The medium and short films throughout Shinkai’s career condense and reveal his central themes of exhilarating love connections and wistful melancholic separations caused by uncontrollable external circumstances, situated between poles of meditative stillness and monumental action. In The Garden of Words, the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden—depicted in some of Shinkai’s most lushly-realized animation—unbidden feelings develop as a 15-year-old aspiring shoemaker boy and a 27-year-old woman playing hooky from her office begin an ongoing discourse.