The scene shifted to a girl waking up.
Wearing a nightgown, bright sunlight coming through the gaps in the door and windows. She seemed deeply confused, then looked down at her chest and reached out to touch it.
Yuna blinked.
Shirogane-sensei. What are you doing.
The scene showed nothing explicit. It left a considerable amount to the imagination. Fans had spent months in the Demon Slayer comment sections requesting slightly more revealing outfits for Shinobu Kocho, Mitsuri, and Nezuko and had received nothing. And this was how the return to romance film started.
The younger sister Yotsuha pushed open the door and saw her older sister's behaviour.
"That's so realistic."
The girl stared at herself in the mirror with an expression of shock.
The plot continued. Breakfast, getting dressed, conversation at the dining table with her grandmother and younger sister. The girl's name was Mitsuha Miyamizu. Her father was the mayor of a small town called Itomori. A radio broadcast playing nearby announced his re-election campaign.
The film's opening moved slowly. Yuna felt a slight confusion. Why did this girl seem so unfamiliar with her own hometown?
Then the scene shifted. The plot jumped without explanation to the next school day, and the same girl was now completely at home in the town she had seemed lost in moments before. Something about the gap between the two days felt abrupt.
On the walk to school, Mitsuha ran into her two best friends, Tessie and Sayaka.
These names. Yuna felt a flicker of familiarity. Shirogane-sensei's ability to create character names in a completely fictional setting that still felt natural and specific was something she had always admired.
The three friends chatted on the way to school. It emerged that Mitsuha had apparently done something remarkable at school the previous day. She opened her notebook in the classroom. Three words were written inside in someone else's handwriting.
"Who are you?"
Then the first major piece of foreshadowing arrived. The teacher at the front of the classroom explained the concept of Twilight, the hour of magic, the liminal time when it was possible to see things that should not be visible.
Yuna was not sure yet why Shirogane-sensei had spent this much screen time on a conceptual explanation in a film with this production budget. Every half-minute of footage here represented serious money. There had to be a reason.
The teacher had been drawn beautifully, with a quality of presence that made Yuna remember both her and the concept she was teaching.
Yuna did not know that this character's name was Yukari Yukino, the female lead of another Makoto Shinkai work, The Garden of Words, or that Rei had already nearly completed that film's production and was planning to bundle it as a companion release with the Your Name home video edition.
The following plot became joyful.
The central setting of the work began to reveal itself. Mitsuha's classmates described her series of bizarre behaviours the previous day. She had completely demolished the boys in a basketball match despite being unathletic. She had taken direct revenge on the people mocking her rather than quietly enduring it, which completely contradicted her usual careful and gentle personality.
In Tokyo, a boy woke up and confused his friends with his strange timid behaviour. But later at his part-time job, when a senior colleague tore her clothes and had no spare, this boy named Taki Tachibana produced sewing skills no ordinary boy would possess and repaired them on the spot, apparently winning her over.
Both of them were behaving as if they had forgotten who they were. Both were doing things they would never normally do without understanding why.
"I swapped bodies with her."
"I swapped bodies with him."
Each had been assuming it was simply a vivid dream about living in another kind of place. The evidence accumulating on their own bodies made the truth clear.
Body swap.
Yuna's eyes went wide.
So it is a fantasy romance.
Once the premise was established the plot found its rhythm. Taki managing Mitsuha's school disputes. Mitsuha helping Taki pursue the senior he liked. Both of them using each other's notebooks and phones to leave instructions and records for the other to wake up to.
The plot became warm and funny and genuinely joyful.
Yuna felt the tension in her shoulders release.
Shirogane-sensei told the truth. This is a youth romance film. It is not depressing.
Taki went on a date with the senior, but she noticed he seemed distracted, as if his attention kept going somewhere else. Mitsuha had created the opportunity for that date but found herself unhappy about it afterward. And then Taki found an important message in the phone texts Mitsuha had left for him.
"By the time the date is over you should be able to see the comet, right?"
A comet again.
Yuna caught this immediately.
In the subsequent plot, Mitsuha performed a public dance as a shrine maiden and prepared Kuchikamizake according to the town's tradition.
After that, Mitsuha cut her hair short. After the town festival, she stood on the hillside and watched the comet cross the night sky, trailing a long flame-like tail.
According to the setting, Japan in the story was a small country of several hundred thousand square kilometres. There was no reason a comet visible in a clear night sky could be seen by one person but not the other.
Reaching this point in the plot, Yuna felt something was wrong.
There was something she had forgotten.
And from that point onward, Taki Tachibana could no longer swap bodies with Mitsuha Miyamizu. Calling her phone number showed it was disconnected.
Unable to rest, Taki decided to go to Itomori Town in person.
A sound of unconscious relief moved through the cinema when he made this decision.
Yes. This is how a normal person thinks.
Bold for a high school student to travel hundreds of kilometres from home. But for a boy who had already fallen in love, these things did not matter. What he had felt for his senior was admiration. What had developed through the body swaps was something else entirely.
The film passed its halfway point.