First off, I don’t know if I just haven’t noticed or if it’s a current thing, but I noticed two light novels recently from Yen On with widely off page counts. In this case, The Place Promised in Our Early Days is listed at 192 pages. Well, you have a lot more reading to do if you pick this up: it’s actually 283 pages! That’s a significant difference.
Anyway, The Place Promised in Our Early Days is set in an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union took control of Japan’s northern island and built a large tower there. Narrator Hiroki reminisces about his middle school days and the two people he had a strong connection to back then: Takuya, a genius with a hidden delinquent side, and Sayuri, a girl who likes literature.
The Place Promised in Our Early Days was Shinkai’s first full-length film. Reading this novel, I was most struck by how much it resembled all his later works. Plot, tone, theme — your name. here, Weathering With You there. All works done by the same creator tend to have similarities (and Shinkai is known to throw in a few references as Easter eggs), but The Place Promised in Our Early Days is almost like an amalgamation for his future films. For Shinkai fans, it’s a delight to see how so many of his ideas have been refined and spun-off into their own stories.
“Refined” is perhaps the key word here. The Place Promised in Our Early Days is another one of those tales of adolescent longing turning into something more, but the situations and rationalizations are muddled. The novel also includes several changes (including parts after the movie’s ending), and these could (and perhaps likely will) cause readers to view the film and its themes differently. These may have been easier to overlook at back when The Place Promised in Our Early Days first came out, but readers are going to be scratching their heads wondering if they missed something or misunderstood something.
Another reason this one may be harder to bond with is the characters’ talent levels. Hiroki and Takuya bond over their love of airplanes, and they create and launch a small plane at their school’s cultural festival. After that, the boys start planning to build one they can fly in. Although they get a lot of advice from their coworkers at their part-time job, it still is amazing that two teenagers can design, collect, build, and code with minimal adult advice while living in the boondocks. Their goal is to fly to the tower on (currently foreign) Hokkaido, and that desire only strengthens when Sayuri joins in on their secret. But when she leaves school abruptly, Hiroki and Takuya’s friendship sours, and the plane is left unfinished. It is only years later, after Hiroki moved to Tokyo and Takuya started college-level courses, that the mystery of where Sayuri is and what happened to her forces them to reunite.
Even if you don’t know much about The Place Promised in Our Early Days, you surely can sense the love triangle vibes. But that doesn’t quite capture the relationships between these characters. The guys had hung out constantly for almost two years, but it’s not as if they had been childhood friends. And while Hiroki has a hard time getting Sayuri out of his mind, he becomes close to a girl at his school named Rika. The novel also occasionally checks in with Takuya, and his closest female friend is his upperclassman/mentor. So it’s a mix of time moving on and yet the dreamlike past, which ends up being something much more than nostalgia or missing an old friend. Again, if you are familiar with Shinkai’s more recent works, the trajectory of the story should be no surprise.
Plus, at times, rather than Sayuri being the center of the love polygon, it’s the tower. The characters don’t know exactly how far it is away, as there’s limited information about the Union. But a couple of details about this area of Japan were confusing me, and there were things like how big the Tsugaru Straits are that gave me a better understanding of the story. (About 20 miles, FYI.) These are the kind of things that make me wish light novels had more translation notes like manga. The plane here is also called the Velaciela, which is a different romanization than outlets like Crunchyroll used.
The Place Promised in Our Early Days‘ writing excels when it comes to emotion, but it stumbles when it comes to the boys’ innate talent and the truth about Sayuri’s situation. It’s worth visiting as a Shinkai fan or if you want to compare it to the movie, but the novel will feel a bit dated and unpolished.