Headscratchers / Your Name

• So, there is this 3-year time gap between the two of them that they are unaware of the whole time. Which makes no sense if you take into account that they live each other's daily lives, with appointments, looking at phones, memos, events, even diaries... The fact that the days don't match up with the dates (for example, March 15th is Saturday in one timeline, but Wednesday in the other) should be obvious on very early. You could argue that they never really remember the dreams in detail, and, as for normal dreams, small discrepancies (or even large ones) usually go unnoticed... Except that they wholly remember their normal lives in the dream, they actively try to communicate to help each other out, and Mitsuha makes very detailed notes in Taki's phone. So when they stop being confused about the whole ordeal, they take a very analytical approach. The implication is that these transfers were going on for a few months at least. There's no way they wouldn't notice.
  • Actually, if this◊ 4chan-compiled timeline is correct, everything plays out in only about 1 month, which given the rush makes not noticing... a tiny bit more plausible.
  • It is also possible that they're actually aware, but they're too preoccupied with frantic/desperate attempt to adapt their lives as different person.
  • Their diary apps also don't show the year.
  • While the two are switched, they seem to forget key details when they return to their own bodies and toward the end even forget each other's names. Considering that they couldn't even remember something as important as names, the power that caused them to switch bodies in the first place may have prevented them from acknowledging that the years were different.
  • The year isn't the relevant part, though — if you went to sleep on Tuesday the 1st, woke up the next day and it was Saturday the 2nd, surely you'd notice even if you didn't know the year, right?
  • Judging by Taki's confusion on the day of the visit to the god's body, evidently not.
  • They could have easily learned the year by watching the news, or the date on a magazine/newspaper, and then leaving notes about it in each other's diary apps. Of course, it would have killed the reveal when Taki sees current-day Itomori, but it can still be seen as a plot hole.
  • Mitsuha leaves a note in Taki's diary, "By the time the date is over, the comet will be visible in the sky." This line confuses Taki, but he doesn't seem to think, "Wait, that happened three years ago."

• On the subject of Mitsuha's Important Haircut, in the original timeline, she is shown cutting her hair on the morning of Tiamat's fly-by after she feels a strange sense of longing while thinking about Taki's date with Miki. However, after Taki drinks Mitsuha's kuchikamisake, and wakes up in her body one last time on that same morning, Mitsuha's hair is already in a short bob. Is there any reason for this discrepancy other than to preserve a visual indicator of character development?
  • Is it actually the morning of Tiamat's fly-by? In Taki's trip through Mitsuha's memories after he drinks the sake, the scene where Mitsuha asks her grandmother to cut her hair happens directly after the scene where she goes to Tokyo (the day before the comet flyby). It's not clear whether it's morning or evening, so it could possibly happened just after Mitsuha came back from Tokyo, heartbroken that Taki didn't recognize her. That's why she already has a short bob haircut on the morning of the comet flyby day. Actually, in some scenes of the film, the timeline sort-of doesn't make any sense, like when the first time Mitsuha wakes up and grabs her breasts in confusion, then screams in shock when she sees herself in the mirror. The next scene treats her as if she's the 'real' Mitsuha, but her actions in the previous implies otherwise. Or when Taki!Mitsuha goes with Yotsuha and their grandmother to the mountain shrine, then when the grandma recognizes Taki in Mitsuha's body, Taki suddenly wakes up in his own body the next day, which is the day he has a date with Miki that Mitsuha!Taki set up previously. If we compare the timeline, the day when Taki!Mitsuha goes to the mountain shrine should be the same day that the real Mitsuha goes to Tokyo to see Taki, as the next day when the real Taki has a date with Miki is syncing to the day of Tiamat's flyby for the real Mitsuha.
  • Wait one. Was the day of Taki and Miki's date the day immediately after the visit to the mountain shrine? I could be remembering wrong, but I think when they were figuring out the rules of the swap, it was said to be a few times a week rather than explicitly swapping every alternate day. Also I think the diary entries weren't alternate days either.
  • Taki!Mitsuha visits the mountain shrine with Mitsuha's grandma and Yotsuha. On the way back, Mitsuha's grandma asks Taki!Mitsuha about whether s/he is dreaming right now, and the film treated as if she could see Taki in Mitsuha's body. Taki then suddenly wakes up in his own body (just like that) then sees Miki's message in his phone telling him about 'their' date that Mitsuha!Taki set up previously. In the meantime, Mitsuha's timeline that syncs with today's Taki's timeline is the day of the Tiamat flyby when she already cut her hair short. That means she must've gone to Tokyo the day before. The way I see it, when Taki wakes up, some time must've passed between his and Mitsuha's timeline that syncs with him. It probably goes like this: after their visit to the mountain shrine, Mitsuha goes to Tokyo to see Taki then back to her town, then the day of the comet flyby. That means Taki suddenly wakes up in the future, or he's actually dreaming the day when he went to the shrine in Mitsuha's body (when in reality Mitsuha was in control of herself that time, because she later remembers that she put her sake at the shrine herself).
  • But isn't the fact that "Mitsuha" was wearing her hair in a ponytail rather than her signature complicated one meant to be a sign that Taki was in the driver's seat on the day of the mountain shrine visit??
  • Yeah. Maybe Taki really is in control, but that still doesn't explain why Taki suddenly wakes back up in his own body after Mitsuha's grandma sees him in Mitsuha's body, and wakes up in a different day to boot (because the day of Taki and Miki's date and the day Mitsuha goes to the mountain shrine can't definitely be the same day).
  • OP here: saw the movie again, and as the first reply points out, the kuchikamisake-induced trip through Mitsuha's memories really does clarify the order of events. First to happen is Mitsuha spontaneously crying because of her Belated Love Epiphany. Shortly after, on the same day, is Mitsuha's trip to Tokyo and meeting with Taki's younger self, who does not recognize her yet; here, she leaves him the hair tie. In the evening of that same day, she returns to Itomori and requests Grandma to cut her hair into a bob. Finally, the scene wherein Mitsuha tells Tessie and Sayaka that she's not coming to school and will instead meet them later occurs the next morning on the day of Comet Tiamat's fly-by; this is the day on which the final body swap occurs.

