Translator’s note: This two-part essay discusses both the film and the complete manga of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; the manga’s story extends far beyond the film.
I. Dear Nausicaä
At the border with reality, the dream is at first a deathly white. A windmill emerges from nothing, swinging its enormous wooden arms and painting the sky blue-green. I sit in its revolving shadow; terraced fields stretch from my feet to the desert at the horizon. Look closely at this world and you will notice that everything in it is made of restless lines resonating together. A piece of classical music, disordered yet harmonious, clearly composed in praise of God, has passed down so widely through the generations that it has become a children’s song, always carrying the sweetness of childhood. That is how this world feels to me: solemn and pure.
White wings, trailing ripples of blue, skim between castlelike houses and land beside me. Nausicaä whisks off her goggles, stretches her limbs like a child, and sits down on the grassy slope. The wind plays with her long hair, kindling the confidence that lingers at the corners of her eyes into flame. For now she is only a girl, with the innocent fantasies about the world that only a girl can have. I superimpose this lovely figure on the lost soul sitting slumped at the edge of a cliff, waiting to offer her life to purification. Does she know? Years from now she will gaze into the abyss and be swallowed by nothingness.
“You’ve come to escape the ravages of war too, haven’t you? Here, in this utopia cut off from the world,” she asks.
I stare at the burning airship far away in the sky. “It’s no use, wherever you flee. There are human beings everywhere on this planet. The Valley of the Wind will soon be drawn into war. Your heart will be shattered in the great tidal wave of insects; your flesh will decay beneath the gaze of the god of death. Even your mercy will devour itself, precisely because it is mercy. Nausicaä, you are nothing but the iron sword fate uses to end the cycle. There is no land without unrest, and this place is no exception. Peace is to human beings what excessively pure air is.”
She glances at me, a little surprised. “So you’re a visitor from the outside world.” After a moment’s thought, she smiles. “Of course I know my fate. I also know that unless I’m prepared to die, I cannot change this world in the slightest. Yes, I have nowhere to escape to. This body holds fast to the earth like an anchor. Wherever I go, I cannot escape the world we inherited from our ancestors, or the fires of war kindled by humanity’s sins.”
“So what are we to do? Our hands are covered in blood; our existence is of no use to the world. You put your hopes in the planet’s own choice and pass the problem on to future life. Isn’t that like hoping the mountains will walk over to us of their own accord? Yet in the end it is human hands that write our fate. For now, there has merely been a shift from past to future. Nothing has been resolved. Human procrastination has piled up into history, and the mountains of corpses and seas of blood grow day after day. There is no ‘life’—only us, who are the future to those in the past. This ‘we’ has neither past nor future. It is alone and helpless, lost and uneasy.”
The airship draws closer. Gunfire and cannon fire crack through the sky, along with the insects’ piercing screams. The people in the castle have noticed the disaster; they lean anxiously out of their windows, searching for their princess.
“Those who cannot see through to the truth will wander forever in confusion.” She stands up into the wind. “For us, the truth of the world is the path to rebirth that has already been planned. We are servants born into a polluted world, fighting without end, falling one after another to prepare for the return of a new humanity. What, then, is the truth of your world?”
“The truth is that there is no truth. That world is empty, without direction or meaning. It merely turns in solitude, crawling onward.”
“Is that really so? Look beneath your feet.” She runs into the distance, her glider’s wings spreading in the air. “Standing on this earth, haven’t you already found peace?”
Perhaps that really is so.
I watch Nausicaä guide the airship down into the valley, then wrench apart the melting iron plates with her bare hands and rescue Lastelle from the fire.
Ah … another story has begun.
II. Ruins and Wings
Each of Miyazaki’s stories, it is said, weaves inward to form a complete, self-sufficient world of space and time. But listen closely! Without our noticing, the scattered notes fall into a single melody, like the lullaby Kushana recalls amid the battlefield’s rain of blood. The song begins with Future Boy Conan. Already the prototype of the dream-world has been drawn: a home for a new humanity, almost destroyed by a great war, yet still rooted tenaciously in the earth. Shuna’s Journey previews the theme. This Tibetan Prometheus steals barley seed from the realm of the gods, only to be struck by a curse. Forefather of technology, how are we to live with nature? How small humanity is beside the thousand years of purification. Yet it is this tiny species that tries to seize nature’s reins and nail life fast in the future. “Wounding the earth, plundering, polluting, knowing only how to burn everything down … Are we a cursed race, doomed to perish?” No answer can be heard beneath the smoke-covered sky. Come, gentle and valiant wind! You give meaning to the long wait. Nausicaä atones for all humanity’s sins, then is reborn in the posture of death to greet the new world’s first light.
