Character · Grave of the Fireflies
Setsuko Yokokawa
A tin of fruit drops, rattling, is the object the entire film hangs on.
In Otakana the clue reads: Four-year-old sister with a tin of fruit drops
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
Setsuko is four. She has a tin of Sakuma fruit drops, a habit of asking questions nobody wants to answer, and an older brother who has decided he can manage. Across the second half of the film the tin empties, and Seita starts filling it with water so she has something sweet to drink. Takahata puts the camera at her height and lets the audience do the arithmetic.
Nothing about the performance is cute in the usual sense. The Japanese track cast a five-year-old, Ayano Shiraishi, and the film keeps her mishearing things, mispronouncing things and getting bored, which is what makes the small moments of understanding land. She knows more about what happened to their mother than her brother believes she does.
Akiyuki Nosaka based the story on his own younger sister, who died in 1945, and wrote it partly as an apology. Ghibli released the film in 1988. Roger Ebert added it to his Great Movies list in 2000 and argued that it forced a rethinking of what animation was capable of doing.
Spelling SETSUKO
SETSUKO is seven letters and one of them is a trick of romanisation. TSU is a single Japanese character, つ, so three English letters cover a single beat: se-tsu-ko. Trim it to SETUKO and you have written something no romanisation system produces. Three beats, seven letters, and the K near the end is the one worth guessing early.