Under the Black Sun, Mercy Remains

Last night I saw In This Corner of the World, and I didn’t come away from it as a critic comes away from a picture, with neat phrases in his pocket. I came away like a man who’s been through the fire once and smells smoke in places where other people still call the air clean. Lizz died of cancer a year ago, and there are still griefs that don’t pass so much as change rooms in the house. You think they’ve gone, and then, in the most ordinary hour, they’re standing at the table before you again.

That’s why this film struck me with such terrible courtesy. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t flatter pain by dressing it in theatrical clothes. It knows that suffering comes into the world like weather through a cracked frame, first touching the humble things: the rice bowl, the sleeve, the lamp, the meal set out at evening, the voice that answers from the next room until one day it doesn’t.

Set among the common lives of Hiroshima and Kure during the war, it follows Suzu through marriage, want, bombardment, mutilation, bereavement, and the black sun over Hiroshima, and it does so without once betraying the small sanctities by which human beings remain human.

That’s what moved me most.

Not merely that it condemns war—any honest soul must do that—but that it sees the deeper profanation. Evil doesn’t only kill the body. It wants to desecrate the ordinary liturgy of love. It wants to make the table a place of absence, the bed a place of memory, the hand an emblem of loss. It wants to persuade us that once suffering has entered the room, nothing holy can remain there.

But Christianity has always known better, and this film knows it too.

Suzu goes on with the poor ceremonies of living: cooking, mending, enduring, noticing the sky, drawing what little beauty she can from a world being ground toward ash. That isn’t naivete. It’s defiance of the purest kind. I know something of that now. After Lizz died, I learned how hard it is to perform the smallest act without feeling the dead lean over your shoulder. To wash a cup. To fold a shirt. To wake and remember.

And yet one wakes. One washes. One folds. Not because one has healed, but because love, if it was real, leaves behind obligations more stubborn than despair.

This film understands that domestic life isn’t small. Only a diseased civilization calls it small. Bread isn’t small. A shared room isn’t small. A woman’s presence at evening isn’t small.

The world itself was sanctified through such things. God didn’t enter history through a theory or a machine, but through the poverty of a home, beneath a mother’s gaze, among objects worn smooth by touch. So when the film lingers over kitchens, errands, weather, garments, and shy human tenderness, it isn’t wandering from tragedy. It’s walking straight into its sanctuary. For all great historical crimes are finally judged there: by what they do to the hand that reaches in the dark for the one it loves.

And then the wound opens. Not melodramatically. Not with the indecent relish of modern art, which often feeds on agony like a scavenger bird. Catastrophe comes here as it comes in life: abruptly, stupidly, almost under an ordinary sky. The lost hand. The dead child. The city consumed in a light no human being should ever have seen and lived. Watching it, I felt again that particular vertigo the bereaved know—that moment when the visible world remains intact and yet everything essential has been taken out of it. The chair is still there. The cup is still warm. The door still shuts.

But reality has suffered a wound no hand can cover.

It hasn’t been abandoned. But neither has it been spared.

That, to me, is the film’s deepest Christian gravity. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t say that suffering is secretly sweet, or that the dead are easily folded back into the fabric of our days. It lets grief be grief. It lets mutilation accuse heaven by its mere existence. It lets the soul stand in a silence hard as iron. And only then, when all sentimental fraud has been burned off, it permits mercy to appear—not as explanation, but as fidelity.

That matters to me more than I can say. Since Lizz's death, I’ve had very little patience for consolations that come perfumed and ready-made. They’re insults, most of them. Real mercy doesn’t explain the grave. It stands beside it. It waits in the dark kitchen. It returns in the morning when there’s still bread to butter and tears not yet shed. In this film, mercy appears exactly in that hard, humble way: in endurance, in the stubborn continuance of affection, in the final receiving of an orphaned child, in the refusal to let death have the last household word.

That ending pierced me. The orphan isn’t there to reassure us cheaply that life goes on. Life doesn’t “go on” cheaply. Not after war. Not after cancer. Not after you’ve watched someone vanish by inches while the world keeps up its idiotic errands.

No—the child arrives as obligation, as demand, as the future appearing in the form of someone who can still be loved. Which is to say: she arrives as grace often does. Without radiance. Without argument. In the shape of a burden only love can recognize as mercy.

I think many will call this film gentle. They’re right, but they haven’t said enough. It’s gentle the way the Gospel is gentle—toward the broken, and ruthless toward every lie. It has pity for human beings, but none for the illusions by which we excuse our cruelty, our idolatry of power, our worship of efficiency, our habit of calling the destruction of souls “necessity.” It reverences the poor, the humiliated, the obscure. It knows that history is borne less by statesmen than by women at tables, by the wounded, by those who continue loving when love has become a kind of martyrdom.

Last night, watching Suzu endure the ruin of her world without surrendering its meaning, I felt something I haven’t often felt since Lizz died: not comfort, exactly, and certainly not relief, but recognition.

The film seemed to know that love doesn’t cease when its earthly object is taken away. It becomes terrible then. It goes on living in duties, in memory, in fidelity to the simplest things. It goes on setting one more place at the invisible table of the heart. And sometimes, by a grace that humiliates us, it opens the door to another life that needs shelter.

So yes, I admired the film. But admiration is too pale a word. I received it as one receives a witness. It told me, with extraordinary chastity and courage, that this broken world is still not forsaken. Man can manufacture hell. He can blacken the sky, hollow out cities, turn medicine or empire or war into instruments of desecration. He can leave a husband standing in a room full of the dead air of yesterday. But he still can’t abolish mercy. He still can’t make tenderness unreal. He still can’t prevent the soul, even with empty hands, from consenting once more to love.

And that consent, trembling as it is, is sometimes the nearest thing to resurrection we’re given on this side of God.