Mystery is Everywhere: Your Entire Life on Video

Mystery is everywhere. It lies behind a waterfall, inside an ornate locked box, or in the school's meat. Mystery improves games. Without it, magic isn't magical. The horizon doesn't beckon without mystery's enticing finger. Mystery lies at the heart of games, because it's always the most enticing question: what happens next?

If I were a game and I were looking for inspiration, I might look at one episode of Japanase television short story seriesYo ni Mo Kimyo na Monogatari ; perhaps a good translation might be Strange Stories for a Stranger World or There Are Pecular Stories Out There.

This tale starts with a woman browsing through a video rental store. Nothing looks enticing until she notices a series of white videos entitled Your Story (Anata no Monogatari), which is also the title of the episode.

Existential worries in the video store of life.

Mami, our main character remembers a conversation she overheard in the train between two school girls. A series of tapes in white with nothing but the words "Your Story" printed on them can sometimes be found in video stores. According to the girls, the person who watches the video will see their entire life from the day they are born to the day they die.

Intrigued, Mami rents the first video and returns home with it. After putting it in, Mami is disappointed to learn there's nothing on the video. She leaves it running and gets up to make a cuppa.

"Hello there Mami, I've been waiting for you."

While Mami is in the kitchen, she suddenly hears a baby crying. She returns to find herself being born on the television screen. Though her parents never filmed her birth (she says there were only photographs), in vivid detail, there lies her first few years after coming into this world. Intrigued, Mami rents more videos and relives her life.

The contrast in these scenes is intriguing. We, as the viewer, know that this can't lead to a good place. (This episode was filmed after the success of The Ring made electronic media devices a thing of terror and besides, anyone who has encountered stories like these know they don't usually end well.) However, Mami is thrilled. Her life is depicted as so bland and ordinary that any kind of spirit and enthusiasm has been filtered away like mediocre coffee. It's only the scenes where she encounters her old life with her 5-years-dead father that the screen shows a real and vivid vibrancy.

 

Hello, TV snow, my old friend.

Eventually, Mami runs into a tape that shows her walking around in a video store, renting the same tape she is watching and even shows footage of her watching it. It is at this point that I, and I think many others, would so creeped out we might need to excrete the excess creepiness out our butts. But Mami runs into a problem in real life. Invited out for lunch at her workplace, and bristling with curiosity, she wants to know what will happen tomorrow. So she watches the first tape to show the future.

It is at this point that I will not reveal what happens next. It's a lot more clever than you might think. Suffice to say that Mami finds out something that has us questioning the nature of how we perceive the future. No, it's not that. And no, not that either. Oh God no, heavens no, it isn't that hackneyed old thing either.

I especially like this scene:

I pissed in your tea, Mami.

Mami is watching her future self, who knows she is being watched by whatever entity films the tapes. She turns around and stares into the camera of her mysterious filmer. Future Mami stares right back at Past Mami, knowing she is watching herself, knowing what will happen next, in a look of utter hopelessness.

So why is Your Story successful at using mystery? One reason is because what Mami does isn't very mysterious. Every step of the way, from beginning to end, we know why Mami does what she does and what motivates her. The story is crystal clear here. 

It's everything that surrounds Mami that is murkier. Where did the tapes come from? Who is filming them? How does this whole mechanism work? Did she really see the tapes as they were or was she just renting regular shows and hallucinating? Was what she saw the truth or did she misunderstand something? Would her life have been better if she -- oops, can't tell you that.

The actress here is Manami Konishi, known for her work in movies and television dramas as a charming, relate-able character actor.

Consider the following three scenarios and ask yourself, "Which do I find the most mysterious?"

a. A girl is walking through the forest. She can hear the sounds of a baby crying and no matter were she goes or looks, the sound doesn't fade, become more faint or louder. Eventually, she ignores the sound, picks some berries and goes out of the woods.

b. A girl is walking through the forest because she needs to pick some berries for a medicine that will help her mother. She can't find the berries and is about give up, when suddenly she hears the sounds of a baby crying. Distressed and concerned, she searches everywhere for the source, but the sounds don't change no matter where shes goes. It still sounds as far away and as close as when she first heard it. Eventually, she runs into the berries she is searching for. Having no time left and knowing her mother is sick, she decides to ignore the baby and go home.

c. A girl is walking through the forest. Her mother is pregnant and she needs berries to cure her ailing stomach. She has heard stories that in this forest, babies are thrown away by mothers who did not want them. She is picking the berries when suddenly she hears the sound of a baby crying. In distress, she tries to find the helpless baby, but no matter where she runs the sound of the baby's cries are just as loud and far away as when she just heard them. It doesn't seem to be getting any closer or farther away. At a loss, the girl rushes home. When she enters her home, suddenly the baby's crying becomes unbearably loud and she drops the berries. After scolding the girl, her sister prepares the berries in the stewing medicine for her sick mother. Meanwhile, the girl is writhing on the floor in pain from the sound of the screaming baby. Suddenly, the screaming stops. Looking up, the girl sees the remnant of the medicine dripping from her mother's mouth like blood.

Many people, I think, would prefer the last one, C. A is probably too vague. We don't know the motivation of the character, why they're in the forest and what is going on at all. Many mysterious stories are just incoherent. They try for mystery by referring to creepy ideas, but there isn't anything else to latch onto and it feels like the authors just omitted details to make it mysterious. With B, we have some idea, but I think a lot of people prefer the creepy details of C. The suggestion that the medicine will kill the baby in the pregnant mother is suitably macabre.

However, I think the best and most mysterious would be somewhere between B and C. If you ask me, the extremely overt suggestion that the berries aren't good for the baby isn't a mystery so much as it is an answer.  

Your Story reaches this magical median between the two. What happens is not a mystery. Why it happens and what the story is suggesting is extremely mysterious. There are any number of interpretations I think could be valid and they suggest any number of things. One of the strangest things about this story is what it suggests about its own nature. Your Story subverts the traditional idea that a character can change the future positively by becoming proactive and suggests something entirely different. 

The final shot of the piece.

Your Story has a lot of other excellent virtues, such as an economy of style that does a world of good for its storytelling and a confident sense of time and place -- even though rental video stores still exist in Japan, elsewhere they are becoming a thing of the past. I watched this for the first time 8 years after it was filmed. Imagine the story 40 years from now to a young boy or girl who has never even heard of the concept of renting videos from a store, let alone VHS! The tapes in this story might be as arcane and mysterious as crystal balls or tarot cards.

Your Story understands that in order to leave an indelible impression in people's minds, the art of the careful direction cannot be underestimated.