job at the time as everyone went on a unified, unpaid vacation for the two weeks of holiday celebrations. Holiday hiatuses are always a bittersweet moment, in my experience; the anxiety of the incoming lack of funds as a result of lack of work, the fact that, regardless of your own resolutions or good-times-had, you will still owe a check for rent come the first of January. There’s a depression that settles in when you are face to face with the longing of childhood ignorance, and knowing you’ll never have your old bedroom back. I can’t be sure, of course, exactly what type of holiday blues Mitski holds, but for me, the visual was crushing: gorged on sweets and an estranged familial warmth, sitting alone in the dark of night, on edge for the financial ramifications of relaxation - she begs as the song fades away, “please don’t take, take my job from me”.
One of my other favorites on the album, besides “Bug Like An Angel”, is “The Deal”. In the fifth track of Mitski’s album, the protagonist walks alone on a midnight, contemplative stroll, and begs to make a devil’s deal to give away, for free, for nothing, the albatross around her neck that is her soul. The song beckons back to one of Mitski’s older tunes, one of the first I had been obsessed with from her, titled “Last Words of a Shooting Star”. It similarly details the experience of passing suicidal ideation, one that tends to come in waves and overwhelm you. “Last Words” has one of my favorite lyrics:
They’ll never know how I’d stared at the dark in that room
with no thoughts like a blood-sniffing shark
and while my dreams made music in the night
carefully, I was going to live
Interestingly, “The Deal” handles what might happen if instead of the death of your body, the result of a suicidal slump was the death of your soul via a Faustian trade (as it so happens, a very uneven trade, gaining nothing in return but a hollow heart). Having successfully made the deal, still alive but soulless, what sort of life is it you lead? Unburdened by a soul, therefore unfeeling, without sadness and joy and anger and love. No ups, no downs, no in-between bouts of boredom. You are stripped of the thing that makes you human. Is the promised protection of numbness worth foregoing your humanity?
The heavy burden of a soul weighs down on our singer, and she can only hope to rid herself of it. But, as she states, “nothing replied, nothing speaks to you in the night” – she goes without an answer. In the isolation of night, it’s only our protagonist - and, then, a bird, perched on a streetlamp. The bird, our protagonist’s soul, has flown off (and out) of her and now tells her that she’ll be lost, emotionless, and freedomless.
I can’t help, as Mitski describes the soul’s personification as a singular bird, to think of Emily Dickinson’s poem likening a bird to hope4. As it goes,
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all
To Mitski’s soulless protagonist, the bird on the streetlamp explains, “You won't hear me singin', you're a cage without me”. In keeping with Dickinson’s bird symbolism, the blind hope we met in “Buffalo Replaced” has now returned in “The Deal” only to be stripped away and silenced, leaving in its wake a husk of a woman who has agreed to accept the consequence of a lobotomized spirit. The choice to exemplify the living soul with an animal is also significant in that it continues the thematic pattern set forth by the album so far that posits that the worth of humanity is inextricably linked with that of the natural world.
Mitski begins her sixth track on the album, “When Memories Snow”, with the nostalgic image of shoveling snow from a driveway, “clearing the path to get to the store”. The scene calls to mind the act of burying your own emotions, memories, and trauma in order to accomplish the more mundane necessities of life which do not stop needing tending when you’re having a mental breakdown. A forceful smothering attempts to repress these feelings, but as snow builds a pile atop your car, one memory stacks atop another, and another, and the feelings, too, come in heavy as a storm.
Returning to that comforting community on r/Mitski (one which makes me feel significantly less insane for being so completely wrapped up in this journey of analysis), I sought out insight on the backing music of “When Memories Snow”, noting the return of the choir which is utilized as punctuation for every line of the song’s initial verse. It felt familiar, somehow, but I couldn’t quite place it. Sure enough, I wasn’t alone in this. Redditors on a thread about the song likened it to a sea shanty, which for whatever reason really resonated with me. The alternation between up! down! up! down! present in the chord progression as we begin the song feels like a heaving of oars, the beating of a drum helping sailors keep time as they navigate a tempestuous sea. Entering the second verse, a more chaotic orchestral backing calls to mind a storm, wild waves slapping against the ship.
In Mitski’s own video on the production of the song, she describes splitting the song into two parts. The first half would echo old Hollywood Western flicks and their soundtracks, and the second would be “inspired by British Invasion Rock”. Strings carry us into the second half of the song, as cymbals crash and a drum beat becomes noticeable, seemingly the representation of the British Rock influence that Mitski mentions in her video. Amidst the chaos of the instrumental backing on the song, there is one instrument which is unique in its inclusion. The shō is a traditional Japanese wind instrument that produces a haunting, reedy sound. Towards the end of the song is when it becomes most apparent, but its audible use in the song is surprisingly less interesting than the use it had in the production itself. Mitski describes using the instrument to find the right chords for the vocals to hit, on account of it not following the Westernized sense of tonal harmony. The result is, to at least an American ear, a combination of chords that feels on the edge of something. The sound inspires a sort of tentative anxiety, as if on the brink.
The second verse begins, “and if I break / could I go on break?” which is an all too familiar question for those who live under the heavy hand of a capitalist system which requires productivity even at the expense of your own well-being. And yet, our protagonist is not begging to disappear, or to stop; rather, she asks for the safety of her own room so that she might make more, write “speeches in [her] head”. A physical exhaustion is not what plagues the singer, or if it is, it’s only as a result of the mental overexertion. Shoveling snow is a demanding task. Getting through “When Memories Snow” echoes the singer’s sentiments as the music trudges through as triumphantly as it can, ankles weighed down by the snow banks, and yet heaving through regardless.
The seventh track is arguably the most famous song off the album: “My Love Mine All Mine” was an enormous hit, largely, it seems, because of its popularity on the platform TikTok (which gave us catastrophes such as “look at you, strawberry cow”). “My Love Mine All Mine” has received more streams on Spotify than any of Mitski’s other work, currently at over 1 billion listens. The statistics of it aside, the song is absolutely stunning. It begins with a similar romanticism as “Heaven”, and is, as well, a love song, but I would say it lacks the same overtly erotic undertones.
