From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: My Path to “Anohana” and “The Anthem of the Heart”

By Mari Okada and Masayoshi Tanaka

From the writer of "Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day" and "The Anthem of the Heart" comes the next expressive tale of the fight against one's own demons.
Mari Okada grew up in rural Chichibu, a truant for most of her adolescent life. She observed school life from afar, often refusing to leave the confines of her room. But with the fateful encounter of a visiting school teacher, Okada found a way through the echelons of school using her untapped skill of turning words on a page into a unique voice that truly captured the essence of youthful spirit.
From her own personal desires to leave home and find a place in "the world outside," Okada came face-to-face with her own anxiety and let her stories speak out on her behalf of her struggles to truly find peace with the world around her.
"From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: My Path to 'Anohana' and 'The Anthem of the Heart'" is a gripping autobiography that details the not-so-succesful life of one of anime's biggest screenwriters as she faces the hardest challenge of all: finding herself through her own works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J-Novel Club
• Release date: May 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781718301603

Book preview

Table of Contents

Cover

Prologue: The Anthem of the Heart (The Heart Wanted to Shout)

Chapter 1: A Place to Belong in School

Chapter 2: Who Do I Say Hello To?

Chapter 3: Day by Day, My Life Disappears

Chapter 4: Warming Up For a Big Occasion

Chapter 5: Mother, Your Hands Aren’t Clean

Chapter 6: Chichibu, the Cage of Green

Chapter 7: Mr. Shimotani and My Grandfather

Chapter 8: Through the Tunnel and into Tokyo

Chapter 9: I Want to Become a Screenwriter

Chapter 10: From DTV Films to Anime

Chapter 11: A Screenplay of The World Outside

Chapter 12: My Mother, the Protagonist

Chapter 13: Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

Chapter 14: The Anthem of the Heart (The Heart Wants to Shout)

Epilogue: Something that Takes Shape when Released

About J-Novel Club

Copyright

prologuetitle

You would do well to choose your ringtone carefully.

Imagine a dimly-lit hallway connected to a waiting room. Several people with pale faces rush out of the hallway in frantic search of someone. They emerge briefly, only to disappear again in search of someone else. Everyone utters something different along the way, but they always end up saying Sorry! Imagine such a tense scene, but with an incessant ringtone blaring out from someone’s smartphone: an anime’s opening theme; the Dragon Quest level-up jingle; the theme song of an old TV show—a sound so utterly out of place, it warps the atmosphere around it.

I composed the script for the anime film The Anthem of the Heart. Immediately after the film was completed, it was screened in Chichibu, the town where the story was set. Held in an outdoor venue called Muse Park, this was a special event where I made a speech alongside the director, Takayuki Nagai. I somehow managed to get through my stage appearance intact, but when the film itself started, it was beset with technical difficulties. Just as the story was reaching its midway point, the footage suddenly cut off.

In the darkness of that summer night, the audience waited for what felt like an eternity for the film to resume.

It was late August, 2014— The humidity was still stifling around then. Chichibu was already a difficult place to travel to even at the best of times; and from there you had to get on a bus just to reach the event, which was located at the peak of a mountain. To make matters worse, the screening commenced at night, which meant that, as time wore on, many of those who had come from other prefectures wouldn’t be able to return home that same day. I’d heard that quite a few people had anticipated this and arranged for overnight accommodation accordingly. They had come all this way, expending so much effort and money, all for the sake of an original film that no one had ever seen before. Nobody could vouch for its quality; nobody could say beforehand whether it was interesting or not. They had done all of this just for us, but what did they receive in return?

Nagai and the voice actors had taken a bus back to Tokyo when the pre-screening talk show had ended. Nagai had probably kicked off his shoes and fallen asleep like a log, sitting cross-legged like he always did. He had pulled an all-nighter just the day before.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like going home, so I stayed behind with all the staff at the venue. But because of that, I became an ineffectual busybody when the sudden mess started. I paced around the hallways restlessly, unable to do anything except twiddle my thumbs. Whenever someone passed by me, they would say things like: We’re terribly sorry, Ms. Okada or We’re trying to get the situation under control, Ms. Okada.

