The streets of Harajuku in Japan are overflowing with Kawaii, a chaotic yet pure and unfiltered youthfulness. I walked through Harajuku several times while making this music video, and I wondered what “love” in this city would look like visually. After listening to City Cyndrome’s music, I wanted to create an animation that captures the intersection of the perspectives of a tough woman and a Harajuku boy, their near-misses, and an almost arrogantly personal point of view. As for the technique, I started by drawing with air spray and watercolor.

When listening to “Hada no Yume” as a song, I felt my chest tighten with a deep ache, as if something within the hearts of the living were drifting to the surface, in a film where death and life quietly coexist and seep into one another. Through the MV, which I was invited to make after Director Horigimoto saw my work Honekami, I wanted to depict the nature of Shikoku and Kochi with tactile detail, and create an image that was not a line-by-line visual translation of the poem. What is “Hada no Yume”? The innocent, soft sense of reassurance in which one can remain unaware even of being “naked” is just like the feeling of those left behind, warmed by thoughts of the person they love. I wanted, in my own way as an MV, to weave into it the director’s feelings for the film, as well as the gentleness of the light that binds the false image and the real one, through the life and death close to me, and through flowers and the seasons. Lost lives do not return, and the living can only continue to remember. I created this piece while thinking of the mother in the film Hada no Yume, and of Yume. https://honamiyano.com/works/

When I was entrusted with the ending for the new anime adaptation of Yasuhiro Nightow’s TRIGUN, by the hugely popular manga artist behind series such as Blood Blockade Battlefront, I looked through a great deal of reference material and felt the poignancy and pain born from the love and sacrifice between two brothers who keep missing each other, as well as the strength to keep asking those questions despite everything. In addition, the quiet celebration and joy evoked by the star in the ending theme “Hoshi no Kuzu α” (Salyu × haruka) seemed to coexist with a certain sorrow—the ache of being unable to reach the stars. From these impressions, I chose to center the work on Knives’ perspective and the theme of stars, and rather than depicting stars as random lights or movements, I wanted to treat them as something with form and meaning, incorporating the myth of Gemini as one of the zodiac signs into the visual background. I also felt that the image of stars disappearing by morning and reappearing at night was closely tied to the relationship between the protagonists, Vash and Knives.

This work is an animation based on my past experience of confronting death for the first time, set on the Shimanami Kaido. In some regions across Japan, there is a custom called “honekami,” in which, after cremation, one eats the bones of the dead in an attempt to take them into oneself and overcome grief. Whether I wanted it or not, my family in my hometown had this custom. The first death I experienced was my father’s, but when I was made to try “honekami” as part of the ritual, I could not bring myself to chew the bones. That became a childhood trauma: an experience of being unable to face my father’s death directly, and not knowing how to accept it. Like an imaginary bone stuck in my throat, it could not be put into words, nor could it be forgotten. More than ten years have passed since I left my small, distant hometown at the age of 15. Fireworks storage buildings still remain along the island’s coast. The fact that there were fireworks magazines, rather than air-raid shelters, in my neighborhood made me feel that death and merciless violence existed for me not as something to be endured, but as something to be inflicted. When I think about these things as an adult, I came to link my father’s bones with the fire in the fireworks magazine, and decided to face “honekami” once again. The island’s landscape and sea are full of life, and within their calmness there is an unchanging severity. The shadows of the dead still exist in the same space and time, both now and in the past. Through this project, by blurring the boundary between life and death, I sought to create a confrontation with the bones I could not chew. The visual concept of this project was to merge natural landscapes with childhood memories, and to visually bring memories to life through the accumulation of dots. For this reason, I used colored pens to layer pointillist dots on paper, then filmed the paper under a camera while placing it over transmitted light. In doing so, I hoped to entrust the haziness of memory and the emotions of childhood to the technique as particles of colored light.

Opening video created to mark the Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival’s renaming to “Rainbow Reel Tokyo” in 2017, the year the festival celebrated its 25th anniversary. Using the phenakistoscope, a visual toy invented in 1831 that exploits the persistence of vision, as a motif, we aimed to evoke the historical atmosphere of this queer film festival in Japan. Colored with ink on paper and filmed.