Rather, “My Love” is a love song to the very essence of art, and of creation. There’s a term that I learned of while watching Shunji Iwai’s “All About Lily Chou-Chou”, a 2001 coming-of-age avant-garde internet/film project. Incidentally, the soundtrack of which, you could replace with the tracks of this very album.
I watched this film recently, and by “watched” I should clarify I split it up into pieces in order to consume it in totality. It is a difficult watch, to say the least. It was so stunningly raw in its portrayal of Japanese high school students caught up in the jagged, lethal edges of broken childhoods and near-death experiences, and that honesty made me uncomfortable. It hurt to look at, sometimes, like it might hurt to stare at the sun for too long.
In the film, Lily Chou-Chou is a fictional artist a la Kate Bush or Björk (or, for our purposes, Mitski), an experimental musician who has fostered a dedicated fanbase who applaud her for her mastery of what they call the “Ether”.
Iwai utilizes the term “Ether” to describe an unseen facet of reality which the titular character, Lily Chou-Chou, has uniquely tapped into. Notably, we don’t really see Lily throughout the film. We only witness her through a screen towards the end as one of the main characters, a young boy named Yūichi Hasumi, stands, abandoned, outside the stadium where she plays, longingly watching a video of her loop on a low resolution digital screen. As Mitski stares up at the moon praising everything that was and is and will be, it feels remarkably alike to this boy, and to the fans who detail in internet forums such as ‘Lilyphilia’ just how impressive Lily Chou-Chou’s connection to and understanding of the Ether is. Ether is not yūgen, necessarily, but there is something extremely similar in the two concepts. It is perhaps that they both celebrate unseen, invisible markers of beauty that go far past surface-level aesthetics.
“My Love Mine All Mine” describes its protagonist peering up through a big top tent towards the moon, somberly speaking to it and begging for it to adopt her legacy. The imagery of a big top instantly calls to mind the red and white striped circus tents of cartoons & vintage flicks. It insinuates a performer who stands now beneath the moon and asks (with that same blind hope that sleeps gently in “Buffalo Replaced”, and that was lost in “The Deal”) that the love she possesses, the only thing left to her, is preserved - beyond that, not only preserved, but given back to the world when she passes. A legacy of love. “When Memories Snow” & “My Love Mine All Mine” feel inescapably linked by the same protagonist: a performer who exhausts herself to her very end and wishes that the one thing she has any real ownership over, her artistry, the Ether, is granted a chance to live on. To “shine down” in her stead.
Alongside speaking to a performer’s legacy, the song could also be said to depict a romance. This may not be the same sort of romance we experience in “Heaven”, but instead that of the stewardship and love held in “Buffalo Replaced”. In “My Love Mine All Mine”, Mitski sings:
My baby, here on earth
Showed me what my heart was worth
So, when it comes to be my turn
Could you shine it down here for her?
In a literal sense, we can take the term “my baby” to mean a significant other, but I would argue that in the full context of this album, it’s something more abstract. The use of the pronoun “her” asks us to recall that same usage in “Buffalo Replaced”, where hope was personified by she & her. If following that same logic, “My Love” is not only describing an artists’ fear of how they’ll be remembered, not only describing a lover on the brink of destruction wishing for their love to shine down on their partner who remains, but, also, it describes some sort of personified emotion (hope, possibly - or, suggested by the song’s title, love, particularly of the self) proving the singer’s individual worth and reinvigorating a soul which was discarded. The song is a testament to the human capacity for love, an unwillingness to die completely, and the idea that love is the fruit and fodder of life (& subsequently, afterlife).
“The Frost” opens on an apocalyptic ice age where only the protagonist remains. The eighth track of the album starts with a mass extinction, as the singer laments that “now the world is mine alone” and she’s left without friend nor companion. She then localizes the feeling to “the house”, narrowing our apocalypse to a singular building within which the protagonist finds isolation - no longer an Earth-wide mass extinction, but rather a confined event. An individualized tragedy. “The Frost” is a song about loneliness. It describes the loss of feeling known, or even just that of being perceived. It describes losing your audience and your connection to the world, as well as your connection on a more intimate level, such as to your closest friends.
Throughout the album, emotions & abstract concepts are personified and given their own agency. The blind hope sleeping, the soul perched on the streetlight, memories as a storm of snow; therefore, by this point in the album, we as the listener have grown accustomed to questioning potential allegorical connections. When Mitski sings, “you’re my best friend / now I’ve no one to tell / how I lost my best friend”, we have to ask whether she’s referring to a real, living personal relationship or a personification. Perhaps, we’re trained to wonder, she might be mourning the loss of some part of herself. A spirit, a bird…
In losing her soul in “The Deal”, are we now witnessing our ill-fated singer facing the consequences of that bargain? It may be that the protagonist, sitting alone in the house, having bartered her soul away for emptiness, is now becoming acutely aware of all that she gave away: not only her private emotions, but those which formed the foundation of the way she related to the world. To her audience. What remains is a sense of loneliness and self imposed ostracization.
In “Bug Like An Angel”, Mitski explores cyclical addiction, a tendency toward over-consumption that seemingly was adopted through the influence of her family. Similarly, “The Frost” explores cyclical self-sabotage by way of refusing to engage with the people around you. The singer laments, “everyone’s been long gone / but me, I was hidin' / or forgotten, the only one left”. Setting herself away from the world has, even if unintentionally, resulted in the loss of that very world. By extension of “Bug Like An Angel”, the unbroken cycle of causing direct harm to yourself is ongoing.
In this empty landscape, frosted over like dust, our protagonist’s love, hers all hers, has no home to call its own. The moon, peered at through that hole in the big top, hasn’t answered her pleading. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised by its silence; as she lamented in “The Deal”, when you speak to things in the night, they tend not to reply.
