What is the most important story ever told?
Respected author and English journalist Christopher Booker attempted to answer this question in The Seven Basic Plots, arguing that every narrative ultimately falls into one of seven categories: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, or Rebirth. Scholars and English teachers alike have debated his theory for decades. While these plots provide a useful framework, each can contain countless themes, characters, and ideas. If we strip away those categories and ask what lies at the heart of a storyteller’s work, we may discover that some creators are really telling the same story over and over again.
Since Your Name (2016), Japanese filmmaker Makoto Shinkai has suggested that there is only one story worth telling. Your Name, Weathering With You (2019), and Suzume (2022) all share remarkably similar themes, emotional arcs, and narrative ideas. Although each film differs in setting and supernatural premise, they all revolve around the same central question: what are we willing to sacrifice for love? For discussion, we will primarily focus on the narrative of Weathering With You.
The film follows sixteen-year-old Hodaka, who runs away from home in search of a new life in Tokyo, where relentless rainfall has become the city’s new normal. His fate changes after meeting Keisuke, the owner of K & A Planning, who hires him as an assistant. While investigating urban legends, Hodaka meets Hina, a mysterious girl who possesses the extraordinary ability to pray away the rain and briefly restore sunshine. As the two grow closer, Hodaka discovers that Hina is a legendary “Sunshine Girl,” whose gift comes with an ancient price.
Running away from home appears to be central to Shinkai’s storytelling. His protagonists consistently leave behind the familiarity of their old lives before discovering who they truly are. In Your Name, Taki and Mitsuha repeatedly cross both physical and emotional distances in search of one another. In Suzume, the title character leaves her quiet hometown to chase a mysterious cat across Japan while helping a young man who has been transformed into a chair. Strange as that premise sounds, it reflects the same emotional journey. Each protagonist must leave home before they can return with a deeper understanding of themselves, echoing Booker’s Voyage and Return.
Another recurring element in Shinkai’s work is the tension between respecting tradition and choosing personal love instead. In Weathering With You, Hodaka learns that every Sunshine Girl is expected to sacrifice herself so that the weather may return to its natural balance. Hina accepts this fate for the good of everyone else, but Hodaka refuses to let her disappear. He enters a supernatural world hidden within the sky and chooses to save her, fully aware that Tokyo will continue to flood as a consequence. Three years later, the city has indeed become partially submerged.
This willingness to sacrifice everything for the person you love forms the emotional core of Shinkai’s films. His protagonists are not simply overcoming obstacles; they willingly disrupt the natural order itself. In Your Name, Taki and Mitsuha alter history to save an entire town from a comet strike. In Suzume, Suzume enters another realm to rescue the man she loves while preventing supernatural disasters from spreading across Japan. Although these stories borrow elements from several of Booker’s basic plots (including Overcoming the Monster, Voyage and Return, and even a metaphorical form of Rags to Riches through emotional growth), they ultimately serve the same deeper narrative.
Shinkai reinforces these ideas visually as well. Across all three films, nature reflects the emotional and spiritual imbalance experienced by the characters. Your Name and Suzume feature breathtaking tears across the sky that symbolize worlds colliding and destinies changing. Weathering With You and Suzume both center on enormous circular formations looming over Tokyo, though they carry different meanings: in Weathering With You, the phenomenon represents the supernatural realm above the clouds, while in Suzume, it becomes a literal force threatening the world. These recurring images remind us that the characters’ emotional decisions have consequences that extend far beyond themselves.
What, then, is Shinkai’s one story?
Across his recent films, he repeatedly argues that finding love requires leaving behind the comfort of who you once were. It demands choosing another person over certainty, tradition, and sometimes even the greater good. Love is not portrayed as something that exists without sacrifice; it is valuable precisely because it asks everything of those who pursue it. By blending several of Booker’s seven basic plots into a single emotional framework, Shinkai demonstrates that the same fundamental story can be told in countless different ways.
Storytelling has always belonged to the creator. Every writer, filmmaker, or artist leaves behind recurring ideas that reveal what matters most to them. The stories that stay with us are the ones that move us emotionally, and when we look across a director’s body of work, we begin to see the experiences and beliefs that shaped them. The most important story ever told is ultimately the one that carries the greatest meaning to its creator and audience alike. In a single word, Makoto Shinkai’s enduring story is love.
MooCow Entertainment 