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This chapter examines Japanese films with themes focusing on the specificity of places—cities, states, worlds, and spaces—and on the relation between particular places and the larger world that surrounds it, to a “sense of the world.” One example is Yukisada Isao's 2004 Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World, which navigates a complex geography of disparate elements in space, time, history, and memory, developing a mode of transit that takes characters to and from specific times and places in a phantom passage between this world and that other world. As the title suggests, the film invokes a sense of the world, a center of the world, in the form of a sense or affect (love and loss) and a mode of expression, crying, or more accurately, shouting.

Researchers have found that people in love enjoy many advantages: love is known to improve psychological, emotional, and physical health. When things go badly, however, lovers may suffer the pangs of rejection, jealousy, sadness, and anger. People can learn from both the joy of fulfilling relationships and the pain they suffer from the affairs that go wrong. This chapter discusses the joys of love and the troubles of love, as reflected in studies of the neuroscience of love and loss and of unrequited love. It also reports on the physiological and psychological effects of jealousy and vengeance.

This chapter offers a close reading of the next four of the poem’s opening verses that frame the rest of the work through the address of the Yaksha to the Cloud. These verses are both descriptive and suggestive, focusing on the state of loss, the pining-sorrowful condition of the Yaksha, the surrounding environs, the appearance of the Cloud, and perhaps underneath all this, critical issues concerning the relationship between language and representation. The intertextuality of the Cloud image is discussed, as is its relationship with figurative language, and the correlation of the rainy season with the themes of loss and longing. The critical question of the poem is then considered: “How can an inanimate Cloud transmit a message from a living being?” Other works of Kālidāsa are considered in this regard (Śakuntalā, Raghuvanśa) as is the recurring trope of the reckless lover, alongside that of the silent sage. What is the relationship between the cloud and the message, the form and the content, the sign and the object world? Does figuration reveal through indirection or does it simply magnify an inadequate situation? The answer given is the remainder of the poem itself, one that simultaneously dazzles with visionary capability and demonstrates figurative impossibility.