The song inspires me to return to “All About Lily Chou-Chou”, which in and of itself deals with the notion of perpetuating cycles.
Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino begin as friends. Hoshino is new to the school and it seems the only one who enjoys spending time with him is Yūichi. The two have sleepovers at Hoshino’s home, where his mother takes care of them. Hoshino introduces Yūichi to Lily Chou-Chou as an artist. The two love her; Hoshino has a poster of one of her album releases on his wall. At school, they share in a somewhat miserable routine, being bullied by other boys of their class.
Please note the following paragraph makes mention of plot points in the film dealing with CSA.
At its most surface level interpretation, “All About Lily Chou-Chou” confronts the cycle of bullying begetting bullying – Hoshino, once powerless against those boys, gains a sense of control and, apparently, confidence after a near-death experience during a summer vacation. In turn, Hoshino becomes the terror of the school, running a makeshift gang and physically assaulting fellow students. He blackmails girls to sleep with older men and give him the money they make. He makes only vaguely veiled threats to his teachers. In a particularly difficult scene to watch, he instructs two of his lackeys to intimidate Yūichi as a punishment, forcing him to masturbate in front of them, and breaking Yūichi’s Lily Chou-Chou CD.
In truth, the protagonist of the film is Yūichi, but I think it is ultimately as much Hoshino’s journey as it is Yūichi’s. The film has a quality of a Greek tragedy, as we watch the two of them sink further into a pervasive unhappiness. Buried by snow, perhaps, to utilize Mitski’s metaphors. A frost overcomes their friendship.
Shunji Iwai’s masterwork of “All About Lily Chou-Chou” has a lot to do with the experimental form he practiced in it. Genre-bending is perhaps something shared with Mitski’s synth-filled, offbeat folk album that consistently goes against what is typical of modern, western music. Framed by online interactions between anonymous internet forum users, we discover over the course of Iwai’s film that the characters we’re watching before us are, in fact, two of the most active members of the ‘Lilyphilia’ forum.
‘Lilyphilia’ is a fictional chatroom dedicated to Lily Chou-Chou. The users discuss her mastery of the Ether, and her new projects. They lament their personal lives, and find a special sort of community with one another that none of them seem able to replicate offline. The founder of the chatroom goes by the screen name Philia. Though not explicitly stated, it’s heavily implied that Yūichi is Philia. Another user of the chatroom is Blue Cat, who we come to find out is Hoshino. The two of them are unaware of each other’s identities as they converse on the forum.
Hoshino does not start out a bully. Rather, he and Yūichi share a sort of victimhood and powerlessness that may be in part what initially bonds them. When Yūichi and Hoshino, along with other friends of theirs, take a trip to Okinawa, Hoshino faces a near-death experience which seemingly changes him. Two experiences, actually - the first being a flying fish that launches at him from the beach shore and just nearly misses. A few local girls who act as tour guides for the boys explain the fish is called a Shijar, and they’re lethal when they hit someone with their long sharp nose. The second occurs after Hoshino and the boys go out swimming. Nearly drowning, Hoshino washes up on the shore, unconscious. The first person to find him is not one of his friends, nor the tour guides watching over them, but rather a character only known as “the traveler” who the group had been running into here and there throughout their trip.
The traveler is a bit of a bumbling fool type. He mooches off the boys’ food and his attire implies he’s rather immature, despite clearly being older than the boys themselves. When he finds Hoshino, he leans towards him in what seems, at first, to be an attempt at CPR. Yet, he does not push against his chest to force the water out, only moves towards him for mouth-to-mouth. It might have been in earnest, but while watching I got a distinctly uneasy feeling, which was only confirmed when the traveler finally calls over the group, and the tour guides provide proper CPR & mouth-to-mouth. In comparison, the traveler was not acting in an effort to save Hoshino.
There’s no way to know whether Hoshino was aware of what appeared like an inappropriate advance by a man much older than him. It’s never remarked on, and the film doesn’t bring it back to us to try and influence our opinion on it.
The boys continue their trip. Towards the end, they run into a grim scene. A few locals overlook the body of the traveler, having hit him with their car. They proclaim “it’s not our fault, it’s not our fault” as the boys and tour guides call in medical help via helicopter.
The boys take a final boat ride on this morbid vacation. As they move through the water, Hosino takes a wad of the cash they have on hand and throws it overboard into the ocean (much to the other boys’ horror). The money flies haphazardly into the ocean.
Following this trip, Philia (Yūichi) posts on the ‘Lilyphilia’ forum.
« Summer 1999. Nostradamus was wrong, but if the world had ended, if my life had ended during my summer vacation, I might have been happier. From: philia »
A reply, from Hoshino.
« It did end. Humanity’s extinct. The world we live in now is “The Matrix”. :-) From: blue cat »
When they return to school, the end of the world is officially set in stone. On the first day of classes, Inubushi, one of the bullies who has always tormented Hoshino and Yūichi, physically assaults another boy in their class as a chastisement for dyeing his hair without Inubushi’s permission. Finding a newfound courage or possibly recklessness (or, most likely, a nihilist genre of rage), Hoshino calls Inubushi out for his behavior, then attacks him. Pushing him to the floor, Hoshino cuts off a lock of Inubushi’s hair. He assumes his place at the top of the food chain with this interaction, and it’s all downhill from here.
To Hoshino/Blue Cat’s musings on the end of the world on ‘Lilyphilia’, Yūichi posts in reply:
« If that’s true, humanity’s last day, was September 1, 1999. The first day of school. From that day on, the world was gray. From: philia »
Separately, following that Okinawa trip, Hoshino and Yūichi occupy their own isolated homes. As frost collects atop them, each might ask, now that they’ve lost their best friend, who they’re supposed to tell about losing their best friend.
