A little late, but
I finally watched The Voice of Hind Rajab.

It seemed like it might leave theaters soon,
and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So I finally went to see it.

Even before watching it,
I had a vague idea of how I would feel afterward.

I thought I would be consumed by rage.
At least, that’s what I thought.

But what I actually felt
went beyond anger.

Scenes of unimaginable horror.
A situation beyond comprehension.
An ending too horrific to bear.

I was so deeply shaken
that when the film ended,
I sat there in a daze for some time.

When I stepped out of the theater,
Ginza was alive with people,
its neon lights glittering against the night.

It was Ginza, just as it always was.
Nothing had changed.

The contrast was so overwhelming
that the world around me felt like a fantasy.

I had no idea where to go
or what to do with everything I was feeling.

So I wandered aimlessly through the streets
for a while,
with nowhere in particular to go.

In the end, I couldn’t find anywhere to go.
I remained in a daze on the train ride home,
and eventually made it back home
in much the same state.

In fact, not long after the film began,
a thought crossed my mind:

Oh no.

Because I had come to see this film
without knowing whether the little girl would survive.

That’s right.
This is not a story.

This is reality.

And the horrific scenes projected onto the theater’s enormous screen
struck me with a force beyond anything I had experienced
when seeing the same events in the news or on social media.

Not that the film exaggerates anything.
What we see on screen is just as terrible as reality.

No—
reality is far, far more brutal.

Why an ordinary family?
Why emergency responders?
Why even a six-year-old girl?

A scene of such horror
that the word inhuman hardly begins to describe it.

Why?
Why?
Why?

We are all ordinary human beings,
trying to make our way through life,
finding happiness in the smallest of things.

So what is it that makes you do this?

What is it that you see?

What, exactly, is it that you are looking at?

October 20, 2026

mienaimonotachi

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