Hiraeth: The End of the Journey

About a year ago, I wrote a preliminary review gushing about the English release of Hiraeth: The End of the Journey’s first volume. It resonated with my own views on life and death in a way that seemed rare (since then, I watched A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, which scratched a similar yet different itch). This past February, the final English volume—volume three—of Hiraeth released, and despite ending much sooner than I wanted it to, I appreciated the whole run all the same, and maintained my 9/10 rating. You surely noticed that I’ve got a “Mixed Feelings” tag on this review. Well, I read throughHiraeth a second time, paying closer attention to the story. I don’t take back my preliminary review, as that’s how I really felt, and I still think that Hiraeth has some very powerful moments that hit just as hard. However, structurally speaking, Hiraeth doesn’t quite hold up on subsequent readings. I won’t spoil the story apart from speaking in the most general terms, except when I talk specifically about an exchange that happens at the end of volume one divorced from all other context. If you don’t want to risk it, I suggest checking out Hiraeth for yourself if you’re interested. Before I go further, I’ll give a synopsis. Hiraeth is a character drama that takes place cross-country across Japan. Our party of characters go west from Shinagawa City, Tokyo to Shimane Prefecture, which for context takes 1 hour, 25 minutes by plane (in the story, the characters drive and make stops along the way). Shinagawa City is home to 14-year-old Mika, the closest thing to our main POV character. Mika recently lost Mitsuha, who you can freely interpret as her best friend or her girlfriend. Due to grief, Mika has decided that life is no longer worth living. Her initial suicide attempt is foiled by Hibino, a man cursed with immortality. Though he has lived many vocations and known many loves, Hibino is now searching for a way to end his life as well. Accompanying Hibino is a youthful looking god who later goes by Hani. As they’ve lost basically all of their believers to the sands of time, Hani is near the end of their lifespan. Hani is the first one to plan this journey—they must visit shrines and say goodbye to fellow gods they know, and then arrive in Shimane, where the entrance to Yomi, the land of the dead, resides, so that they may formally end their life. Hibino sees Hani’s pilgrimage as an opportunity to reverse his immortality. And Mika, upon learning of Yomi, is excited at the possibility of meeting Mitsuha again, giving her suicide mission a slightly new bearing. And so Mika, Hibino, and Hani travel to Yomi, learning about the histories of different towns (mostly thanks to Hibino having lived those histories himself), getting to know specific people and their life perspectives and struggles, and overcoming their own interpersonal frictions with each other. Let’s start with the positives. First, I want to emphasize that Hiraeth is more about death than it is about suicide. Granted, our main character Mika is suicidal; the main question for her, narratively speaking, is if she should reunite with Mitsuha in death, or not. But, Hiraeth is larger than Mika’s story. We have Hibino, who had to deal with outliving anyone he meets—learning how to process death as it happens only to those around him, never to himself. We have Hani, who is able to literally see the “roads toward death” of every person they meet, and is genuinely yet clinically fascinated by how humans behave on those “roads toward death” they unknowingly walk. We have Chihiro, a student who researches folkloric representations of death partly out of sincere academic drive, but also as a method of coping with something very personal to her. We have Michino, an old woman who suffered loss like Mika has, but who learned to keep living and make compromises when she must. All these encounters influence Mika’s own relationship to death, and by extension her suicidality. Even if suicide is her guiding endpoint throughout, the journey she goes on concerns death in general. It gets heavy, and I don’t blame you if you don’t want to engage with such charged subject matter. However, Hiraeth always makes sure to counterbalance the darkness with some legitimately helpful optimism, and in the end, Hiraeth treats death and suicide with real thought and compassion. In volume 1, Mika is told, essentially, that her desire to die for her friend is understandable and even normal. That feels radical, especially compared to how verbalizing your depression around where I live would result in getting chastised for even daring to “think something horrible like that”, and getting complained at for “not sucking it up like everyone else.” Of course, Hiraeth isn’t advocating for suicide by any stretch (well, one scene in the final volume plays a bit odd when taken out of context), but it does argue that empathy and understanding are fundamental in connecting with and helping others who are struggling. That sounds super obvious, but actually, the most powerful moments in Hiraeth are just these beautiful gestures between people. Moments that, on the one hand, do