I didn’t want them to apologize to me. For one thing, I didn’t want people fussing over me, and I certainly didn’t want them attaching Ms. Okada to every little thing they said. In an attempt to escape from all the painful awkwardness, I retreated inside a tiny and secluded dressing room. It was there that I realized why everyone had been apologizing to me.

My face was bright red.

Whether it was because I was furious or because I wanted to cry, I don’t know. At any rate, my flushed face was staring back at me through the mirror of that dressing room. I looked like I was about to faint. As I gazed at myself, I thought dispassionately: I’m getting old. I was at an age now where crying would ruin any speck of charm I had. Seeing my face in that state drove home the idea that nothing in life is permanent.

As I was pondering such philosophical thoughts, I received a text message from my aunt, whom I’d been forced to invite to the event.

Hasn’t it started yet? Everyone’s waiting.

My mother had also come to the venue today. A number of events had been held in Chichibu thus far, but I had never personally reached out to my mother about them. I didn’t want her to watch me fumble my words onstage.

And I especially didn’t want her to see me so defeated.

I’m really, truly sorry.

There was a voice outside the door. It belonged to Shunsuke Saito, a producer.

You’ve worked so hard on this, Ms. Okada. I swear I’ll do something about it.

Every once in a while, Saito would get carried away and say things like that. Despite the fact that our current dilemma was entirely out of human hands, he probably felt some responsibility for not preparing a backup. I didn’t blame Saito one bit; if anything, I wanted to cheer him up.

But all I could say was— Enough already.

I’m hopelessly inadequate with words. Whenever I try to say something, the words will clog up in my throat. I may think of three or four potential things to say, but I’ll flounder over the right choice. Feeling compelled to answer immediately, I’ll invariably pick the wrong option.

Until I became a scenario writer, I’d thought that it was solitary work where you could carefully pick the right words to use and express your feelings perfectly. But that’s not how it was at all.

Being an anime scenario writer means grappling with people. You can’t just write your feelings in text; you have to say the words out loud.

The production of The Anthem of the Heart had been fraught with difficulty.

When making an original anime, you have to complete the script first before you can start animating any part of it. I stumbled over that very first step.

Nagai and I hadn’t been able to see eye to eye at all. We had become very close after working together on so many projects, and because of that, we lost all pretense of politeness or restraint around each other as the situation worsened.

Don’t give me that crap. I’m sick of your shit. Piss off. Words that you’d never think would be uttered in an adult workplace flew out of our mouths. Underneath the gentle world portrayed in the film was a reality underscored by hostility and toxicity. Every morning I woke up feeling like I was in a haze, as if the world were spinning around me.

The reason that Masayoshi Tanaka, the character designer and chief animation director, didn’t attend the event was because he and the animation staff were frantically at work putting together the final corrections on the animation. If Nagai and I had been able to work together better, we would have had more time to complete the production itself.

And yet, it’s strange. I felt a peculiar kind of fondness for this script, which had been completed in the midst of all that doom and gloom. The Anthem of the Heart ended up becoming a very important anime to me, belying the circumstances in which it had been made.

Feeling that I had scaled a mountain, I loosened up and let my guard down. That was when the screening trouble happened.

When I thought about how much the audience must have been looking forward to that screening, my stomach churned in pain. As I stood there alone, my imagination ran wild. I thought about dashing onto the stage right that very minute and prostrating myself in front of the entire audience. To tell them how really, truly sorry I was to have wasted everyone’s time.

But then, something else occurred to me. Three people’s names were attached to this film: mine, Nagai’s, and Tanaka’s. If I showed up alone, wouldn’t I be making it out that I was the main character here? The audience might like our work when it was done by the three of us, but detest me personally.

Besides, look at what an emotional wreck I was. I was absolutely sure that I’d burst into tears while apologizing. If that happened, I could just imagine what people would say.

What a stupid bitch. It’s disgusting to see an old hag cry. Bring out the voice actors already. Isn’t it like we all said? Mari’s an emotionally unstable narcissist.

