We can recognise in it an act of resignation, of letting go. Chiyoko distances herself from the image of the girl, which she was keeping not only in a literal sense — Chiyoko kept the portrait of her that he had painted that evening all her life — but also in a figurative sense by acknowledging her age, something that her second traumatic experience made clear to her. Holding on and letting go, these are the two pillars that determined her life. But that does not mean that we are at the end, but rather just at the beginning. There are in fact two types of reading in relation to these pillars, which have very different meanings.

(a) The psychoanalytic reading, in which Chiyoko falls into compulsive repetition is too obvious to be ignored. And it is not just that this compulsion manifests itself in the constant attempt to regain the lost condition of happiness, namely finding the painter (which itself might be the solution to some previous repressed repetition perhaps stretching back to her earliest years), but in the constant repetition of the very scene that had happened in her youth, her first traumatic experience. Hence, all her films, films that are embedded in different historical settings, follow the very same basic pattern, with her playing the very same role: She, the protagonist, is searching for her lover, who is being persecuted by the police and is always rescued by a third figure, which is always played in her memories by the interviewer Genya. This constant repetition of the traumatic scene, which is transferred to the fictional realm of film, strongly resembles a compulsion, even though it is unclear whether she consciously looks for such roles, or is unconsciously attracted to them. Freud summarizes this tendency very lucidly: “[T]he patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (Freud 1914, 2501).

Chiyoko’s unwillingness to let go, the compulsory repetition of the traumatic experience, would in this light be of tragic character. She would thereby repeat and transfer her destiny to the filmic screen, losing her self in an all-encompassing work of fiction, her life. The blocked memory would not let her get ahead and would make her forever hold on to the self-image of the young girl who fell in love for the first time. The resignation that begins with the loss of the key would offer no real closure, but rather a kind of energy loss with a no less tragic retreat into recluse life. The whole focus of this reading lies on the interview, which actually assumes the task of a therapeutic session, namely “curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering” (ibid., 2505), where “[o]ne must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it” (ibid, 2506), for a “reconciliation with the repressed material” (ibid., 2503); to quickly summarize the Freudian conception. The psychoanalytical goal of the interview would be to work through the trauma to attain a final closure and thereby also a final distanciation from the desire to find the painter. Putting the whole search to the past and summarizing it in a narrative, objectifying it in a cinematic retrospective, can in this light be understood as an act of pure fictionalization (i.e. the quest was just something that Chiyoko played to herself, while she has ‘come to herself’ by becoming a house wife — a truly Freudian conclusion).

But this is not what happens; while the end of the film is clearly to be understood as conciliatory, the reconciliation does not lie in the rejection of the desire for the artist. We need to rethink the whole dynamic to get a full understanding of it. However, it is not about a rejection of the above reading, but rather a necessary addition.

(b) The whole dynamic shifts if we understand Chiyoko’s repetitive gesture not as unconscious but as conscious. On the contrary, then, the unity of the gesture, which in the above manner of reading comes to light as a tragic stepping-on-the-same-spot, attains the clarity of a crystal [This metaphor I take from Eric Dumont (cf. Dumont 2014: 386)]. Crystal, because the individual moments of her life, which basically begins with the encounter with the painter (which already reinterprets the role of the traumatic), shows individual facets that are reflected in a single light, that of her desire. In this light, Chiyoko expresses an impressive clarity about herself in her last words: “After all, it’s the chasing after him I really love.” This is not the cheesy ‘the journey is the destination’, but a deep realization about what desire is. Desiring gives us pleasure, and this inner pleasure is completely different from a quest that is initiated by a lack, and ends unsuccessfully — this shifts and breaks the Freudian conception, in which, according to him, it is the “satisfaction of an instinct [that] is always pleasurable” (Freud 1915, 2977; my emphasis), and not desire itself, which is characterized purely negatively by a lack.

The fact that, as it turns out, the painter was killed in the war, and Chiyoko therefore was looking for a phantom, therefore does not witness the world’s cynicism, but in contrast reveals a humanity which is indifferent towards attaining external things; Chiyoko does not lose herself in a regressively nostalgic girl’s love, but on the contrary, by keeping her love to the painter young in her desire, she comes to herself. I cannot refrain from quoting Kierkegaard at this point, who speaks in a passage of Fear and Trembling about the ‘Knight of Resignation’, who falls in love with a princess. To fulfil this love proves to be impossible for him, which is why the knight resigns:

The desire that would lead him out into actuality but has been stranded on impossibility is now turned inward, but it is not therefore lost, nor is it forgotten. […] He keeps this love young, and it grows along with him in years and in beauty. But he needs no finite occasion for its growth. From the moment he has made the movement, the princess is lost. […] He has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another person one ought to be sufficient to oneself. He is no longer finitely concerned about what the princess does, and precisely this proves that he has made the movement infinitely (Kierkegaard 1983, 44).

Likewise, the painter is lost from the beginning, and Chiyoko’s quest is all but about him (“I never thought I’d see him again …”). Yet, after the loss of the key, Chiyoko gives up and retires, and only the act of narration, which coincides with the returning of the key, allows her to reappropriate a part of her past that she thought to have left behind. The film ends with Chiyoko looking for her lover beyond death. This resurgence, yes, resurrection of desire refers to the de-fictionalizing moment of narrative developed above. Her life had not been dissolved in art, as a mere means of transmitting her compulsive repetition; art, her film career was quite on the contrary a means to keep her desire alive as long as it was possible, to multiply it in the faces of the crystal. In this respect, it was not about life for the sake of art, but about art for the sake of life. The conciliatory moment in which the film ends, can therefore not be understood as a result of a therapeutic overcoming of compulsion, but on the contrary as a re-appropriated selfhood vitalised by desire.

While this optimistic reading is entirely against the Freudian one, we must not forget that the two types of reading are in an indissoluble ambivalence. Not only because it remains unclear to what extent Chiyoko was aware of her repetitions, but especially with regard to a scene or rather a figure that emphasises this ambivalence: namely the witch. She first appears in a movie scene in which Chiyoko plays the wife of a deceased samurai and where the witch offers her a potion, which is supposed to bring her to her lover. The movie’s protagonist thinks it is poison so she can commit suicide, and thus she’ll join him in death; but it turns out, after taking the potion, that it is immortality tea and the witch had tricked her. She prophesied: “Now you will burn forever in the flames of eternal love,” and when asked who she is, she says: “I hate you more than I can bear, and I love you more than I can bear. One day you’ll understand.”