The Whole of a Life in Ten Seconds: On 100 Meters (Hyakuemu) and Why We Run

I come again with an interesting insight on a film I have seen recently. Today I am going to talk about it. Hope you all will find it to your hearts_

There's a shot a little past the middle of 100 Meters that I can't get rid of. A teenage sprinter has just lost a final in heavy rain, and he stays standing on the track while the downpour thickens, until you can barely tell where he ends and the weather begins. I rewound it the first time, not quite sure what I'd just seen.

It isn't my favourite shot, though. My favourite is the very last one, and most of this post is an attempt to explain why.

Spoilers ahead. I talk about the whole film here, ending included.

The Film, Briefly

The director is Kenji Iwaisawa, who made On-Gaku: Our Sound, about delinquent kids who form a band without being able to play anything. This time he's adapting Uoto's first serialised manga (Uoto later wrote Orb: On the Movements of the Earth). Most of it is rotoscoped, drawn by hand over live-action footage, and you can tell. When someone runs, you feel it in your own calves.

Togashi is the kid who's simply fast. He wins every 100-metre race at school without really trying. Komiya shows up as a transfer student, lonely, a bit of a mess, running hard and badly. Togashi teaches him; Komiya gets good and then far too good, and life pulls them apart before bringing them back years later as rivals. What the film actually cares about isn't who's faster, though. It's why either of them bothers running in the first place.

Five Moments, Read Closely

The First Meeting: A Mirror on the Track

Komiya runs to get away from things. He has no friends, and nowhere he fits. Togashi has always fitted in, and he knows why: he's fast. So his advice is blunt and, looking back, a bit sad. Be the fastest, and everything else sorts itself out.

It's hard for me not to read this through Lacan. In the mirror stage, a child recognises itself in an image outside itself and builds a self around that picture. Komiya looks at Togashi and sees who he'd like to be. His wanting to win doesn't start as his own; he picks it up from Togashi. Desire as the desire of the Other, more or less.

The mirror cuts the other way too, which I missed on first viewing. Togashi's sense of himself is also handed to him by other people: the fast kid, the kid who belongs. So the film opens on two boys misreading themselves in each other.

Teaching Komiya to Run: The Lived Body

For Merleau-Ponty, a skill is less a set of rules than a habit the body has taken in, an "I can" rather than an "I think." Togashi has never needed to think about running. In the after-school training scenes he has to, because he's trying to put something that lives in his legs into somebody else's.

I love the irony in that. Teaching forces talent to become technique. Once Togashi can explain his gift he can pass it on, and once he can pass it on it isn't entirely his anymore. Komiya soaks it up with a hunger that already seems to worry him a little.

Then there's sports day. Komiya falls, gets back up, and hurls himself at the line while Togashi cheers him on, and wins his first race. It's intersubjectivity at its most literal: one boy's shouting becomes the other boy's stride. It's also where the film starts taking apart the talent-versus-effort idea. Togashi's talent has to learn to describe itself, while Komiya's effort is starting to look like its own kind of gift. A gift for wanting, maybe.

The Departure: A Line of Flight

After their last race as kids, Komiya is hurt and Togashi rattled, and soon Togashi learns that Komiya's family has moved away. There's no fight and no real goodbye.

Deleuze and Guattari would call Komiya's running a line of flight, a way out of a territory he can't bear to stay in. Running deterritorialises him. The catch is that lines of flight can turn destructive, and Komiya's already halfway there. He runs as though running could stand in for living.

In a neat psychoanalytic reversal, Komiya now becomes for Togashi what Togashi was for him, the thing his wanting circles around. Both keep coming back to that track.

The Time Jump and the Rain: A Bildungsroman in Fragments

The film jumps years at a time, sometimes mid-stride, so a child sets off and someone older arrives. Beautiful cuts, too.

You could call the structure a Bildungsroman in fragments. The classic novel of formation lives in its slow middle; this film throws the middle away. Its temporality is elliptical. You get a before and an after, and the missing years press on everyone anyway.

By high school Togashi is buckling under expectation, and Komiya comes back genuinely formidable. Their final happens in a downpour and plays out as one unbroken take lasting several minutes. Komiya wins, and Togashi is left on the track while the rain erases his outline.

The mise-en-scène does work no dialogue could. If your whole self is built on winning, losing doesn't just sting; it wipes you out. It's the film's most liminal moment, a boy who isn't the fastest anymore and hasn't worked out what else he might be. The stadium itself is a heterotopia in Foucault's sense, a real place with its own rules and its own clock, where shapeless lives get measured to the hundredth of a second. The rain is the outside world flooding in.

