Character · Weathering with You
Hodaka Morishima
Sixteen, on a ferry to Tokyo with no plan at all, arriving in a city where the rain has not stopped for months.
In Otakana the clue reads: Runaway who meets a girl who can stop the rain
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Weathering with You
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Hodaka Morishima runs away from an island home the film never bothers to explain and lands in a Tokyo that will not have him. He is too young to be hired legally, so he sleeps rough, gets moved along, and eventually picks up odd jobs for a shabby occult magazine run by a man he met on the boat. Then he meets a girl who can clear the sky by praying.
Shinkai plays the first act as social realism, which is not what audiences turn up to his films expecting. The rain, the hunger and the police interest are all specific and unromantic. What the second half asks is whether a sixteen-year-old owes the city anything at all, and it answers in a way that irritated plenty of viewers who wanted a tidier boy.
Weathering with You came out in 2019, after Your Name had become the highest-grossing anime film in the world, and Shinkai chose to follow that with something markedly less agreeable. It took over 190 million dollars, Japan submitted it for the international feature Oscar, and Radwimps scored it again. Kotaro Daigo voices Hodaka.
Spelling HODAKA
HODAKA is six letters and three beats, ho-da-ka, each of them a consonant followed by a vowel. Two of the three vowels are A, so landing one usually hands you both. Japanese writes it with nothing stretched and nothing dropped, making this one of the few names in the set that transcribes across exactly. The game wants the given name, not MORISHIMA.