2007

2007 was the year Five centimeters per second appeared both as an animated film and, in the same year, as Makoto Shinkai’s first novel. The film’s release left a strong visual and musical impression on reviewer Ai Nishida, while the novelization began its passage into print through magazine serialization before appearing as a book in November.

Film Release and Reception

When the film was released in 2007, Nishida was struck by visuals that seemed too beautiful to exist outside memory, their beauty carrying a cruelty of its own. The final scene and Masayoshi Yamazaki’s “One more time, One more chance” remained with Nishida afterward. Even as a middle-school student in the provinces, Nishida heard fragments of a modest fan controversy over whether the ending was a downer. Nishida rejected that reading: the ending was happy, and the more troubling question was why the protagonist took so long to move on from a first love.

From Screen to Novel

The film’s release year also marked Shinkai’s debut as a novelist. He wrote the novelization himself, and it began serialization in Da Vinci magazine in May 2007. The book edition followed in November, extending the story from the screen into prose within the same calendar year.

The Year’s Two Afterlives

The year therefore holds two related forms of afterlife for the work: the film persisted for Nishida through its remembered images, ending, and song, while the novelization gave its characters another form on the page. The book was later issued as a paperback by MF Bunko Da Vinci in 2012, identified as its second paperback version; that later publication underscores how the work’s print life continued beyond its 2007 beginning.