capitalize on previous development. But on the other hand, they just utterly and completely capture the power of kindness and of vulnerability via these interactions between Hibino and Mika specifically, all the more powerful when death lingers, and lingers persistently, just outside their comprehension. I admit I am weak to that stuff. Every person on planet Earth has their button that can be pressed, and Hiraeth just knows how to press my buttons when it needs to. And the ending of Hiraeth is powerful because I personally felt those feelings before. I’ve been at life’s precipice, needing to decide if I want to live or not. I know what it’s like. The fact that mangaka Yuhki Kamatani writes to that experience—other elements of the writing notwithstanding—cannot be discounted. Of course, not everyone will relate as much as I do, but there are people out there who will relate as much, if not more. That is a genuine power of fiction, and Hiraeth at its best shines with this power. Now, however, is a good time to talk about the negatives. Again, using storytelling to convey powerful and relatable life experiences is good, even if it doesn’t resonate with everyone. Speak your truth rather than appeal to the lowest common denominator. But, I wonder, if Hiraeth should have tried *harder* to be more broadly appealing. I’m not saying that Hiraeth should have filled its story to the brim with tired tropes and canned story beats. I’m speaking more fundamentally: Hiraeth relies on relatability too much to carry its story (a double-edged sword), and there’s a lack of organizational narrative techniques that could have picked up some of the slack—whether that be a logical backbone of dramatic cause-and-effect (maybe you know it as South Park’s “therefore, but” approach), or a built-in layer of thematic meaning that would further organize and add meaning to the story. Those aforementioned “big moments” I mentioned before do pull the story together in meaningful ways, but much the rest of the time, Hiraeth just meanders. It takes these characters who do have a lot of dimension to them, lets things play out in dramatic and messy ways, and asks you to do the work of making sense of what’s happening. And sometimes, basic dramatic cause-and-effect is missing. For example, Hibino has these moments early on where he’s a bit of a jerk, but then he comes back around and plays the “nice adult” without any explanation, where my only reaction is, “Yeah I guess adults are like that sometimes?” Sure, this is fleshing out Hibino’s character in a way, but it’s hard to get invested when scenes have no clear purpose. And Mika’s character arc—the centerpiece of Hiraeth—sometimes has these “learning moments” that barely affect her at all. They’re there more to add texture to the journey than anything. None of this is helped by mangaka Kamatani’s bad habit of making scenes as visually dramatic and shocking as possible, sometimes imbuing scenes with unwarranted importance. These complaints didn’t really apply when I first read Hiraeth, since I didn’t know what would end up mattering or not. In fact, rolling with the chaos was part of the initial appeal, since it made the story feel unpredictable and real. And the fact that this is a character drama that relies substantially on organic conflict might be enough respite from a lot of other stories in manga and anime that feel so artificial, to the point where anything that *isn’t* made entirely out of tropes will feel like the best thing ever. But, it’s on a second readthrough that the novelty wears off, the story cannot rely on unpredictability anymore, and the dysfunctions and inefficiencies of the narrative structure become noticeable. The worst of it is localized in chapter two of Hiraeth, which I consider functionally useless. I had no idea what purpose all the needless drama was serving, and I was actually worried that I wouldn’t like Hiraeth enough to even finish it again. Admittedly, it never gets quite as bad as chapter two ever again, but there’s sprinklings of structural sloppiness throughout—moments of confusion that added up enough to keep Hiraeth from being truly great. An experiential narrative—one that relies on the power of relatability and bolstered by rich details—has only one layer of meaning, regardless of how much meaning is packed into that layer. Stories that truly survive the passage of time have multiple layers with which readers can engage. There is some thematic writing in Hiraeth, of course, but it is not agile enough to keep with the subtle intricacies of Mika’s journey. I did neglect to mention the Japanese-religious subtext in Hiraeth which makes for an additional layer, but I couldn’t ascertain if those elements amounted to something greater than its parts (maybe check Hiraeth out if you are into Shintō and/or Japanese Buddhism). And again, dramatic cause-and-effect would have lent an almost physics-like inevitability to the narrative, bolstering its staying power with function alone. It’s because of these structural weaknesses, along with the subjectivity of Hiraeth’s main message, that I cannot easily recommend Hiraeth to everyone. As a side complaint, I did not like what they did