Yodaka was an ugly bird. One day, a hawk forces Yodaka to give back his name. Struggling against this, Yodaka comes to understand the rules of living in this world through pain. Starting from the idea of how we perceive the world, we look back at “The Nighthawk Star.” Then, three questions arise about “The Nighthawk Star”: ‧ What does “home” mean to Yodaka? ‧ Why does Yodaka burn himself up? ‧ Why does Yodaka desperately try to protect his own name? The answers to these three questions are sought through the process of creating the work based on “The Nighthawk Star.”

In a world that has been turned upside down, we still want to keep chasing our dreams. On the day when many artists lost the places where they could live and create amid the COVID-19 crisis, a film director who also found himself in difficult circumstances came up with one thing he could still do right then and there. To document the day when cinema and culture died, he listened to the voices of a wide range of people—actors, musicians, comedians, and Tokyo Shimbun reporter Masaaki Nakamura—in this gripping documentary. On April 7, 2020, the first state of emergency was declared. The closure of movie theaters, the shutdown of studios, and the cancellation of all kinds of live entertainment were decided. To at least leave a record on film of the day cinema and culture died, we boarded the first train and met in Shinjuku. We listened to the cries of film workers, actors, musicians, comedians, and people from all walks of life. The director himself contracted the novel coronavirus. And then came a meeting with a newspaper reporter. There was only one thing we wanted to ask: “After the COVID-19 crisis, what is your dream?”

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.