#9 on the album is “Star”, ringing in with an ambience that feels reminiscent of one of Mitski’s earlier albums, “Be The Cowboy”, and its more ethereal songs such as “I Glow Pink In The Night”. Of course, it’s not just the sound that harkens back to “Be The Cowboy”, but also a few mirrored motifs. At the start of the song, our protagonist recalls that herself and this lost love “acted like two fools” when they first met. In “Two Slow Dancers”, a track on “Be The Cowboy”, Mitski describes a high school sweetheart and the soft disappointment of growing out of love, being too far from their start to rekindle their affection. “Star” seems to echo this scenario, singing of two fools sharing a formative, fundamental love that burns on regardless of the time that passes.
The song suggests, simply, love is like a star, but this is stated not by our protagonist, but told to her. She describes being taught by what might be interpreted as a lover (possibly the same referenced in “My Love Mine All Mine”, who by her own words, “showed me what my heart was worth”) how to live:
You know I'd always been alone
'Til you taught me
To live for somebody
Though the song itself feels idealistic, there’s a more sinister read to be gleaned from these particular lines. In being taught to live for somebody, then insinuating the love has since been lost, where does the will to live go? That the love lives on through a belated burning, like a star, is perhaps one interpretation – but even a star is finite. It feels almost wrong to interpret this song so pessimistically; everything about it begs you to take the meaning at face-value (dreamily and with a sort of romanticism). In her video on the production, Mitski describes investigating several types of backing music until paring it down to a bare bones composition, with subtle orchestral support.
In the music video itself, we see Mitski standing in a small wooden boat, rowing slowly through a misty water towards no clear destination. The video is in black and white, featuring the figure of our singer mainly in silhouette; shades of gray wash over the frame at every angle, in every cut. Colorless.
It’s a simplistic visual: a woman, staring up at the night sky, moving forwards towards something unseen. Yūichi’s words come back to mind: From that day on, the world was gray.
Optimistic, overlapping string instruments provide a gentle background for an exploration on the lingering effects of a love lost. It’s a triumph of grief, positing that there will always be an echo, a “leftover light” from love, even after the living body of it is long gone. Our protagonist promises to keep hers burning for that which she lost: the “best friend” from “The Frost”, perhaps, or the lover from “Heaven”... or maybe the bird of the soul in “The Deal”? Somehow, the promise rings hollow – we know the fate of them from “Bug Like An Angel”. When you break them, they break you right back.
Where “The Deal” uses a bird to symbolize the soul, the same might be said of physical money in “All About Lily Chou-Chou”. There’s a significance in the difference. Mitski’s album purports that the worth of a soul is tied to that of an animals. It grounds us in the natural world, and, therefore, suggests a soul is inherently good. It shuns capitalist and colonialist overconsumption as killing, or at the very least corrupting, the soul. In Iwai’s film, money represents the soul. Iwai’s characters are stunningly complex and lack moral clarity. Their souls are not inherently anything, but all of them have the capacity for good. It’s also worth noting that the soul in Iwai’s universe is product of, motivator for, capitalism.
I’d argue, in both Mitski’s album and Iwai’s film, the enemy is ultimately the same.
Hoshino’s act of throwing his money overboard is one of his last before the world ends, by Philia & Blue Cat’s description, and the era of “gray” begins. As if speaking to things in the night, Hoshino, perhaps due to the powerlessness he’s felt as a result of bullying and near-death, makes a deal as he discards the cash. He, in turn, sheds his soul, setting the stage for him to become a villain in his own right. Later in the film, one of the girls he’s blackmailed into working for him and his gang, Shiori Tsuda, is seen throwing her cut of the cash onto the dirt path her and Yūichi walk together.
Tsuda tells Yūichi, before throwing the cash towards him, “I heard Hoshino’s sucking money out of you.” When Yūichi moves to pick up the money, she begins kicking him, and pushing him around. Eventually, her anger is redirected towards the cash. She stomps it into the ground, dirtying the paper money and ripping it to shreds. Satisfied with its destruction, she runs to the nearby flooded field water and submerges herself in it.
Tsuda enacts a violent end to “The Deal”, whereas Hoshino simply keeps living, soulless, despite the consequence.
If, in “Star”, the singer is promising to keep the flame of her soul burning, but is, regardless, soulless – who, then, exemplifies this form of grief? Hoshino or Tsuda?
At the end of Mitski’s music video, we see a shot from beneath the water’s surface, the camera close to the tips of the singer’s fingers as she floats, presumably lifeless.
An everlasting love, taught to our protagonist by someone else, perhaps, in the end, is not enough on its own to save her.
Listening to “I’m Your Man”, the tenth track, I imagine our protagonist walking through a dust-laden ghost town (perhaps a nuclear-felled dystopia that is introduced in “The Frost”), struggling against a singular whip of wind as she expresses a dry sort of agony, that of knowing yourself to be unlovable (or else, that of thinking yourself rotten, and fearing that rot to be contagious). Whereas songs such as “My Love Mine All Mine” and “Star” beg for an everlasting love that extends death, “I’m Your Man” suggests fear at the prospect of such a strong connection. Anticipating the end, our protagonist sings into the wind, “one day you’ll figure me out / I’ll meet judgment by the hounds”. The sentiment is echoed by the sounds of barking in the background.
We hear our singer grapple with the fear of being found out as a fraud in love, being outed as something unbecoming and unloveable, and her paranoia over her lover’s response to this. I use “lover” generously, of course, because as we discussed in “The Frost”, there are many times Mitski teeters along the line of literal and metaphorical. It might be her lover who will hate her, in the end; or it might be herself.
“I’m Your Man” returns us to a particular line of “Bug Like An Angel”. In the latter song, Mitski sings, “the wrath of the devil / was also given him by God”. In “I’m Your Man”, the first verse is as follows, in what seems like a response to, or perhaps extension of, what “Bug Like An Angel” started:
You're an angel, I'm a dog
Or you're a dog and I'm your man
You believe me like a god
I'll destroy you like I am
Hoshino’s Godliness to Yūichi’s broken faith in him echo the emotional crux of “I’m Your Man”. Following his rise and usurpation of the role “bully”, Hoshino is worshipped like a deity of violence by his fellow students. He rules with a heavy hand, controlling everything about the kids who surround him. Thus Yūichi, having lost his best friend who is now completely unrecognizable and cruel, enters a gray era of betrayal.