Trapped inside my own head, the slurs against myself intensified. My willpower to leave this tiny and suffocating waiting room steadily evaporated.

It was then that I had a sudden thought:

I really haven’t changed at all since back then.

Since the time I grew up in Chichibu— When I’d been entrapped in a town surrounded by mountains; when I’d shut myself away from the world even further, lying inert in a room surrounded by walls.

I’d never been able to tell anyone that I’d grown up in Chichibu.

This was something that had been exposed on Twitter and the Internet long ago. And yet, despite that, I’d never been able to make that fact concrete, to declare it with my own mouth. I made each and every journalist erase their words whenever they wrote that I’d grown up in Chichibu in the Saitama Prefecture. Every time I asked for that, I felt as if I were suffocating.

How long was I going to be chained by the past?

I came out of the waiting room. I’d accomplished nothing, but I figured that I had better go outside for the moment. I knew from experience that if I stayed inside, I’d only berate myself and make things more painful.

By then, nobody was left in the hallway; it was dead silent. The quickest way to the venue was to go out of the hallway and into the first hall, and from there you had to come out through the lobby. A lot of the staff members had probably gathered in the lobby and were likely having a serious conversation. I didn’t want to intrude on everyone, so I decided to go out through the back entrance.

When I opened the back door, I was taken aback by the silence.

Just one hundred meters in front of me, there should have been hundreds of people, and yet all I could hear was the buzzing of insects. That only made the silence seem even more overbearing.

All I could see was verdant greenery. Chichibu’s Muse Park had been built when I was in high school, so it wasn’t that familiar to me personally; but when I was in elementary school, I did go on an excursion to the nearby Ongaku-ji Temple. Did I have fun back then? Not particularly, from what I recall. I remember not getting along well with the most popular kid at the time and eating my lunch alone, feeling anxious and miserable.

Anyway, I decided to go around the parking lot and into the venue. I tried to walk, but my nerves were too strained and my limbs wouldn’t move. Before I knew it, I was being attacked by mosquitoes from all angles.

Over and over, I scratched the places where the mosquitoes had bitten me.

Incorrect, incorrect, incorrect... I felt as if my body had cross marks all over it. It was then I recalled something that someone had once said to me:

Okada, you’re a failure of a human being.

chapter1title

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology defines truancy as being absent from school for more than 30 days a year. Going by that definition, I officially became a truant in elementary school.

In order to cook up an excuse to skip school, I’d roll up my pajamas past my stomach and dream of getting a cold. If I woke up those mornings without a cold or bowel problems, I’d rub the thermometer against the futon. When confronted with the reality that you can’t actually change a thermometer’s reading using friction, I’d move to the kitchen with the idea of using hot water. It was then that I’d be discovered by my mother, to whom I’d mumble a feeble excuse about cleaning the thermometer. After putting on so many childish pretenses of being in pain, I would always receive a cold look from my mother, who saw right through my fake illnesses. Even then, I still succeeded in skipping school once or twice a week.

My classmates and the people around me saw through my acts as well, obviously, but they never acknowledged me as a truant. Going by the literal definition of truancy, there was no way I could talk my way out of it; but the word truant has an air of defeat around it that I certainly didn’t want to accept.

At the time, a game called Ten Times Fast was all the rage.

Say white ten times fast. White white white... What do cows drink? Milk. Wrong, it’s water!

When you repeat the same word ten times, it starts to lose its meaning in your mind. Wordplay was big with elementary schoolchildren at the time, and many publishers were releasing books with suggestions of words to use with Ten Times Fast. At first I played along with it cheerfully, but as the number of challenges increased incessantly, a particular one had come up. Whoever devised it must have wanted to curse me.

The words were true aunt.

Say true aunt ten times. True aunt true aunt...

Who skips school on New Year’s Day?

Truants. Wrong! Everyone skips school on New Year’s Day.

I was the only one my classmates liked to use these words on. But if I let my face cloud over even a little, it would be the same as admitting that I was a truant. I was regularly performing simulations in my head so that whenever the true aunt question came up, I could immediately answer with Everyone! As long as I could rattle off the correct answer, nobody could press me