Grave of the Fireflies: Saving the fruit drop

Where will you be… when she dies?

The war was not the story. It may have been the headlines in the papers or the unforgettable event written in the history textbooks. For a young boy, his sister’s death was the unforgettable event. Isao Takahata’s  Grave of the Fireflies (1988, a Hayao Miyazaki film) tells the tragic tale of Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) and his younger sister surviving World War II, and how they died with it.

The gloomy atmosphere focused on Seita: filthy, thin as stick, dying as he leans on a post at the train station. In the distance, his spirit and his sister’s watched him die, and both rode in a train to recall their miserable life during the war.

The sound of sirens and the words “air raid” were already familiar to his ears, as Seita, along with his sister Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi) and their ill mother (Yoshiko Shinohara) prepared to store food underground and take cover to the shelter. However they parted ways with Seita and Setsuko struggling to reach for the shelter because of the chaos and had to improvise. When everything was back to normal, the children found out their mother was severely wounded with very little chance of survival.

The worms cannibalizing on his mothers’ dead flesh and the way she was thrown into the sea of fire for cremation was a nightmare Seita knew very well to be too much for his younger sister. Staying in their aunt’s house for a while, the boy tried very hard to divert Setsuko’s attention to forget their mom by bringing her to the beach, treating her with her favourite fruit drop and teaching her how to catch fireflies.

With their aunt taking advantage of their parents’ wealth, both decided to live off in an abandoned cave far from the city. At first they enjoyed improving the place but eventually struggled with food and water scarcity. Setsuko developed severe diarrhea because of the river water and malnutrition. Their mom had left them money in the back, but was of no use during the war because no one else would want to trade their goods.

Seita proved his love for his sister, giving up the noble honor as a Japanese citizen and as a son of a soldier by stealing goods whenever people run to the shelters during the air raids.

When the war was over and Seita was withdrawing money from the bank, he found out the Japanese lost and realized their dad had died, too. Left with almost nothing, he ran back to her dying sister and bought her lots of food. But it was too late. “She never woke up,” and now the young boy had to carry two boxes of ashes.

He eventually left the cave with his sister’s ashes in the fruit drop can, and died.

The movie always makes me cry even when I think about it, especially in the scene when Setsuko buried the fireflies they once used as lights for their cave one night, and asked Seita, “Why do fireflies have to die so soon?”