Serialized over thirteen years, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind runs through almost all of Miyazaki’s work, becoming a constantly varying main theme and a wellspring of metaphor. The holy city of Shuwa, spewing shadows of death, becomes Laputa, an ancient weapon severed from the earth. The Ohmu and the Sea of Corruption, originally designed to destroy themselves once purification is complete, have grown hearts instead. Like the great tree spreading through Laputa’s ruins, they sing the praises of life evolving on its own. The robots of Castle in the Sky combine the heedra and the God Warriors. As embodiments of technology, all are innocent beings that can be used to destroy or to guard a garden. Nausicaä’s glider comes from the fallen ancient kingdom of Eftal and becomes the wings of the prophesied messenger; Sheeta is the princess of Laputa, holding the levitation stone that represents ancient technology. Castle in the Sky grew from a story Miyazaki conceived at twelve, before Nausicaä, yet many of its images took root in the latter’s soil, allowing the two to illuminate one another. The stories blend seamlessly in the 1995 music video On Your Mark: Chage and Aska rescue a winged girl from an organization intent on imprisoning and studying her, and release her into the surface world, now uninhabited because of nuclear radiation. The girl echoes Sheeta falling from the sky, while the surface world recalls the teeming Sea of Corruption.
Ruins and wings—earth and sky: these two primal images gradually diverge in the telling, branching out, putting forth leaves, and bearing new metaphors, yet all can be traced to the same root. Born in 1941, Miyazaki spent his childhood amid the postwar depression. That age, when everything awaited rebuilding, was as the Master of the Tomb describes it: a monument to the old world’s death and a sign of hope for the new. Civilization reaches its peak, only to collapse swiftly in civil war. The nuclear bomb, that button that ends history, appears in Future Boy Conan as a supermagnetic weapon; in Nausicaä, it becomes the Seven Days of Fire, when the God Warriors run amok. In Castle in the Sky, it is suggested by the enormous energy within the levitation stone, while On Your Mark uses radiation warnings to mark the unhealing wound directly. Fortunately, humanity does survive the catastrophe of its own making and rebuilds its home from the ruins.
Miyazaki’s attitude toward the past is complicated. He hates the folly of the ancients who started the wars, yet knows perfectly well that rebuilding means relying on their technology. Seeing the wormhandlers scavenging jewelry beside a crashed Torumekian aircraft, Nausicaä loses her temper: “Stop! You mustn’t steal from the dead! Don’t dishonor the dead! Any of them!” But she quickly catches herself: “Oh, I’m sorry. I have no right to be angry … These people have lived like this for hundreds of years.” A life eked out from the ancients’ rubble. Ruins signify both danger and hope: the God Warrior was excavated from beneath Pejite, and the mutant slime mold that caused the Daikaisho—the great tidal wave of insects—was cultivated using the technology of the Tomb of Shuwa. Yet the Sea of Corruption and the Ohmu that cleanse the pollution are also the fruits of ancient technology. We might say that the image of ruins carries both humanity’s connection to the old era and its opposition to it. What Nausicaä strives to show is precisely the magnificent process by which life grows freely beyond its past.
“Living things change! Ohmu, slime molds, plants, people—all of them change! We too can live together with the Sea of Corruption! But you cannot change. Everything about you is a plan laid down in advance! Because you deny death altogether … Tell the truth! We do not need you!”
When Nausicaä rejects the Tomb of Shuwa, Miyazaki has already made his difficult choice: rather than entrust life to a past already planned out, cast it toward a boundlessly open future and trust its own potential. “Even the most wretched life can survive by its own strength.” Nausicaä must believe this, or she will slip into nothingness. For its sake she is prepared to lie to her followers and to herself. She knows that the command “You mustn’t take things from the dead” contradicts itself, yet still cannot contain her anger. This contradiction is inseparable from Miyazaki’s complicated attitude toward technology. Technology and the environment are where past and present meet, and Miyazaki places flight at the pinnacle of technological achievement. In a sense, then, wings themselves symbolize a measure of reconciliation with the past and with technology.