Professional Sport and the Gaze

Ten years later Togashi is a professional, just about. His results have dried up, his contract barely survives, and when a veteran sprinter on his team asks what he's actually racing for, he has no real answer.

Sartre's account of the look, the way someone else's gaze turns you into an object, fits professional sport uncomfortably well. Agencies, sponsors, rankings, the clock: it's all looking. Sartre would probably diagnose bad faith too. Togashi has glued himself to his facticity, to being "the talented one," as if talent were what he is rather than a fact he still has to decide what to do with.

In one scene he breaks down crying in front of two baffled kids. They don't see an athlete, just a grown man in tears. The gaze that once made him a star finds nothing special in him now, and strangely I found that freeing.

Then his body gets a say. He strains a muscle before the national championship; the doctor tells him to rest, the agency tells him to run or lose his contract. He runs. By now he knows what he wants, which is to race Komiya again, and he chooses knowing what it might cost. That's about as close to existential authenticity as sport gets, I think.

Komiya, meanwhile, has become a monk of the stopwatch, chasing records and little else. Togashi is caught in other people's gaze and Komiya in the gaze of the number. A different trap, but it leads to the same question.

The Ending: Why It Is Perfect

The national final. Togashi and Komiya break clear together, and as they run the film lets them remember the races they ran as kids, so past and present share a lane. The last image is the two of them crossing the line side by side, both smiling. We never find out who won.

For me the ending isn't vague. It's honest.

By this point they've each found a reason to run. Togashi wants to run against Komiya, not for a contract or an audience, but because Komiya is the one person who makes the race mean anything. Komiya never spells his out, but you can see it in that smile. The boy who started running to escape is now running towards somebody, and his line of flight has curved round into a meeting.

The ending also rests on acceptance, and that's what gets me every time. Togashi has accepted that talent fades, that bodies break, that he may never be what he was at eleven or twelve. Komiya has paid for his speed with injury and years of obsession. Accepting it doesn't mean giving up, though. They run anyway, eyes open.

Aristotle separates kinesis, an activity that's incomplete until it reaches its end (building a house, say), from energeia, an activity complete at every moment, like seeing or living well. A sprint looks like kinesis in its purest form; it exists to get to the line. The ending quietly turns it into energeia, where every stride is already the point. The telos stops being the result and becomes the running.

And the running is shared. The phenomenology of motion in that last sequence belongs to both of them at once, two bodies setting each other's rhythm the way they did as kids. Husserl would call it retention, the past held inside the present rather than fetched from outside. Neither could have run that fast alone, or felt that happy.

That's why holding back the result feels right to me. Within the diegesis somebody crossed first; the film just won't show us. Sports films nearly always settle things on the scoreboard. Even Rocky, famous for letting its hero lose, tells you the decision. Naming a winner would drag everything back into the logic these two have just escaped, where one of their lives counts and the other doesn't.

Bakhtin wrote that a person is never finalisable, that no last word can sum anyone up. A named winner would finalise them. Leaving them mid-becoming feels truer, because that's where people actually live.

Winning still matters, mind you. They run flat out, they want it badly, and the film never looks down on that. What it does is pull apart the wanting and the worth. You can want to win with everything you have and still be more than whether you did.

So yes, I think it's perfect. The question was never really who's fastest; it was why anyone runs. And the film answers the only way it honestly could, with two people smiling at the line who have both, by then, found out.

What I Love Most

Mostly I love how quiet it is. For a sports drama it's oddly shy about announcing its feelings. Grief is a figure disappearing into rain, joy a smile at the finish. It trusts images to do what most films would hand to a speech.

I love that it holds back, too. It never tells you what to think about Togashi's slide or Komiya's obsession; it lets both be sad and admirable at once.

And I love what it does with time. A 100-metre race is over in roughly ten seconds, and the film spends nearly two hours showing those ten seconds can carry a childhood, a friendship, a loss, a decade of doubt and a return. I kept thinking of Bergson's split between clock time and lived duration; this film is made almost entirely of duration. By the end a sprint feels like a whole life, brief and intense and repeated, limited by the body, and over before you're ready.

I don't know who won. Somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to.

Thank you for your patience. Reading it all might feel hectic, as I vomited a bit more this time. These little thoughts come to me several times when I finish a show or a film. But it is seldom I get the chance to share it with you guys. I hope you will take it lightly and enjoy.