*The Night on the Galactic Railroad* is set in a train’s journey through the galaxy. We gradually find out that its passengers are dead souls being taken to the afterlife.
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## The bird catcher
[Figure 1](https://i.imgur.com/fplCFoC.png)
The main characters meet a travelling merchant who asks to sit next to them on the train. He calls himself a “bird catcher”. He shares candy with the main characters, who find it delicious. The candy, he says, is made from birds he caught. In fig. 1, he exits the train to intercept a flock of herons. The birds fall into the ground around him, by the hundreds, each dying upon contact with the earth and sinking in. The bird catcher stands there and catches a few of the birds and stuffs them into his bag. When they go in his bag, they magically freeze and become candy. Once he has caught a modest few, he smiles with satisfaction, as if it has been an entire day of hard work.
Note how the birds glow ethereally. Note the white sand: in the scene right before this, the boys meet a paleontologist who is digging up the same kind of sand to find the fossils of an ancient creature. Therefore, this sand has been connoted to be a place of death.
This is made even clearer in the original novel:
> For a while the herons were like fireflies flickering on and off with a bluish light inside the sack. . . . More numerous than the birds that were caught [by the bird catcher], however, were the ones that were not caught and that descended safely to the sands of the Milky Way. Just as the snow melts, these birds collapsed and flattened out the instant their feet touched the sand, until soon they were spread out over the sand and gravel . . . For a while the bird shape remained but this too, after growing and fading two or three times, by turn soon became utterly indistinguishable from the surrounding sand.
There’s a subtle allusion to fossils, a kind of flattened out image of the body in the ground. The birds flashing several times probably means they represent souls: The author has used flickering lights (particularly *blue* lights, interestingly) as a description of the ego/soul in his leading poem in *Spring & Asura* (Miyazawa, 2007):
> The phenomenon called “I”
is a blue illumination
. . .
which flickers busily, busily
with landscapes, with everyone
Like so much of Kenji Miyawa’s works, *The Night on the Galactic Railroad* is so interwoven with his worldview and imaginary landscape that his background must inform our understanding. Born in 1896, he was a devout Nichiren Buddhist but also a deep admirer of Christianity (as is in NotGR). His spiritual beliefs was anchored and practiced within his interests in geology, meteorology, and botany.
> Taking as his guide the Lotus Sutra, which teaches the availability of Buddhahood to all sentient beings, [Miyazawa] dedicated himself to the welfare of the local farmers, becoming a sort of one-man cultural and agricultural missionary, teaching crop rotation and soil improvement and exploring methods of flood and drought prevention (Hiroaki Sato, 2007).
Therefore, a proposition: The flocks of birds, descending from the air and being absorbed into the earth, represent the cycles of life and death across time. Migrating birds also signify the change of seasons, which is more generally the passing of time. Birds in many cultures symbolise spirits of the dead; something about them seizes the imagination as such (Moreman, 2014). The birds’ absorption into the ground is the return of all life to its origin. From a Buddhist perspective, the birds are the countless souls moving in and out of life to be incarnated in one body and the next.
The bird catcher is a businessman. He shares the candy (for free) with the kids. Clearly he signifies someone who deals in and benefits from the life-and-death cycle. So the bird catcher represents something like a hunter or a farmer. From a religious perspective befitting the film, the hunter or farmer is someone who trades in catching a tiny bit of nature’s life cycles and nabbing it for themselves. Whatever soul happens to come his way – be it an animal or a tree or a crop that grows and dies with the season – he temporarily stops it from merely returning to the earth, instead using it, freezing it, making it “candy”, i.e., shaping it into something artificial.^[1]
The binary between nature and artifice is further foregrounded in the novel, which emphasizes the sudden petrification of the birds’ bodies into candy — from organic to inorganic, supple to brittle.
The bird catcher isn’t *just* a hunter or farmer, but anyone who captures the life forms of nature, freezes and controls the life cycle, for their own use. That’s us. If the birds symbolize the vast life-death currents of nature, the bird catcher symbolizes the spirit of culture and artifice, that which harvests the vast movements of nature to create its own little farms, buildings, machines, and societies.
I do not argue any of this is a bad thing. Certainly, the author Kenji Miyazawa understood people’s suffering in his time and the need to carve out one’s own place at a reasonable cost to nature.
I connect the bird catcher’s scene with the sharing of apples later in the film.
***
## The apples
[Figure 2](https://i.imgur.com/STFlfBU.png)
[Figure 3](https://i.imgur.com/Ylq1uhi.png)
In fig. 2, the bird catcher splits off a pair of legs from a bird-candy, and splits those legs in half, giving one half to Giovanni and the other to Campanella. Each split makes a magical sound. His movement as he splits the candy are slow and deliberate, as if the film wants to highlight this act of sharing.
In fig. 3, a stranger hands an apple to the young man, who duplicates the apple into two. He passes one to Giovanni, who also duplicates and passes an apple to his best friend Campanella. Campanella does the same with the girl next to him. Similar magical sounds are made when the apple is duplicated as when the bird-candy is split.
Just as the gift of candy started the relation between the businessman and the boys, the gift of apples starts the relation with new acquaintances. The presentation of these moments is similar to a degree that could only be intentional.