Miyazaki’s father worked in the family factory, which specialized in parts for military aircraft. Miyazaki’s own fixation on flight is bound up with his love of airplanes. Yet airplanes are also instruments of war and slaughter, utterly at odds with his antiwar ideals. That is why Caproni sighs at the end of The Wind Rises: “Airplanes are a beautiful, cursed dream.” Correspondingly, Miyazaki’s flying machines divide into two extremes. Nausicaä’s glider, Sheeta’s levitation stone, Totoro’s spinning top, Kiki’s broom, and Porco’s fighter plane all express the airy, harmless qualities of wings. The Dorok flying warships bristling with gun turrets, the ponderous military airships, the dirigibles swimming like jellyfish through the skies of Howl’s Moving Castle, and the enemy planes that shoot Jiro down out of his dream all convey an oppressive sense of destruction. Through the airplane, the oppositions between freedom and dictatorship, peace and war, civilization and sin, life and death form the source of instability and conflict in Miyazaki’s world. This is where the restlessness mentioned at the beginning comes from. Yet just as human civilization advances by eliminating contradictions within its systems of belief, this contradiction, too, fuels Miyazaki’s continuing thought and creation. Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and The Wind Rises can all be seen as attempts to respond, though their answers differ somewhat. If the first three clearly express a loathing of technology, The Wind Rises, through Jiro—a figure so innocent and tenacious as to be almost cold-hearted—suggests that humanity might live with its own sin. This leads directly to Nausicaä’s final revelation: we cannot survive without toxins. Life is a light flickering in the darkness.
Rather than resolving the conflict between humanity and nature raised in Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke depicts its tragic consequences in bold strokes. Returning the Forest Spirit’s head to nature is hardly a practical strategy; it is only a symbol. After this battle, the ironworking civilization led by Lady Eboshi will still strip the mountains and destroy the forests, while the forces of nature led by the Forest Spirit will still unleash disasters upon humanity. Loud accusations of blindness to everything but self-interest cannot reconcile the two. They stand on equal ground, each fighting for the survival and prosperity of its own kind. Neither side is right or wrong. We might instead say that this protracted war is nature’s very truth. Witnessing the tragedies along her journey, Nausicaä sinks into nothingness, anguished by the harm humanity has done to the planet, and questions the meaning of life. But after witnessing the new life kindled when the slime mold and the Daikaisho converge, she suddenly understands: there is no reason to exclude humanity from nature. Human beings are part of nature too. Pollution is not imposed from outside; it is nature devouring itself.
“The individual is the whole, and the whole is the individual. In this world, eating and being eaten are the same thing, because the entire forest is a single living being. When human beings destroy the harmony of the world, the forest pays a great price to restore it. That is why, over these thousand years, the forest has grown deeper and wider.”
This precisely describes the relationship between humanity and nature in Princess Mononoke: the balance between eating and being eaten, between life and death. The life of nature as a whole moves slowly forward only through the successive deaths of individuals and species and their struggles with one another, like the metabolism of the human body—a ship of Theseus forever adrift. This is why the Forest Spirit is portrayed as wielding the powers of both life and death, becoming a stag by day and a giant by night, flowers blooming and withering at its every step.
Returning to this theme does not mean that Princess Mononoke has no revelations of its own. It reverses humanity’s lowly position in Nausicaä, where people are powerless against the Ohmu and the forest. It also points to the ultimate state of this mutual struggle: humanity and nature regarding each other with fear and respect. Nausicaä concentrates on an age when the encroaching Sea of Corruption has brought humanity close to extinction; Princess Mononoke moves the stage to the century when human beings have only just used technology to wrest a place for themselves from nature. Pollution has not yet begun, and on Ashitaka’s journey we still see green mountains and clear waters stretching like an ocean. In this sense, Nausicaä offers a remedy after disaster and a longing for the past, while Princess Mononoke offers a hope for peace and a warning of disasters to come.
Can humanity and nature really live in harmony? The question is meaningless; it only adds to our distress. The fact is that humanity and nature coexist, and will coexist forever. Harmony can truly be achieved only when human beings realize that they must do everything in their power to safeguard the interests of the whole planet. It is the result of history, not of argument. Humanity is taught to live in harmony with nature, and this education can begin only in fear and respect for nature. The paradox is this: without recognizing nature’s destructive power, how can we learn to fear and respect it? Go and watch Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke!