THE WIND RISES

"Days went by marked by the kind of happiness that exists before life itself. We were more alive than life, alive to the point of being afflicted by it, so much so that the line of that poem that had suddenly escaped my lips the summer of two years before, and which I loved to repeat to myself, suddenly returned between us. The wind is rising, we must try to live. Until that moment, we seemed to have forgotten it." "The Wind Has Risen" is the transposition of an experience actually lived by the author, as well as a cross-section of Japanese daily life in the first half of the twentieth century. The protagonist, upon learning of his fiancée's precarious state of health, decides to accompany her to a sanatorium in the Japanese Alps, and thus attempts to live through the difficult experience by her side, trying to find with her happiness in the small, everyday things, in gestures of affection, in the nature that surrounds them, and in the blue sky above them. An intimate work dedicated to his late fiancée, this meditation on life, nourished by Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry (the novel's title is taken from a line in the poem "The Graveyard by the Sea"), and Rainer Maria Rilke, is also a work of exquisitely Japanese sensibility. To view the animated trailer, click on the white and blue URL icon below.