When we interpret the bird catcher as above, the dialogue about the apples is given new context. The stranger mentions that fruits in these lands “grow on their own, without effort” and that farming is easy. “Even the rice here, it is ten times bigger than that grown around the Pacific and it has a magnificent aroma without any hull.” There is no hint of the suffering and burdensomeness of subsistence farming.
In this utopic afterlife world, crops grow easily and bountifully, making a tragic contrast to the peasants of Miyazawa’s time, whose privation most of us today couldn’t imagine.
The film makes explicit the connection between the candy and the apples: “If you sow the proper seeds, you’ll find they bloom quickly all by themselves. *It’s true for apples and even for candy.*” Listing the parallels:
* An apple is cultivated, while a candy is wrought by hand. Both stand for the deliberate artifice of the natural cycle for human benefit.
* For both the bird candy and the apples, the act of sharing is highlighted by the storyboarding and magical sound effects.
The apple, however, has a notable characteristic. It copies itself when given to another, while the bird candy doesn’t.^[2]
Proposition: The duplicability of the apple symbolizes reciprocity in social relations.
Early societies are formed and held together by a cycle of gift exchanges (see Marcel Mauss for example).^[3] Social units — individuals, families, tribes — would give each other large sums of goods like food, livestock, and weapons. By reciprocity, a universal across cultures, the parties would give with the expectation that they would receive back a gift of equal or greater value, either now or later. Through the unspoken contract of gift exchange, small social units could forge connections with one another, held together by the value they owe to others.
To be concrete, say you had an especially large harvest this summer, or you caught a massive animal in a hunt. You could eat as much as possible and leave the rest to spoil. You could eat as much as possible but share the rest with the neighbors. Or you could eat as much as is satisfying and share. The latter two strategies are of course optimal, but they require an implicit or explicit expectation that the same favor will be done to you.
Only when a society understands this, and *knows that others understand this*, can its denizens risk a relation with strangers. And only when a child understands this, that sharing your toys and food will facilitate a more fun relationship in the long run, can they have friends at all.
So it’s only natural that, in NotGR, the apples duplicate themselves when they’re shared. Say I have an apple. I split it in half and give the half to you. I have lost half an apple; but in another way, I still have a whole apple to myself, one half actual and the other half in potential which at minimum I expect to receive. The weight of that “other half” is in fact limitless, because the total value of the reciprocal relation in our future interactions is far greater than the half-apple it cost me. Sharing one apple, in potential, created another out of nothing.
The apple therefore signifies, for one, the product from nature by human hand; for two, the reciprocal relations between people.
***
## Putting them together
I’ve argued that the birds represent the life-death cycles of nature, and the bird catcher is artifice, that which extracts and reifies part of that cycle to its benefit. There is an implicit connection between the bird candies and the apple, in the way they are shared between characters. There is an explicit connection spoken by one of the characters: Both the candy and the apple is a bounty of the earth that you’ll get if you “sow the proper seeds”.
The duplicability of the apple highlights sharing, especially food sharing, as the foundation of reciprocal relations. The sharing of the bird candy is also the start of a relation with the bird catcher.
What is the point of this symbolism? I admit I’m unsure, so I suggest two parallel answers, of which zero or many may be Miyazawa and the filmmakers’ intention.
One: These symbols are placed to portray an ideal world, where produce is always bountiful, and people have been liberated from the privation of subsistence farming. In this dreamed afterlife world, apples grows easily and rice grows without hulls. Birds are plentiful. People share eagerly with strangers, even insisting that they take the food. Miyazawa was an enthusiast of Esperanto, a designed universal language. He envisioned a world of endless generosity and abundance. He enshrined self-sacrifice as an ultimate virtue, one which he himself lived up to.
Two: The symbols are a meditation on society’s relationship with the natural world. Artifice and social relations are some of our primary tools to break free from and hedge against nature’s violence, its fickle climate, floods, and earthquakes. All these were more alarming issues in his day than they are to us.
I’ll finish with this. No matter what the answer is, I think the worldview inscribed into *The Night on the Galactic Railroad* is beautiful; his sincere belief in the values in his stories is attested to by the conduct of his tragically short life.
***
### Footnotes
[1]: Though I emphasize candies’ artificiality, in the sense of being wrought by hand, I firmly do not mean any negative connotations. Candies were quite different during Miyazawa’s time, hand-made by family businesses or roaming merchants. Not quite the mass-manufactured, plastic-wrapped things in supermarkets today. They were also relatively simple to make, so there is less the sense of cold factory-ness we have in modern sweets.
[2]: The apples don’t duplicate in Miyazawa’s novel, but I believe the anime creators were artistically faithful in realizing his worldview on screen, including in this scene. Therefore I interpret the duplicability of the apple as canonical.
[3]: Not to imply that the anime filmmakers knew of or used an anthropologist’s work; this is in fact definitely not the case. But these are intuitable truths about relations which, consciously or otherwise, an artistic vision could draw upon.
### References
*Miyazawa Kenji: Selections* (2007) by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by Hiroaki Sato.
“On the Relationship between Birds and Spirits of the Dead” (2014) by Christopher M Moreman. https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/22/5/article-p481_3.xml
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