• What kind of class would be teaching metaphysical things like kawatare doki? If it was mentioned, I must have missed it.
  • Literature - the teacher is looking at it as an idiomatic expression, and proceeded to name other words that had similar etymologies. The teacher is Yukino from The Garden of Words, who was a literature teacher.

• Were Taki and Mitsuha's ages explicitly mentioned anywhere?
  • The movie showed the ages of Mitsuha, Yotsuha and Hitoha as a Freeze-Frame Bonus, when Taki was looking at the list of victims of the comet strike.
    • Okay, found it. Thanks. Mitsuha's 17.
  • When Mitshua meets Taki in person and he doesn't recognize her she's slightly heart broken. But shouldn't she immediately notice that this boy is approximately three years younger than the one she was expecting to see?
    • Indeed. People change quite a bit between the ages of 14 and 17, so it's baffling how she doesn't notice that this Taki isn't as tall as the one she sees in the mirror. Well, the movie needed the opportunity to leave behind a plot device.
    • When they experience body switches, they experience it like a dream. The details are not very clear. The grandmother mentions this at some point. So when Mitsuha meets Taki on the train, that is in real life, and she perhaps can't accurately draw comparisons with what her mirror image looked like during the switches.

• Anyone else wonder what exactly happened to Taki's mother, who is never shown or brought up a single time at all? Mitsuha's mother was shown briefly and established to die due to illness, but we don't even get a glimpse or passing mention of Taki's. Did she die? Acrimonious divorce with his father that he would naturally not want to bring up? Premarital fling that she left Taki as a doorstop baby for his father to bring up alone? Or is there some perfectly normal reason I might be overlooking for her not being there?
  • Law of Conservation of Detail?
  • I think it mentioned was mentioned by the producer that his parents were divorced and maybe his father had either primarily custody while his mother has visitation rights?

• Speaking about Taki's missing mother, anyone else wish the film bothered to make more of this commonality of both Taki and Mitsuha no longer having mothers?

• I've seen some screenshots of Taki and Mitsuha looking at hourglasses, but don't remember seeing that in the film proper. Is that something that actually happens in the film proper or is it just in the trailers?
  • It's only seen during the opening.

• How did Taki's red cord stay intact, when every diary entry Mitsuha made on his phone got corrupted? Was it protected by the metaphor?
  • This is likely because the diary entries that Mitsuha left were written after she had already died, while the cord was given to him while she was still alive making it the only thing he actually received from her.
  • All the things that got erased have one thing in common: They were made by Mitsuha in Taki's body. It's likely that they were erased because the borked timeline caught up to it, while she gave him the cord in person in a perfectly ordinary non-magical fashion!

• Anyone else think the Miyamizu shrine lineage would have died out with Mitsuha's generation even without the events of the film? I mean, considering that Mitsuha has no interest in continuing them, the ambiguity of Yotsuha, and Toshiki abandoning the lot, that leaves only Hitoha. She's already 82. She might have one or two more decades if we're generous... And then what?
  • We don't know for a fact, but it may not really be necessary anymore. Taki theorizes that the whole thing was set up in order to save the town from Tiamat, which means that there will be pretty much no reason to worry about the future. Sadly, the custom itself will probably be lost.
  • They might have some offscreen relatives who could take over the shrine if need be.
    • Wasn't the shrine destroyed by the comet? I remember the scene of the impact near the end showing the shrine almost right next to it. It would be impossible to keep performing rituals at a place that doesn't exist anymore, and I don't believe that all rituals done at one shrine can be done in other shrines (different shrines would have different traditions).
    • Given Taki goes to the shrine to drink the kuchikamisake when the town is already destroyed, no, it wasn't.
    • The place Taki visits is actually another shrine located in a neighboring crater.

• Wouldn't Taki already have heard about Itomori's destruction? An event of that magnitude would be plastered all over the news for quite some while, so how could he have missed it?
  • Since he basically had to draw out pictures and ask people if they know the town from his drawings I guess he never learned the town's name or it slipped his mind as memories during the body switching aren't always clear when they return back to their original bodies or since it happened three years ago he might have simply had decided that while the event was tragic it didn't effect him enough to cause him to constantly think about it so it slip to the back of his mind.
  • Even assuming he forgot the name of the town Mitsuha was in (due to the forgetfulness that follows their dreaming), Itomori's destruction was something that happened in his own life and should be something he remembers clearly. A piece of a comet striking a town and killing hundreds is a historical event, considering nobody has been killed by a meteorite in all recorded history. It'd be the equivalent of him discovering, in 2004, that Mitsuha worked at the World Trade Center and his friends saying, "But don't you remember, Taki? The towers were destroyed by terrorists in 2001!" Taki forgetting about Itomori and the comet seems to be an improbable plot device so that it's a dramatic reveal for the viewer, rather than something that makes sense story-wise. Which is a shame, because if he'd only forgotten where she lived, and him finding out made him say, "But that's where...!" - that would be dramatic enough. Him forgetting both the town and the impact and his friends having to tell him strains suspension of disbelief.
  • What happened to Itomori isn’t 1:1 comparable to 9/11. The latter was a deliberate terrorist attack targeting a notable landmark in a major city that killed thousands of people. Itomori was a small town in the middle of nowhere where 500 people died in a random act of nature; sure, the meteor strike makes it a pretty notable event, but it’s not something every last person is guaranteed to know about and make a connection to, especially just going off the name or appearance of the town. You have to remember, Taki had no idea that Mitsuha had lived three years in the past; he has no reason to consider whether Itimori was the town that got destroyed three years ago because he thinks his experiences in Mitsuha’s body are happening in the present day. That’s a large part of where his shock at the reveal comes from.

• Why doesn't Taki try to find out what the name of the town is on those photographs at the gallery?
  • The gallery might have ended by the time Taki decided to go look for it. And/or it might not have even had the name. Could have just been called "Rural Japanese Towns".

• Why doesn't Taki recognize Mitsuha as the girl who gave him that bracelet?
  • He only saw her for a few minutes at most. He wouldn't have had time to memorize a lot of details.

• Why is Miki so quick to write Taki off after just one date? Sure, he acted very odd, and the date was clearly a flub, but Taki wasn't a complete stranger to her. Miki had known Taki for quite a while already and was clearly not put off by his original self (even though she clearly preferred Mitsuha's personality), so from her point of view he might just have been shy or tired. It's even weirder when you consider that she kept hanging out with him for years after that.
  • Didn't she write him off during the search for Mitsuha? I remember her giving a speech about how "this girl caused a change in him when I didn't" or something along those lines.