The film focuses on obsessive craft and familial ties. It lacks explicit LGBTQ+ identities or non-heteronormative romantic arcs, staying within traditional genre bounds.

Female characters, including the assistant and daughter, possess psychological agency and central roles in the mystery. However, they do not overtly dismantle the period's masculine hierarchies.

Set in the Meiji era, the film offers a culturally authentic Japanese landscape. The casting avoids whitewashing by centering a localized, non-Western historical perspective.

The narrative favors existential ambiguity and the ephemeral nature of memory over rigid moralities. It avoids Western-centric tropes by focusing on a postmodernist approach to truth.

There is no central depiction of physical or neurodivergent disability. Themes of sensory perception are used as supernatural genre elements rather than explorations of lived experience.