Your Name.

Your Name. is the original novel that Makoto Shinkai wrote for the animated film of the same name that he himself directed. The simplified Chinese edition was brought in by Tianwen Kadokawa and published by Baihuazhou Literature and Art Press, translated by Kushanshui. The novel unfolds in alternating first-person narration: Miyamizu Mitsuha, a high school girl living in the remote town of Itomori, far from the metropolis, born into a family of shrine maidens, is weary of her closed-in life and the family pressure brought on by her father's role as town mayor; one day, she wakes up in a dream as a high school boy living in Tokyo—Tachibana Taki. And in Tokyo, Taki also dreams of being a country girl, living through unfamiliar family life and shrine rituals. The two gradually realize that they are swapping bodies at a fixed frequency. They leave each other messages on their phones, keep each other's lives in order, grow bit by bit familiar with the world the other inhabits, and come to feel affection across a distance in which they "cannot see each other." But the swapping suddenly stops. Following the landscapes in his memory, Taki goes in search of that town, only to discover a heavy truth: what separates him from Mitsuha is not merely space. The novel advances through eight chapters—"Dream," "Clues," "Daily Life," "Visit," "Memory," "Reappearance," "Beautiful Struggle," "Your Name."—translating the landscapes and emotions the film presented through its camera into the separate inner monologues of Taki and Mitsuha; compared with the images, the words draw closer to the two characters' inner hesitation, shyness, and fixation. In the afterword, Makoto Shinkai admits that when he wrote the novel, the film was not yet finished, and that "it's hard to say which is the original, the film or the novel." The novel's plot largely matches the film's, but it depicts only what the two protagonists know and see; precisely for this reason, readers can encounter the hesitation and feelings beyond the screen. This is an entry point into "another way" of understanding the work.