The two remain intertwined, however, in two notable ways. Unbeknownst to them, they both chat on ‘Lilyphilia’ as Philia and Blue Cat. Offline, Yūichi is one of Hoshino’s quieter lackeys – as Tsuda had made mention of, Hoshino often taking Yūichi’s money.
Please note the next two paragraphs detail plot points of the film that handle CSA, prostitution, and rape.
Yūichi does as Hoshino asks wordlessly, for the most part, with his head bowed in every interaction. One of these tasks, of course, is that of following Shiori Tsuda, a girl who Hoshino has blackmailed into enkō, or prostitution that tends to be most associated with grown men targeting young girls. We don’t see what happens in these meetings of Tsuda’s, but the connotation of the practice is typically that of a sexual nature.
Tsuda and Yūichi’s relationship begins tenuously as he starts supervising her during her walks to and from enkō appointments. She notes his crush on another girl at their school, Yōko Kuno. Coincidentally, Kuno is another victim of bullying, being inexplicably shunned by the popular clique of girls in her and Yūichi’s class. Punishing her for merely existing, the head of the clique convinces Hoshino and his gang to do to her what they did to Tsuda. Kuno is subsequently lured to an abandoned warehouse (previously owned by Hoshino’s family, who, it is casually mentioned during this sequence, split up and faced serious financial problems as a result of the factory they ran shutting down). Yūichi is the one who brings her there, lying in order to keep her unaware of the danger. When she enters the warehouse, she is chased by the boys and raped. Yūichi, meanwhile, stands outside the warehouse, but is aware of what’s happening. Hoshino, too, is not inside when it happens, but his influence is palpable.
The next day, Kuno returns to school having shaved her head, seemingly as a way of avoiding Tsuda’s fate. The action references an earlier conversation between Tsuda and Yūichi, where Tsuda ponders aloud to him whether Hoshino would stop making her work for him if she got fat, or shaved half her hair off.
Hoshino betrays Yūichi, Yūichi betrays Kuno – and perhaps the cycle ends with her.
The event casts an ambiguity over Yūichi, who, until now, had been by all accounts a victim of Hoshino’s. He still is, but now crosses a line in the sand. No longer passive, he is an active hand in the violence Hoshino enacts.
“I’m Your Man” frames its singer as God, and the lover, or friend, doomed to eventually discover the implicit rot of the singer, as an angel. “Bug Like An Angel” reminds us of the fallen angel Lucifer, better known as the devil, and prompts us to acknowledge that a well intentioned love can blacken, becoming wrath. The acknowledgement doesn’t ask us to absolve the sinner, but rather brings us to the realization that the sinner was holy-born, too. Nourished by the love of God, the devil was also granted his wrath by the same source, and thus developed into something evil and repulsive.
“I’m Your Man” and “Bug Like An Angel” utilize phrasing which places God not as a passive witness of this degradation but rather an active participant. Simultaneously, the singer denies herself the designation of divine (she is, after all, “your man”, as the title of the song makes clear - not “your god”). In the last verse, Mitski sings:
You believe me like a god
I betray you like a man
The final, eleventh track of the album is called “I Love Me After You”. Breathy, echoing, and growing with each verse unapologetically confident, it is an optimistic end to the collection of stories Mitski has laid out for us. Even just by the title of the song, we are reminded of “Star”’s promise of love outlasting the death of a relationship; “I Love Me After You” suggests that the burning love which persists beyond its origin is one that doesn’t need to be a regretful, lingering burden on a soul but rather an emboldening of your own self-love.
The song begins with the image of its protagonist taking care of herself, “brushing my hair naked / spritz my face with toner”. Instantly it feels post-sex, as if a follow-up to “Heaven”, and both call into mind for us watery analogies. In “Heaven”, a murmuring brook, sipping on coffee, a storm just outside. In “I Love Me After You”, the spritz of toner, splashing water on her own neck, cool water in a glass.
For the first time in this analysis, I’d like to really call our attention and energy to the title of the album: “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”. Clearly, it provokes us to picture a land which is uninhabitable, and so I think of arid desert landscapes, or frigid tundras. I do not picture playful touches of water (a spritz, a splash, “cool”).
Where “Heaven” is a temporary reprieve from dehydration, “I Love Me After You” is fluids dripping from an IV. It promises new growth in the light of inhospitality. The watery analogies also succeed in renouncing the fear our protagonist held in “When Memories Snow”, when Mitski sings, “and when memories melt / I hear them in the drainpipe / dripping through the downspout / as I lie awake in the dark”. In watering herself, there’s a sense of control over her own emotions, her own memories, her own trauma. It’s an act of grasping, actively pursuing a betterment. Nourishing her soul.
“The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We” breaks open the Ether and in its genius explores broken promises, broken deals, and the shattering effects of growing through and out of trauma. It posits that love outlasts life, which can, sometimes, be a burden - memories of past loves, of past losses, can and will haunt you in perpetuity, like the belated light of a star reaching Earth.
In its yūgen philosophy the album begs its listener to recognize that the cyclical nature of self-destruction and the breaking of those personal vows (either to get better, or to get worse) forms the foundation of your personal beauty. It relates the beauty of human emotion directly to that of the living spirit of the Earth, tying us to buffalos and birds, lamenting the violence enacted on those creatures, and enacted on one another.
Mitski’s work in this collection of songs, of stories, advocates self-care. And, since it intertwines the souls of the natural world with humanity’s, “self-care” becomes an expansive concept. To take ownership over yourself and give yourself the love you deserve is to do the same for the Earth. To see the beauty in the Earth is to see the beauty in yourself.
