Character · Perfect Blue
Mima Kirigoe
She quits the pop group on Sunday, films her first acting role on Monday, and finds a website writing her diary for her.
In Otakana the clue reads: Pop idol turned actress being stalked
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Perfect Blue
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Mima Kirigoe leaves the idol trio CHAM to become an actress, on advice from an agency that has already decided for her. The new job is a grim television crime serial, and the role her manager negotiates is nothing like the image she spent years maintaining. Her fans take it as a betrayal. One of them takes it further than that.
The stalker's site, Mima's Room, posts diary entries in her voice describing her day in accurate detail, including things she did alone. Satoshi Kon cuts between the drama she is filming, the life she is living and the version of her being published online, without marking which is which, until Mima cannot tell either. The film is far more interested in her losing that thread than in who is typing.
Perfect Blue came out in 1997, adapted loosely from a Yoshikazu Takeuchi novel, and it was Kon's first feature as director after work as an animator and on Katsuhiro Otomo projects. It was made cheaply, on a budget cut when a planned live-action version fell through, and it has shaped how film handles fractured identity ever since. Darren Aronofsky bought the remake rights and paid the shower scene back directly.
Spelling MIMA
MIMA is the given name, so the answer is four letters and not the family name Kirigoe. The shape is close to a palindrome without being one: M, I, M, A, with the same consonant in positions one and three. Nothing is romanised loosely here, no long vowels are dropped, and the two vowels are the two you hear.