Your Name. (Kimi No Na Wa.) 2016

Mitsuha Miyamizu is a high school girl living in the town of Itomori in Japan’s mountainous Hida region. She is bored with country life and wishes to be a handsome boy in her next life. She begins to switch bodies intermittently with Taki Tachibana, a high school boy in Tokyo, when they wake up. They communicate by writing messages on paper, their phones, and sometimes on each other’s skin. Mitsuha causes Taki to develop a relationship with his coworker Miki, while Taki causes Mitsuha to become popular in school.

One day, Taki, as Mitsuha, accompanies her grandmother and sister to leave the ritual alcohol kuchikamizake, made by Mitsuha, as an offering at the family shrine on a mountaintop outside the town. The shrine is believed to represent the body of the village guardian god ruling human experiences and connections. Mitsuha’s latest note tells Taki about the comet Tiamat expected to pass Earth on the day of her town festival.

The next day, Taki wakes up in his body. After an unsuccessful date with Miki, he tries to call Mitsuha but cannot reach her, and the body-switching ends. He decides to meet her directly, but not knowing the town’s name he has to rely on his memories of the scenery. A restaurant owner in Hida finally recognizes Itomori from Taki’s sketch and tells him when the comet unexpectedly split into two; the larger piece kept moving, but the smaller one crashed onto Earth and destroyed the town. Looking at the site of the crater and while in disbelief that Mitsuha was dead this whole time, her messages on his phone disappear and his memories start fading away. Taki finds Mitsuha’s name in the records of fatalities and discovers from the date of the disaster that their timelines were separated by three years.

Taki goes to the shrine to drink Mitsuha’s sake from the bottle, hoping to reconnect with her body and warn her about the comet strike. Through a vision, Taki discovers that the girl who acted like she knew him that he had encountered in the past was Mitsuha: not knowing they were separated by three years, she, having fallen in love with him, had met his past self while trying to meet with him personally. He wakes up in her body on the morning of the town festival, and Mitsuha’s grandmother deduces what is going on and she tells him the body-switching is part of the family history as caretakers of the shrine. He convinces Mitsuha’s friends, Tessie and Sayaka, to help evacuate the town by cutting the power and broadcasting a false emergency alert, but the plan fails. Realizing that Mitsuha must be in his body at the shrine, he goes back to find her.

Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body at the shrine. When Taki reaches the shrine as the sun is setting, the two sense each other’s presence, but are separated by three years. However, when twilight falls,^{[note 1]} they return to their own bodies and meet. They attempt to write each other’s names on their hands so they will remember each other, but twilight passes and Mitsuha disappears before she can write hers.

As Mitsuha races back to convince her father, the town mayor, to evacuate the town, her memories of Taki start to fade, and discovers that Taki wrote “I love you” on her hand instead of his name. The comet piece crashes to Earth, destroying the town. Taki wakes up in his own time, only to remember nothing.

Five years later, Taki has graduated from university and is searching for a job. He senses he is missing something important, and learns that the inhabitants of the town survived by following the mayor’s order. One day, Taki and Mitsuha see each other when their trains draw parallel, and are compelled to disembark and search for one another, finally meeting on a staircase. They initially start semi-awkwardly walking away, until Taki uneasily asks Mitsuha if he had met her before, and she relievingly replies that she felt the same way: their connection reestablishing, they shed tears of happiness, and simultaneously ask for their names.