Jiro is treated with nostalgia and respect, and is a character you come to love, with his pink suit and unruly hair. His love story is touching and terrible, sweet and funny, and during a walk in a torrential downpour, struggling under an umbrella together, Naoko says to him, suddenly, "Life is wonderful, isn't it?" You may wonder how she can say that, especially since she suffers from tuberculosis. But she cannot help but look around and see things like rainbows, and waving trees, and see how good it all is. In her first conversation with Jiro, she quotes to him a line from a poem by Paul Valéry:
"The wind is rising.
We must try to live."
«Вот поднимается ветер.
Мы должны пытаться жить.»
Wind is in every scene, both figuratively and literally. The winds of war are already blowing at the beginning, and so are the winds of change. Japan must "catch up" to the rest of the world, and Jiro is part of that push. Wind also represents the breath of life, the breath caught in Naoko's TB-infected lungs, but as long as breath exists, there is hope. Wind races across a pond causing ripples, it rips umbrellas out of people's hands, it pushes against an airplane's curved wings, helping it to stay airborne. Wind is both benign and ominous.
