I once joked to a friend that every Miyazaki movie follows a similar trajectory: stuff happens, then five minutes before the end, we find out it was about love the whole time. Miyazaki doesn’t build his stories in the way that we’re used to. Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises don’t break down easily into the three-act structure. They feel truly idiosyncratic.
While Miyazaki’s films are remarkable things no matter your cultural background, his story structures are less unusual when considered within the framework of both Japanese storytelling tradition specifically and East Asian narratives as a whole. Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird is an introduction to those narratives, exploring East Asian storytelling and what distinguishes it from the West. In particular, he juxtaposes the Eastern preference for four-act and circular structures with the Western three-act.
The West is so steeped in the three-act structure that many people who don’t spend most of their time thinking about the inner workings of stories are familiar with it. A thing happens. The thing intensifies. The thing resolves. That’s the flow of it. Lien uses Star Wars as an illustration, but just about every story we know and love here in the U.S. of A. adheres to the formula.
The four-act structure is similar. Similar enough, in fact, that it is often treated as nothing more than a variation on the three-act. People exist in a given world. We see them go about their lives in that world. There is a crisis. We see how that crisis and the world come to terms with one another. From that description, you can see how they might be considered two different ways of cutting the same sandwich.
Whether Lien is aware of their interchangeable status, I don’t know. He doesn’t mention it. Instead, he provides a wonderful argument for how and why the structures are distinct, tying them to philosophical outlooks reinforced by the cultures that prefer them. The three-act structure emphasizes the individual, requires a tidy resolution, and necessitates that everything obey the terms laid out in its first act. The four-act structure, on the other hand, emphasizes communities, tends to leave the ending a bit more ambiguous, and allows for so massive a change in the third act that a story may hop genres—consider the tonal shift halfway through Parasite. In point of fact, Lien says, four-act stories are entirely about the impact of that sudden third-act change, and how the world adjusts or doesn’t.
Though Lien missteps early on with some poor choices of examples, and leans throughout the book on a risible short story to illustrate some points, his observations are excellent. There’s a lot to chew on here. Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird better equipped me to think and talk about many of my favorite stories, which is a wonderful feeling. I always knew Miyazaki’s movies suddenly become about love in the last five minutes. Now I know why.