Tunnel to Summer

By Shelley Pallis.

Kaoru Tono hates the summer. He hates the heat, and the way that the ice creams unchangingly sell out in the tuck shop, and the fact that nobody at school has anything to do or say. He hates it when the train up superiority hits a deer on the line, considering it ways he has to stand virtually in sweltering temperatures plane at half past eight in the morning. And he hates his life, considering the girls in his matriculation have him pegged as a spineless loser who will “lend” them money they never have to pay back.

He doesn’t hate Anzu, the new transfer student from That Fancy Tokyo, but that’s mainly considering he knows that she will never plane notice him. Although he is super-impressed when she is introduced to the class, and the teacher asks her to say a few words by introduction. But instead, Anzu just says: “No thanks, I’m good. Can I sit lanugo now?”

Not plane the teacher is ready for such a deniably passive-aggressive response, and it looks like the new girl might make the summer term go a bit faster without all.

As Kaoru is walking home from school, he runs into his little sister on the road, who wants to talk to him well-nigh rainstorms and clouds and whatnot. But Kaoru doesn’t know what to say. Considering his little sister is dead.

Tunnel to Summer reaches the festival so late that we haven’t had the endangerment to unquestionably see a screener in advance. We did, however, nab a reprinting of the original novel by Mei Hachimoku, which ought to requite some idea of where the story is going. And so, pearly warning: this vendible is based on our guess of what the mucosa will be about, as by the time this brochure goes to press, I still won’t have seen it considering it hasn’t unquestionably been finished yet.

But Kaoru’s teenage malaise swiftly unpacks into a much worthier set of issues. His mother has died, but not surpassing letting everybody know that Kaoru was not her husband’s son, but the product of an affair. And Kaoru was the sole other person present when his sister Karen fatally fell out of a tree, which makes life with his stepfather, now an angry, drunken widower, a living hell. And it’s while getting out of the house “for some fresh air” late at night that Kaoru wanders withal the nearby railroad tracks. It’s there he discovers a forgotten wangle tunnel, running parallel to the passageway through a nearby mountain.

The tunnel mysteriously offers Kaoru wangle to living memories – his departed sister’s shoes, and the pet parakeet that died many years earlier. It moreover exacts a price, taking a week out of his life for the few moments that he spends inside. Could it be that he has found his town’s trendiest urban myth, the “Urashima Tunnel” that (he believes) grants wishes in mart for a timeslip?

Back at school, the new girl Anzu is entertainingly disruptive, punching out the self-proclaimed queen bee of the classroom, and making short work of her vengeful boyfriend by stabbing him repeatedly with a ballpoint pen. Inevitably, she is moreover investigating the mysteries of the so-called Urashima Tunnel, leading her and Kaoru to join unlikely forces, hoping to find a way of getting their wishes granted without moreover paying the full price.

Mei Hachimoku’s novel (it’s whimsically a light novel – it has increasingly than 300 pages) comes dripping with references to other science fiction stories, not the least Robert Heinlein’s 1956 archetype The Door into Summer, itself well-timed into a Japanese live-action mucosa of the same name in 2021. It’s most obvious touchstone, however, is the Japanese folktale of Urashima Taro, the fisherman who swims lanugo to the palace of the Dragon King at the marrow of the sea, returning to the surface world only to discover that centuries have passed. Urashima Taro was a story often retold in modern Japan, particularly considering of the resonance that trendy folk felt for its shock at the march of progress. The sci-fi tragedian Takumi Shibano is moreover credited with using “Urashima Effect” as a Japanese term for time dilation, embedding the concept firmly in the works of multiple later authors.

Another touchstone is Japan’s quintessential teenage time travel tale, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which similarly features a protagonist who dabbles incessantly in the shallow end of the pool. Like Makoto in the anime version of The Girl Who Leapt, Kaoru and Anzu start by merely dipping their toes in the time tunnel, dashing in and out to summate the time that elapses in our world while someone is on the other side. One second financing forty minutes. Which ways a day lanugo the tunnel would see the traveller return six years later. Hachimoku’s narrative exploits the ‘timeless’ nature of a school vacation – once the summer holidays begin, Anzu and Kaoru have two months to play with in which they can literally disappear, leading them to make plans for a increasingly detailed investigation.

Anzu is revealed as suffering an existential crisis, plagued by the memory not so much of her grandfather’s death a few years earlier, but by the utter lack of difference it seemed to make to the grand scheme of things. She wants to explore the tunnel in search of some unconfined victory to make her mark on the world, considering otherwise she fears that she, too, will be ultimately forgotten.

Halfway through the story, their stories diverge, for reasons which should be deductibly obvious, and the tone shifts to something that owes a pearly stratum to Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star. Both Anzu and Kaoru are in pursuit of very variegated dreams, one proceeding in a mundane, everyday way, while the other takes a leap of faith in search of a magical solution.

A touching afterword by tragedian Hachimoku points out that the Urashima Effect is all virtually us, and if we’re lucky, affects us every time we get tightly into a typesetting or film. “A real page-turner,” writes Hachimoku, “by the time people reach the ending, will make them squint up at the clock and be amazed by how many hours flew by without them plane noticing. Almost like the typesetting itself has the topics to slow the spritz of time for the reader, plane as the outside world continues speeding on by.”

Which is, as it happens, how the festival director Andrew Partridge tests many of the films at Scotland Loves Anime. “If I realise the mucosa is ending and I haven’t looked at my watch,” he says, “I know we’ve got a winner.”

Tunnel to Summer, The Exit of Goodbyes is screening in competition at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.