Blog Post

Spoiler warning: The Ending of Perfect Blue and all of Millenium Actress

The characters in Satoshi Kon’s films are always running.

They chase each other, gliding through Kon’s dream-like worlds, unbound by time and place. Hana, Gin and Miyuki chase after the abandoned baby Kiyoko in Tokyo Godfathers. Rumi chases after her j-pop idol protégé-turned-actress Mima Kirigoe in Perfect Blue. Detective Toshimi Konakawa chases after Dr. Morio Osanai who, in turn, chases after the titular Paprika (Dr. Atsuko Chiba in disguise) in Paprika. Each film’s story culminates in a moment where the leads are forced to act — to realize their ultimate identity and fate, and to run like hell.

Why do they run? Hana runs after her stolen motherhood. Rumi chases after Mina in order to kill and assume her identity. Morio chases after Paprika to rip open her skin and steal Atsuko from within. Often, characters who physically run are also doing so figuratively. Miyuki and Gin run from their pasts as a runaway child and deadbeat dad, respectively. Toshimi is running away from his nightmares of an investigation gone wrong. Mina is running away from her life as an idol and all of the expectations that came with it. Kon’s creations run from what haunts them; toward who they truly are.

People often discuss the role of dreams in Kon’s films. I’ve read many dissections of other themes: reflections and mirrors, modes of transportation, genre fiction tropes, and gendered fashion, to name a few. These themes pervade his work. But, to me, the beating heart of Kon’s films is the sound of feet rapidly hitting the floor. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the film I return to time and time again is Millennium Actress.

I watch it once a year. Near the end, on cue, I sob. This has been my tradition since I first watched it. I always wondered if it would stop, but 12 years later, it hasn’t. It’s the sort of a thing I force friends to experience once we become close enough. My 10-heart event is that you get to watch this weird anime about Japanese cinema history and watch me cry like a baby. I get the sense that people don’t understand why it affects me the way it does. Why a film that’s largely just a made-up Japanese film star sprinting through the scenes of her old movies in flashbacks makes me break down like that. For a long time, I didn’t get it either.

Millennium Actress tells the story of the life, work, and tragedy of fictional Japanese actress Chiyoko Fujiwara. This story intertwines with the history of Japan, shown through flashbacks to her roles in various fictionalized, yet familiar, Japanese films. These flashbacks are framed through an interview conducted by Genya Tachibana for a documentary about the actress’s life. These snapshots of Chiyoko’s life and films are interspersed between Genya’s attempts to hide his history working for her studio and his dream to finally be seen by his idol. The interview uncovers Chiyoko’s lifelong search for the love of her life: a painter and anti-government rebel she met briefly as a child, who vanished while fighting against the rise of fascism in WWII Japan. Near the end of the film, we discover that the painter died at the hands of a fascist policeman. The interview ends as Chiyoko passes away from old age, watched over by Genya.

It isn’t this story of obsession and loss that makes me cry. For reasons I struggled to explain, it picks at a very specific scab on my heart: my memory of discovering and embracing that I’m a trans woman. It is not difficult to find transsexual themes in many of Kon’s films. From the explicitly trans Hana, to the recurring theme of transforming into a different woman in Paprika and Perfect Blue. Kon’s characters stare into mirrors as they confront the separation between who they are and what they wish they were; they transform into women, they hide from their pasts, they confront the expectations of womanhood. All very relatable to many trans people.

Compared to those concepts, though, it can feel like a mystery as to why Millennium Actress, a film about the history of a country I know little about and its films that I’ve never seen, strikes this chord in me. Why I don’t cry when Hana lets Kiyoko and her dreams of motherhood go, or when Mima meets a broken Rumi and confronts the reality of violence in womanhood with love and acceptance.

Millennium Actress employs many of these themes too, but they are far more subtle. There aren’t any transformations beyond Chiyoko and Genya donning the costumes while re-enacting her old films. Even then, the roles they play are often direct analogues of their real selves. These moments don’t explore the desires to become someone else seen in some of Kon’s other work, but as the film progresses, they emphasize the role gender plays in a life’s journey.

Throughout Chiyoko’s life, there is a constant conflict between becoming someone the painter wouldn’t recognize and needing to transform in order to find him. Her pursuit of the man she loves leads to her gradually embracing a more masculine appearance: from the besieged lady of a Sengoku-era castle, to a ninja, a geisha, a teacher, and a spaceman. The mixture of shifting attire and gender roles flow in parallel with her real-life conflicts: the pursuit for her greatest love and society’s expectations of her settling down and becoming a wife. Chiyoko's pursuit of the painter masculinizes her.