And, so, if the land = the soul, if one is inhospitable, so is the other.
At the end of Yūichi and Hoshino’s journey is a tragedy.
The death of Hoshino.
Preempting this tragedy was another.
The death of Tsuda.
In the sacrifice of their souls earlier in the film, Hoshino opted to throw the money into the wind, and Tsuda chose to destroy her cash. A shedding of the soul, lost to the sea which would in turn claim it, as the sea always does, versus a violent soul death by the holder’s own hand.
On a walk they take back to her house after one of her jobs, not long after the assault on Kuno, Yūichi shows Tsuda Lily Chou-Chou’s music, and she asks to borrow his CDs. He complies, albeit a little reluctant to give away essentially all he has left (the money he’s given by his mom is stolen by Hoshino, and the CD of her latest album that someone bought for him as a gift is broken by Hoshino). He leaves her as she retreats to a serene, picturesque home, calling back to him, “she’ll be alright. Kuno. She’s tough.”
Intercut with shots of Tsuda crying to herself, and standing at the edge of the school’s rooftop, words appear on screen – Philia, Yūichi, writes on ‘Lilyphilia’:
« I wanted to die many times. But I couldn’t. Falling! Falling! Falling! Like an endless loop, I keep on falling. Somebody! Help me! Somebody! Get me out of here! From: philia »
What ensues is an extended sequence of white text over black, as we witness the back and forth of Philia and Blue Cat on the forum. Piano music plays Debussy as we read along.
« Dear Philia, I know you’re feeling the invisible Ether deeper than anybody. From: blue cat »
« I don’t understand. I just don’t understand. From: philia »
« I understand. Because I know the pain you feel. From: blue cat »
« I take a deep breath. “Breathe!” And then I understand it all. Everything Lily means. From: blue cat »
The music shifts as Blue Cat references one of Lily’s fictional tracks (“Breathe”) and more modern music comes in, the sort of ethereal rock Lily is purportedly famous for.
« “Breathe!” I’ll try to say it loud. “Breathe!” From: philia »
« I’m alive! I’m alive! Within the pure Ether! We’re alive! From: blue cat »
« Breathe! Breathe! Breathe! From: philia »
« “Sympathy! Sympathy! Sympathy!” From: blue cat »
« “Arabesque”! “Wounds That Heal”! “Glide”! “Experiment In Love”! “Hearts In September Rain!” “Airship”! “Abyss of Loneliness”! “Music Box”! “Erotic”! “Wings That Can’t Fly”! From: philia … From: blue cat »
The forum correspondence climaxes with Philia and Blue Cat exchanging the names of Lily’s songs (in such rapid succession that the film does not care to designate which screen name posts which song). Finally, we cut from black to an image: Tsuda against a rich blue sky, walking aimlessly as she stares up at the clouds with headphones one. The music cuts out. An airplane passes overhead. A bright red kite flies nearby.
As the kite dips, and more follow into frame, circling around just above Tsuda, the music returns.
Interspersed with Tsuda’s day amongst the kites are flashes between Hoshino, listening to music alone in a field, and Yūichi, alone in his bedroom. Their screen names jump at us from the screen, appearing and disappearing: blue cat. philia. blue cat. philia. We witness a brief scene of the clique leader who sent Hoshino after Kuno speaking passionately to Hoshino’s lackeys (without, of course, Yūichi), telling them Hoshino needs to be held accountable for what’s happened. As the audience, we wonder why they seemed to have turned on Hoshino so quickly. The brief scene ends with the clique leader scolding one of the boys who laughs over Kuno’s shaved head. She asks him, “How can you laugh after someone just died?”
Tsuda comes across a group of men flying the kites which had floated above her during her aimless walk, and, wearing a smile nearly the size of her whole face, she excitedly accepts their offer to give the hobby a try. She takes hold of the strings, pulling them down with force to get the kite to fly higher. She laughs, bathed in sincerity and joy, shown as what she has been the whole time: a child.
Not long before this scene, Tsuda had made a confession over the phone to Yūichi: “Lately when I think of men, I think of ‘customer’.” We witness now a girl who had been stripped of her childhood, dignity and autonomy, as she reclaims, in part, a sense of innocence, and a right to joyful reprieve, that she’d been denied. It almost leads you to believe that she’ll have a happy ending. That she might heal. Forget. Move forward.
The next time we see this girl, she has followed Philia’s earlier message: Falling! Falling! Falling!
She lays motionless on the grass beside a cell tower, surrounded by pieces of a puzzle: a shoe that must have flown off her foot, a CD player smashed by the impact of a long fall, a phone caught on a telephone wire, hanging by its thick, childlike, beaded charms, and, finally, blood. She was smiling just a moment ago.
I think Tsuda’s song would be “Star”. Earlier, I posed the question: if, in “Star”, the singer is promising to keep the flame of her soul burning, but is, regardless, soulless – who, then, exemplifies this form of grief? Hoshino or Tsuda?
In Tsuda’s story, she does quite a lot to retain the heat of her soul. In stark contrast to Hoshino, or even Yūichi, she smiles, often. She has a moment of joy and returns herself to a state of childish innocence, even if just for a moment. In her final moments alive, Shiori Tsuda lives dedicated to her former soulfulness. She is not emotionless. She feels, she feels, she feels. The catalyst for the uptick in morale, this return, briefly, to happiness might be Yūichi’s borrowed CDs. A reason to reinvigorate. But, of course, an everlasting love, taught to our hero by someone else, perhaps, in the end, is not enough on its own to save her.
Hoshino’s death does not reflect Tsuda’s reclaimed agency.
After all, he threw his soul to the wind when he got rid of it. It was the ocean that would, in time, destroy it.