with Hani, the god character. For most of Hiraeth, Hani was not a very prominent character compared to Mika or Hibino, but that did fit in with their detached, observational personality. I figure so long as they lightly interacted with the narrative as they have been doing, it would be ok. However, near the end, something is revealed about Hani, which suddenly adds new aspects to their character, and also ties the overall narrative into a bow so neat it’s disgusting. When I talked about Hiraeth avoiding tired tropes, this is the one big exception. It feels tacked on. I’m not sure if this was an editorial mandate or if this was Kamatani’s idea. It does technically slot in with the rest of the story, but the rest of the story wasn’t asking for something like this either. I understand why there may have been an urge to give Hani more narrative prominence and emotional impact, since they are a “main character”, after all. I admit that going a subtler route with Hani’s character would have been far more challenging to write, but I think it could have been done. Well, at least it doesn’t actually figure that much into the overall story. As a final point, I want to compare Hiraeth with Kamatani’s previous work, Our Dreams at Dusk (which I’ll call Dusk from now on), and talk about why I think Dusk is ultimately the more successful work. I’d skip to the final paragraph if you haven’t read Dusk (not out of spoilers, but because it won't matter to you). For one, Dusk’s narrative structure was much tighter, focusing on main character Tasuku’s journey of accepting his sexuality and learning how to help others like him. His experiences stack in an intuitive way, such that every step of his journey feels meaningful. Meanwhile, as I’ve already mentioned, Mika’s journey is more muddled. The overall arc is satisfying, sure, but the individual pieces don’t fit together as nicely. Hiraeth’s significant focus on Hibino is very welcome and interesting, and I think this time away from Mika does actually add something to the manga. But still, I must wonder if the narrative could have come together more (an extra volume would have been nice). Secondly, while we are firmly in Tasuku’s head from the first moment of Dusk, Mika’s interiority in the early chapters is unknown not only to us readers but to Mika herself. This is because she hasn’t fully accepted her friend/gf Mitsuha’s death, and doesn’t seem to be processing the world around her as real. It takes us a while to really see how Mika ticks, and this can be really hit-or-miss. On my second readthrough, I was not charmed by how Mika seemed to be “suicidal in a quirky way.” She came off like an early-era Adventure Time character. It actually takes some time to get used to Hibino and Hani as well, whereas I feel in Dusk there are at least some immediately palatable characters. It just makes for an odd on-ramp experience for Hiraeth. Lastly, Dusk is about LGBTQ people dealing with present circumstances and learning how to move forward with their lives, while Hiraeth is about people weighing the value of their entire lives (a big task for an immortal like Hibino) as they prepare to either live or die. Both are rich subject matters, but, and this is my opinion, I think the latter is much more complicated and thus harder to completely express. Of course, it’s not like Dusk captured everything about the LGBTQ experience, but it didn’t have to either. Meanwhile, Hiraeth tackles life and death, perhaps the biggest and most expansive topics of all time? I think Hiraeth did a good job with discussing death, but there’s just more opportunity for it to miss something or to not fulfill expectations. Admittedly, I have never identified under the queer umbrella, so I could be underselling Dusk’s capacity to mess up in the same regard. But I think it’s clear that Hiraeth’s ambitions would be particularly difficult to fulfill perfectly. (I just want to mention Kamatani’s art in Hiraeth. Their art in general is very accomplished, and always pleasing to look at. However, I feel Kamatani’s art in Hiraeth is more mature than their work on Dusk. While Dusk was flashy, non-diegetic, and sometimes needlessly detailed (though it at least engaged the eye), Hiraeth was more restrained, and kept its maximalist collages within the context of Hani’s visions, where the fantastical actually makes sense being there. There is one standout sequence depicting “death as nothingness”, using abstract art and minimalism, which is the opposite style of Dusk. It was just cool to see Kamatani do something different.) In conclusion, if you try Hiraeth and find the ride enjoyable, you’ll probably like the whole thing. And I still see myself going back to chapters five and sixteen in the future. However, for me at least, the second reading experience felt compromised. I do wonder if years from now, when I’ve worked through my baggage a bit more, I might come back to Hiraeth and suddenly have Mika’s story click for me—all the little cul-de-sacs in her journey gaining an intimate power that I couldn’t feel before. It’s possible. I just have to keep growing and see what happens. Hopefully by then, stories like Hiraeth will make more sense, not less.