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/