This is not uncharacteristic for Kon’s Films. In Perfect Blue, Mima’s transition from idol to actress follows a similar shift from femininity to masculinity. In "Reflections on the Subtitling and Dubbing of Anime: The Translation of Gender in Perfect Blue, a Film by Kon Satoshi” Daniel Enrique Josephy explores the way gendered sentence particles in Japanese are deployed to showcase this conflict and journey. As Mima gives in to her past and the ghostly apparition of her idol self, she slips into more feminine words and inflections. Conversely, as she overcomes this conflict, she sheds them. This level of intent, atop Kon’s emphasis on telling stories that center the complex lives of women and their struggles, demonstrates his thoughtful approach to stories about gender and transformation.

Exploration of gender isn’t exclusive to Chiyoko. Genya serves as a foil to many of the men in Chiyoko’s life. Unlike her ex-husband, the film director of her studio, Genya treats her with a distinct deference and respect, especially with regards to her quest to find the painter. Despite the initial framing of Chiyoko as his celebrity crush, the film repeatedly suggests that his quest to find her is a parallel to hers. His is a love of what she represents and a desire to preserve that; to help her keep running after the painter. Throughout the interview, as the cuts between scenes in reality and in her films blur more and more, Genya repeatedly shows up to save the day. Each time he reasserts that his sole purpose is to help her escape those that would halt her endless pursuit.

A motif that threads the film together is a single, mysterious key given to Chiyoko by the painter. As the painter says, “it’s the key to the most important thing there is.” The film initially implies that it’s the key to his suitcase of paints. After escaping the police, he leaves it in the snow for her, and she begins her quest to return it to him. Possession of the key keeps Chiyoko dedicated to her chase. It prevents her from marrying the director, leading him to steal it. Its loss causes her to stop searching. Genya acquires the key after Chiyoko gives up searching for the painter and retires from acting. The key inspires Genya to chase after Chiyoko in that same way. Characters in both Chiyoko and Genya's lives interpret their parallel quests as a romantic journey, but repeatedly they assert that their goal is just to return that key.

It reminds me of my pre-transition feelings about womanhood. The messiness of blurring the lines between loving someone and chasing after what they represent. Deep down, years before I’d figured any of this out, I saw myself in the way that Genya loved. I felt this strong passion and desire to support the women and trans people in my life. To hope they could acquire the thing that would fill the void in my own heart. It was easy to confuse it for a crush, but it’s a feeling that doesn’t have a word — to be happy that at least someone got to have the thing you wanted, even if you couldn’t. Scene after scene, Genya watches Chiyoko chase after this indescribable thing... he cries tears not quite of sadness, not quite of joy.

This feeling is not compersion, mudita, or some other term for sympathetic joy. Those are all too selfless. The jealousy is still there, somewhere between grief and denial. It isn’t a possessive jealousy. It’s a feeling that breaks your heart with joy and despair all at once. Kon’s films are masterpieces at depicting the harm gender-roles have on women. In each, he explores their lives in all their genuine messiness. Truly, I love all of them. But Millennium Actress shows me something different: the gentle tragedy and joy of a life spent chasing something that society doesn't want you to reach.

the old crone that emerges in Chiyoko's reflection saying 'I hate you more than I can bear'

There’s a strangeness about relating to a cis person as a transsexual. Honestly, I so rarely understand the things non-transsexuals say and believe that, when I do, I become suspicious. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the archaeology you do into your own life after you transition. That weird obsession you had with turning into a girl dragon as a kid. The time your friends (who were all girls) commented on how little arm hair you had and you took it as a compliment. The way you always ended up dating chicks that looked identical to you. Maybe I’m just seeing something that I wish was there. “They long for everyone to reveal themselves wherever they are.” (The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions)

Maybe it’s nothing at all. The way Satoshi Kon’s depictions of women feel eerily accurate could just be the signs of a master screenwriter and director. An unrivaled ability to convey emotions that I’d only ever experienced in moments where I almost admitted to myself that I was transsexual before recoiling in fear could just be a coincidence. He passed away in 2010, so there’s no way to ever know.

A little over a year ago, while digging through old interviews like Genya chasing down Chiyoko, I found something strange. Susumu Hirasawa, the composer for the soundtrack that scored Millenium Actress, whose own music explicitly explores ideas of gender and transition, said this:

A long time ago, in high school, I made a friend. She would later transition, just before she vanished from my life. We met at church camp and talked for days on end, during which I would realize I probably wasn’t straight. We went on a single date. She gave me a copy of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime”, telling me it was her favorite book. I still have it and I’ve never been able to give it back. At this point, I don’t even know where I would start. How could I read this interview and not see myself in it? How could I not see the ways we saw strange secrets in one another? How could I not think about the book she gave me a long time ago.

When I watch Millenium Actress, I cry at a very specific moment: when the chasing stops. When Chiyoko lays on her deathbed in the hospital, Genya at her side. When she says that she was happy to pass on the story before she dies. She says, “Don't feel sad. After all, I'm going… after that man again. See? I have the key, thanks to you. It's opened the door to my memories of him.” I cry and think about the people we all chase after, about the keys we don’t get to return, and about how not all of us get that moment when we realize: