Where ‘A Place Further Than the Universe’ stops: a brief character analysis of Yuzuki Shiraishi

It’s ironic: when Yuzuki is forced to move in a direction she doesn’t want to go, it’s evidence that she’s stuck

[Short on time this week, so I’m leaning on floaty quotes rather than original writing. A Place Further Than the Universe is excellent, but in the same way I’ve struggled to connect with other triumphs of animation like Spirited Away, it hasn’t clicked with me somehow. Plus, Yuzuki’s far and away my favorite character in the series, perhaps making my concerns here more a matter of disappointed expectations than a genuine story misstep. And I dunno, I’m also a big fan of failure, so maybe I should take it as just another of the series’ good points]

Man, I don’t much often watch good anime anymore. I think I subconsciously avoid it, out of an odd irrational anxiety that if I consume the best too fast, I’ll run out — for good. So, between the masterpieces, I usually content myself with rank garbage …because, yuck, I seem to like it better anyway (and you never know when you’ll find a diamond in the muck!).

Given my preference for trash then, I surprised myself when I watched A Place Further than the Universe (Japanese: Sora yori mo tooi basho, apparently it’s abbreviated Yorimoi?). A friend had recommended it to me and I’ve seen nothing but praise for it online. It even made the New York Times’ list of best television shows from 2018! An anime drawing acclaim from America’s most mainline newspaper? Probably pretty good, right?

Yes, very good. Yorimoi is excellent in just about every way. Buuut… with pessimistic me, there’s always a but. I found it a little maudlin, a bit boring. Yorimoi has a strong coming-of-age message about putting “youth in motion,” explored through an extraordinary journey to Antarctica and captured by one of the highest quality television anime productions I’ve ever seen. But! As the show’s relentless positivity ground down at my pessimism and all adversity collapsed under cathartic crying sessions in the name of f-r-i-e-n-d-s-h-i-p, I began to lose interest. Yorimoi is a startling success. But uhhh… hmm… bleh. I much prefer failure.

I hate to quote Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran again, but he’s too topical (and funny!) to ignore here: “Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all attraction.”

To the extent that success aspires to some fixed ideal — becoming popular or wealthy, having a respected career, achieving truth or virtue or even just simple contentment — good successes all begin to look alike. Just think about the students at Ivy League universities with their immaculate academic records, stalwart extracurricular leadership experience, and identical spiritual epiphanies earned on mission trips to Central America or wherever. Maybe good life choices, but eh… Boring! It’s youth in motion, just on a fixed path towards a stop.

By contrast, a preference for failure opens consideration to everything else life might offer. All of those students have blemishes, no matter how well they hide them in their transcripts and applications. And that makes them so much more interesting. I wrote my own not-good-enough-for-Ivy application essay on my habit of oversleeping before school while half-listening to NPR weather reports on my radio-alarm clock. It didn’t impress any admission committees, but I’m glad to have failed on my own terms rather than conceding to the proper path. Failing sidewise, where will I go? I dunno! Neat. (and… ugh. scary.)

With those thoughts in mind then, I want to focus on what I consider Yorimoi’s greatest failure: the conclusion to Yuzuki Shiraishi’s character arc. Yuzuki enters Yorimoi’s narrative as a lonely, discontent child actress trying to resist her mother’s unwelcome management of her inauthentic career …but then ends the story a passive actor, again acceding to social pressure to take a role in a drama that she doesn’t seem to want to do. Though Yuzuki finds friendship on the journey to Antarctica, in the coming-of-age story, I don’t know if she asserts her youth in the same triumphant way as Kimari, Hinata, and Shirase. Unlike the other girls, who move so fast that it becomes difficult to keep up, Yuzuki… doesn’t. Instead, by the end of the series she’s still charted on that same path towards her mother’s idea of success, into an acting career Yuzuki herself doesn’t seem to enjoy.

Ah, a failure of youth in motion, and all the more interesting in an animation that exalts movement for its own sake! Let me explain where I think Yuzuki came to a stop…