(To check out the previous Miyazaki essay in this series click HERE)

There’s not much to be said that hasn’t already been said about Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 film Spirited Away. It won a ton of awards, was the highest grossing Japanese film of all time when it was released, and has entered the cultural consciousness on a higher level than any of his other works. Many critics and reviewers consider it to be the greatest animated film ever made. Many find parallels between the film and earlier Disney animations and classic works of literature. Some of the themes I’ve explored in Miyazaki’s work previously, like liminality and the abyss, ecology, Shinto metaphysics, and the presentation of modern-day fables are all apt here and have been sufficiently delved into by others elsewhere. So hold my beer and wish me luck.

Spirited Away is the story of a ten-year old girl, Chihiro, who is moving to a new city with her parents. Along the way, they miss the turn to their new home and find themselves barreling through a forested trail in their family Audi. The trail ends at a kawai-uncanny stone marker in front of a tunnel that leads to an abandoned amusement park, one of many created during Japan’s economic boom and left defunct after its fiscal bubble burst and the country fell on economic hard times. But the father in his polo shirt and the mother in her western professional attire smell something that immediately catches their attention: food. They follow their noses, the reluctant Chihiro following behind, and find a food stall packed with food, but with no vendor or cook present. They begin to eat, are slowly turned into pigs, and the park changes aspect as the days turns to night. Chihiro meets a young boy, Haku, who tells her to leave quickly before she is trapped there in the world of the Kami (the spirits, the gods). she doesn’t make it and spends the rest of the film trying to save her parents from their fate and escape the park, all the while gaining new friends, maturing, and attempting to make the Bathhouse at the center of the narrative into a better place.

The film’s Japanese title is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, meaning Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away. Let’s parse this just a bit. Chihiro is obviously the young protagonist of the film. While Chihiro is in the spirit world- the Kami no Bun’ya (sorry if that translates odd, my Japanese needs some brushing up)- she must eat their spirit food to continue existing lest she fade away forever and she must get a job, lest she become prey for any of the spirit’s who especially enjoy human flesh. She takes her job with Yubaba, the owner of the park’s titanic bathhouse, and loses her name by signing her work-release contract. Yubaba erases Chihiro’s memory of her past name and life little by little in an attempt to keep her there forever in her realm as an employee, and she discards the last two characters in Chihiro’s name, only keeping “chi”, which she interprets as “Sen”, or one thousand (showing Yubaba’s preoccupation with numbers and with money).

So, key one to the film’s original title: Sen and Chihiro are one and the same person literally, but are treated as two persons. As a person undergoes a liminal transaction, they begin as the child with a set identity (Chihiro as her parent’s child) and must pass through a liminal gate (the gate to the amusement park) where they enter a new world invested with mystical or spiritual or philosophical power or significance (the Kami no Bun’ya Amusement Park). In this new world, they must undergo a quest (saving her parent’s and escaping) whilst under a void or dearth or lack of true identity as a neither here nor there, a neither child nor adult (the placeholder worker name of Sen, neither totally human nor totally spirit though displaying attributes of both). And in the end, one must complete the quest and pass over the threshold or gate once more to claim a new identity nominally equivalent to the original pre-liminal one (she is called Chihiro again) but with a noted new responsibility and character (she has saved her parent’s, worked hard in the bathhouse [thus dispensing with her Jungian Puer Aeternus, or child god Dionysus, whose idealism is destroyed through work], and come out a stronger person), but different. The title’s emphasis on the otherness of Sen to Chihiro and Chihiro to Sen highlights this journey and the shifts in identity that take place over the course of the narrative.

Next up, what is Kamikakushi? Kami is the name for the animating spirits of all things, for some ghosts and monsters, and for the indigenous Japanese gods of Shinto religion. To be kakushi by the Kami is literally to be “hidden away” by them. This notion has been translated as spirited away which means to be removed without anyone noticing it happened. the term is obviously a perfect fit for Chihiro’s circumstances in this film where she is taken without anyone’s notice (her parent’s were too focused on Capitalist and Western-style gorging of themselves to pay attention to her and fell into Yubaba’s trap in the process).

The notion of Kamikakushi as the mysterious death or disappearance of a person is a notion common in Japanese folklore. Pair this with the Yokai Kappa, who steals away children near rivers to consume their flesh and you have a potentially very dangerous world for children in pre-modern Japan. As we move into a more modern world where spirituality takes on more metaphorical meanings, we know retroactively that consistent tales of Japanese children being spirited away and never found again often had much more sinister implications. There must of been Japanese Bluebeards and serial killers, as well as many cases of children becoming lost and never finding their way homes again, at the source of much of the Kamikakushi myth.

Another bizarre feature of pre-modern Japanese myths and stories is the Ubasute. Ubasute, literally “abandoning of old women”, refers to the rarely used, but historical Japanese practice of bringing old women who could no longer fend for themselves and were taking up village or household resources to maintain into the mountains where they would be left to fend for themselves. In other words, a death sentence. The practice extended to one’s own parents as the term Oyasute, or “abandoning a parent”, is common as well. In Japan today, there is mountain called Ubasute-yama, where stories of the practice in the past were common. The Suicide Forest, or Sea of Tress, Aokigahara, where hundreds of people a year sometimes commit suicide, is rumored to have been a place where ubasute was common.

Unlike Walt Disney productions, which often soften the darker elements of Hans Christian Anderson and Brothers Grimm stories, Miyazaki does not shy away from the more gruesome elements of fairy tale, fable, and myth. If Haku had not appeared to help Chihiro, she would not have consumed any of the food in the Kami no Bun’ya and would have disappeared forever. If he had not then procured a job for her, she would have been eaten by one of the spirit realm’s many Kami, and would have died that way. If either of these potentialities came to fruition, her parent’s would have remained pigs and the Kami would have eaten them. At any moment, she could have failed in her quest and either become an indentured servant to Yubaba forever and Chihiro would have been forced to sit back and do nothing as her parent’s were consumed. And worse yet is the fate that could have transpired as she slowly lost all semblance of humanity, and in the distant future, may have feasted on the flesh of human beings like her fellow worker-spirits. The fall into the abyss of nothingness or worse was always an option that she just barely skirted.

But Chihiro succeeds in identifying her parents as pigs and manages to free them and herself from their bonds. As they come to in the real world defunct amusement park, they exit the gates and find that their car is covered in dust and leaves. How much time elapsed? We may never know, but these shifts in time are common themes in Japanese (and in Western fairy-tale) liminal narratives. Some time has been lost perhaps, and the family may have been presumed missing, but with Chihiro’s new strength, she can hopefully help her family to acclimate to the problems ahead.

Cody Ward

[Next up: Howl’s Moving Castle]