When Lily Chou-Chou announces a concert in Tokyo, Philia and Blue Cat discuss the prospect of, finally, meeting one another at the event. Blue Cat says he’ll be carrying a green apple with his username written in sharpie across the surface. At the concert, Hoshino, carrying this apple, recognizes Yūichi - but not as Philia, simply as a friend (or whatever you can call the pair of them, now). He gives Yūichi the apple, and tells him that if anyone comes up to talk to him, to give them that. His intention to meet Philia appears to disappear; whether it was there to begin with is up for interpretation. I’d argue the decision was made upon seeing Yūichi.
On ‘Lilyphilia’, Hoshino ventures into a space of genuine vulnerability that he’s long since shedded in his offline life. As Shūsuke Hoshino, he is that violent half-God, half-dog of “I’m Your Man”. He’s a raw wound and angry for surviving. As Blue Cat, he nears the label of optimist at times, perhaps if only for the sake of respecting Lily Chou-Chou’s Ether and all it encompasses. He talks Philia out of suicide online, while he is, ultimately, the cause of Shiori Tsuda’s suicide in the “real” world.
The space of his Lily fandom is separate to that of his persona outside of the internet. Seeing his offline world encroach on that of the online, and I believe the sight of Yūichi outside the concert venue forces him to choose one over the other. Ultimately, the choice is between ‘Sympathy! Sympathy! Sympathy!’ – to choose that he does feel, that he possesses humanity and a soul – or the gray world, an apocalyptic hellscape – the latter, a choice that would rid him of that remaining shred of morality, if it’s even there at all. In deciding not to follow through on his desire to uncover the identity of ‘Philia’, Hoshino discards Blue Cat altogether.
As the bird of the soul sings in “The Deal”,
Now I'm taken, thе night has me
You won't hear me singin', you're a cage without me
Your pain is eased but you'll never be free
For now I'm taken, the night has me
Hoshino demands Yūichi to trade him his ticket since his seat is better, then asks him to grab a soda from the concession stand. Yūichi complies, leaving Hoshino in line with both of their tickets. The two lose each other as the line progresses, and, then, as Yūichi returns, he sees through the bobbing heads of the crowd Hoshino, holding up Yūichi’s ticket, then throwing it away. Yūichi is left, abandoned, outside of the stadium. A low-res digital screen looping a video of Lily Chou-Chou is the only thing to keep him company.
One could imagine “The Frost” haunting the visual:
After everyone's long been gone
But me, I was hidin', or forgotten, the only one left
As the concert ends, the crowd disperses. Hoshino, running into Yūichi, comments, “Are you still here?” Then, about the apple, “Did anyone talk to you?” Yūichi gives him the apple back, and with that, Hoshino says goodbye and begins to walk off.
He doesn’t get far before Yūichi begins to scream.
Again, “The Frost” lingers, a sentiment echoed in Yūichi’s release of emotion.
Now I’ve no one to tell
How I lost my best friend
Yūichi covers up the scream by shouting that Lily is exiting the concert to greet fans. A frenzy erupts; the crowd and Hoshino push forward towards the venue, itching to get a glimpse of Lily. In the chaos, Yūichi finds Hoshino, and with Hoshino’s own switchblade, stabs him. Hoshino dies at the scene, falling back into several concertgoers. The soul & the body: dead, destroyed, gone.
There are a variety of wounds, and cycles of abuse, that are explored in the totality of “All About Lily Chou-Chou”.
Yōko Kuno’s shaved head and the promise that her last scene of the film gives, that of her playing piano with the same passionate talent that she had before the assault – we are left with the hope, the optimistic, desperate hope, that she will make it out of this. As Tsuda said, “Kuno’s tough”. A soul well-kept, despite it all.
Shiori Tsuda’s last flight, falling to her death. A wound that should have had the chance to heal, that almost did (it haunts me, still, that only moments before we cut to her bloodied body, we saw her as a child, smiling, playful). Someone who should’ve made it out. A soul that might’ve lived.
Shūsuke Hoshino’s collapse into a screaming crowd, murdered by someone who used to be his best friend, with his own knife. A victim who became a villain who became a victim. A soul that was lost a long time ago.
Yūichi Hasumi’s uncertain future. The film shows us scenes of Yūichi after the stabbing, unsure of what'll be done, in the end, about his fall from grace. He sits in his mother’s salon chair as she finishes dyeing his hair, just a bit lighter per school rules. In green-lit silhouette, he reaches for the suspended hood dryer, pulling the glass dome down over his head. The image feels reminiscent, for those of us familiar with Mitski’s “Star”…
In the very final scene of the film before the credits play, Yūichi speaks with his teacher, who scolds him of a sudden drop in grades, and asks him to try harder. She dismisses him after her lecture, and asks him, on his way out, to tell Kuno she should go home, as she still sits in the classroom just outside the teacher’s office playing piano. As Yūichi leaves, he stops to watch, but does not speak.
In the credits of “All About Lily Chou-Chou”, the chatroom exchanges of ‘Lilyphilia’ continue to flash on screen, not from Philia and Blue Cat but from other members of the forum. There is one message in particular that feels as though it encapsulates the film’s ill-fated characters:
« The wound that does not heal. The wound that may heal. The wound that should have healed. It grows wider, wider. What if the whole body became one big wound? We can still revive, that is “the wound that heals”. From: Lui-hua »
Another user replies:
« The great wound of the heart is Existence. I listen to “The Wound that Heals.” Existence will heal you from the past to the future. From: Shinobu »
Mitski and Iwai’s works have a quality of introspection about them. They turn a mirror to humanity to ask it what the worth of a soul is, and what it means to be rid of it. They both beg us to consider cyclical patterns: an addiction born of a familial inheritance, an eye for an eye, a broken promise breaking you in return, blind hope spurred even in the most dire of circumstances, the inhospitable land in turn corrupting its inhabitants…
But even when the buffalo have been killed, when the land has been leveled by men with violence glinting in their eager eyes, when the world has ended and turned gray, still, even then, souls burn on. For better or worse, lingering on the Earth, like starlight traveling space.
AN INTERESTING NOTE ON THE FILM’S PRODUCTION. The following was originally meant to be a part of this article, but I took it out as it doesn’t necessarily add to our discussion on Mitski & Shunji Iwai’s overlap. However, since it’s genuinely fascinating how Iwai went about creating this film and the project behind it, I’d like to include for optional further reading. Regardless, thank you for making it this far. :)
“All About Lily Chou-Chou” is based on a written project by Shunji Iwai that involved an online forum dedicated to the fictional singer, Lily Chou-Chou. The project is in fact still up, at lily-chou-chou.jp. The forum, ‘Lilyholic’, still hosts an interactive feature that allows users all over the world to engage in discussion with one another. These days, it’s not very active, but I noticed a few posts from recent months which detail users’ struggles with their own lives and unhappiness.
When you navigate to the link “Pascal’s Profile”, you’re taken to a page which outlines the website’s administrator, who goes by the name “Pascal”. He explains his real name is Shunji Iwai, and lauds a new film project by Lily which tells “the story of a series of events that happened on ‘Lilyholic’ last year.” He goes on to say, “I wonder how it will turn out. It's a film that exudes the kind of mood that makes you think, ‘If I could choose my last work, this is the one I want to make my last work.’”
In the “Production Note” section of the site, the narrative of the film, as well as plot points not discussed on-camera, is explained in character by Pascal/Iwai. Pascal, a filmmaker, met Lily when working on a music video production for her. He was enamored by this “modern shrine maiden” and immediately entered a chatroom titled ‘Lilyphilia’ (yes, the very one used by Yūichi and Hoshino). The site was managed by “Philia” – we, as the audience, know this to be Yūichi, but to Pascal and those in the ‘Lilyholic’ universe, Philia’s identity is still yet unknown.
After the incident outside Lily’s concert venue in which Hoshino was stabbed to death by a still-unknown perpetrator, Philia went missing, and ‘Lilyphilia’ was shut down. In its stead, a new site, the one we’re on now, ‘Lilyholic’, opened up. Pascal joined in the migration of Lily fans to ‘Lilyholic’, roused by the passionate persona of the admin nicknamed “Sati”; Sati would eventually disappear as well, and Pascal himself would take over management of the forum. It’s implied that Sati was also Philia, therefore, Sati was Yūichi - though why he changed his screen name and completely moved websites is unknown; it could be interpreted as an expression of his becoming something new with the decision to kill Hoshino.
Pascal notes his own injured back, having been present during the murder of Hoshino and pushed back by the crowd in the subsequent panic. He explains that he’s creating the film on the subject of the murder with Lily’s involvement in order to make sense of the event, which left a traumatic mark on him.
Another link on the real ‘Lilyholic’ website brings you to a new domain altogether, ‘Lily Berry’, an “official fansite” for Lily. The information on this site builds on the film’s universe, deciphering (or at the very least, clarifying) the half-unraveled mysteries of Iwai’s movie. Here, we find an entire biography on Lily, her history, how she came to embrace the “Ether” after learning about it in physics and exploring it in a more spiritual sense. One line of her biography is especially haunting in its innocuous placement, stating, “Lily is surrounded by sad events, such as injuries by staff, suicides by fans, and murders.”
Scrolling down on the page provides lists of albums, images of Lily, TV appearances, and an article published by Yasushi Kawayama in the July issue of “Ripple” (whether this is a real article, or real publication, I couldn’t tell you; I tried to search for it but came up with nothing, though as I don’t know Japanese it wasn’t as in-depth a search as might be possible, so I don’t want to confirm it either way).
The “Ripple” article is not within this fictional world; it meets the audience head on with a truthfulness about the project, and Shunji Iwai’s genius in crafting it.
Kawayama explains Iwai’s project is an internet novel that uses the format of an online bulletin board to tell its story. They mention the real singer behind “Lily” is Salyu. At the end of this short piece on the reality of this project, Kawayama wonders to the reader: “This [the internet novel] was a trap named Lily Chou-Chou. Did we drag Lily out into the real world, or are we the ones being drawn in? I can't help but think it's the latter. But if it's this comfortable, I'll just let myself get caught up in the trap. Or so I think.”
I would encourage those reading to take a look at the website yourself to find all the other delightful details, including reviews and accolades for the film as well as insight from people who participated as extras. It’s a wonderful companion to the movie.
The best way to end this exploration into the world of Lily Chou-Chou and Mitski (both masters of the Ether, who inspire a sort of sentimental and deeply felt adoration in their fans) is with a quote from one of the fans who participated in the Lily Chou-Chou internet novel experience, which is found on the ‘Lily Berry’ website:
”All about Lily Chou-Chou" doesn't end here.
Because this is "part of Satie's (Philia's) confession" and represents the feelings of all the loved ones who have been tossed about.
There is more to the story.
Where will we go from now on as we wander the ocean of the internet?
And if Sati (Philia) "cannot go", what will she do from now on?
As long as Lilyholic exists, Satie will continue to exist.
Yūgen / Japanese Aesthetic Sense. ART NOMURA. (2021, March 14). https://nomurakakejiku.com/lesson_lineup/yuugen
King, G. (2012, July 17). Where the buffalo no longer roamed. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved July 18, 2024, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/.
Jeff Buckley said this in an interview for OOR magazine. Citation to the best of my research ability, though unfortunately it’s hard to find the actual article now, just transcripts without much info re: title and Magazine issue:
der Kamp, B. (1994, August). Unknown article title. OOR.
Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the Thing with Feathers" from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
This was actually fascinating, Ró! This album remains one of my most persistent listening experiences of the year, not because of it keeps me returning to it, but really because the story is so haunting and emotional, so it feels amazing to read into it with an entirely different POV and, also, through the lens of a brand new story! I'll be thinking about this for a long long time, I'm sure of it <3 thank you for sharing
❤️ thank you for reading!!! It really is a beautiful album and has so many interpretations you can take from it, it might be one of my favorites of hers all in all simply because the tracks are so fun to think about - and there’s always something new to take away from it each fresh listen!