III. Paradise Lost
My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, and Porco Rosso illuminate one another in an intriguing pattern. Leisurely in manner, light and buoyant in rhythm, they drift outside the main theme. They lack a clearly stated theme of their own, as though deliberately washed free of revelation, and so become “stories” in their purest form. These four secondary themes unfold the history of an individual, one stage after another; pieced together, they form a brief song of a life. My Neighbor Totoro tells of the invisible friends of childhood reverie. Mei and Satsuki are like two clear streams: we can see straight through to the joy, anger, and sorrow laid out in their eyes. Back in that age when human beings could still touch the thing in itself! Kiki and Chihiro venture into the adult world in children’s bodies. This ought to be a tragedy, for it foretells the loss of magic and self. But out of tenderness for hope, Miyazaki draws a fairy-tale cloak over life’s darker side, just as Nausicaä, out of mercy, leaves the world a lie:
“What would telling them all this achieve? Besides, deep in my heart, something is calling insistently. The landscape I saw … the place you took me to, beyond the Sea of Corruption … The world really has come back to life. Even if our bodies cannot bear that purity …”
Lost as we are, we always need someone to tell us how beautiful life is. Even if it is a paradise that exists only in fantasy, as soon as we hear its voice, “we will surely fly there like birds.” Innocent, endearing humanity! Or do you want the truth? It is there, its clues deftly set into the details. At the end of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Kiki recovers her lost magic. The black cat who could once talk jumps onto her shoulder, but all he gives is an ordinary meow. It is certainly no coincidence that Kiki and Jiji share a name.1 The black cat is the girl’s mirror image, the reality that never shows its face. The development of Kiki’s relationship with Tombo and the two cats’ romance echo each other in the story. Perhaps the black cat has given up the ability to speak so that he can be with his lover, while Kiki has finally found her place in the town’s life and awakened from childhood’s dream. Yet Spirited Away, which also describes a girl growing up, offers the opposite hint: at the end, the hair tie Haku gave Chihiro catches the sunlight.2 It is the mark of someone who has been spirited away. It means that everything she experienced was not a dream, and that magic really exists.
Which Miyazaki, then, are we to believe? One murmurs: reality is reality, after all. Only children are allowed into Narnia; once you grow up, you can never return to that magical kingdom. The other whispers: do not forget us. In that distant underground world, unimaginable miracles are always taking place. We will keep watching over you, protecting you, from places you cannot see.
But it is not only the children who mature. Miyazaki does too. Some say that after Kiki’s Delivery Service, none of the heroines in his animation can fly anymore.
Yes. Because they have grown up.
In Miyazaki’s world, “growing up” has a peculiarly tragic meaning, because it separates two utterly opposed worlds: one holds all humanity’s innocence and goodness; the other, all its impurity and sin. Growing up means recognizing the impurity and sin in oneself, then being driven out of childhood’s Eden. In Nausicaä, nothingness jeers at her: “Look at your feet! Look at your own feet! Among these corpses are people you killed! Still pretending you don’t know? How absurd! You can’t keep pretending to be a pure little child! The Ohmu will no longer forgive you! You are just another of those foolish, polluted humans! You are a human adult! A woman who has inherited the blood of a cursed race! Go and wander in torment with the dead!”
If Nausicaä escapes her own sin by becoming forest alongside the Ohmu, Miyazaki escapes the sin of being human by hiding in the world of childhood. This is also why his dreams are so gorgeous and moving, yet so “restless” and “full of cracks”: Miyazaki refuses to wake, and yet must wake. Ponyo is unquestionably a fairy tale, but through Fujimoto—Ponyo’s father, who has rejected his human identity to live in the sea—he still gives expression to the darkness in his heart. Miyazaki says his dream is to live to see the day Tokyo is submerged. Ponyo fulfills that wish: to be devoured by nature, then wander among the ruins of Atlantis.
In Spirited Away, growing up means becoming a gluttonous pig, and Porco Rosso is a fairy tale written for adults. Porco Rosso is the easiest to understand, and the hardest. Easiest because it tells of a middle-aged man’s persistence and romance; hardest because it tells of a middle-aged man’s romance and persistence. Amusingly, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso both began as jobs Toshio Suzuki found for Miyazaki to lift his spirits: one an advertisement for Yamato, the “Black Cat” delivery company, the other for Japan Airlines. But as the two men went back and forth, adding to the stories, there was no stopping them. Miyazaki himself began drawing up the Porco Rosso project. When Suzuki asked in astonishment why he had drawn the protagonist as a pig, he snapped back: because I like it. The original script consisted only of the opening ten-odd minutes of combat with the air pirates. Once Gina appeared, however, the story became interesting, so it continued—and the red pig’s identity became a question to be resolved.
When Porco collects his payment at the bank, the clerk asks, “Would you like to buy some government bonds? Do your bit for your country?” He replies casually, with his usual effortless style, “Surely that’s a matter for you humans.” A pig is not human and therefore need not bear human duties and responsibilities: “Country and law mean nothing.” Here, the pig becomes a symbol of self-exile, like Nausicaä merging into the forest. The paradox of the airplane returns. Porco exiles himself because he no longer wants to risk his life for the fascist air force. Yet he still loves the exhilaration of flying, and so can only declare, “A pig that can’t fly is just an ordinary pig.” When he says this, Gina berates him—“Nonsense!”—and those of us watching can only smile wryly. In the cinema, Ferrarin urges him to return to the air force, but he refuses: he “doesn’t want to be a fascist, only to fly for bounties.” This recalls that suggestive pronouncement at the beginning: “Those who make money from war are villains; those who can’t earn a bounty are incompetents; those up to their ears in debt are air pirates.” Porco will not make money from war, which makes him a free and unfettered pig. Nor does he want to be up to his ears in debt, so he becomes a flying pig. There is the simplest answer to the question.
If we probe further, perhaps he lost heart after seeing his comrades fall in battle and coming upon the plain of clouds where dead aircraft drift in a single line into the distance, and so exiled himself as a pig. Or perhaps, having chosen freedom over Gina, he feels guilty toward her and takes refuge in a pig’s identity to escape his own reproaches. Porco returns to his original form twice: once through Fio’s sleep-blurred eyes, and once after Gina has gently scolded him and flown away. Who can know what he was thinking then? But the truth of the matter is not really important. What matters is that the persistence disguised as indolence is itself what makes him romantic. Gina and Fio probably fall for him because of it. Indolent, because he is an adult; persistent, because he is a child.
Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises are Miyazaki’s only two animated works with adult protagonists. Both revolve around airplanes, and their central characters are much alike: Porco and Jiro are infatuated with aircraft and do not want them tainted by sin. The difference is that Porco’s plane belongs to him; he is free to decide what to do with it. Jiro, however, designs aircraft for war, and his love of them is bound to bring disaster. Porco chooses to evade his own sin; Jiro chooses to face his. They point to two different ways of “growing up.”
IV. Divided Love
Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises both involve war, but in the former war serves love, while in the latter war and love develop in parallel, each reflecting the other. In Miyazaki’s animation, the meeting of a boy and a girl has always been an occasion for a burst of feeling. Looking back, though, love has remained a flickering presence, never truly becoming the theme. His young heroes draw close through an unspoken understanding, as though they belong to a secret society, exchange passwords the instant they meet, and remain loyal and trusting ever after. For the first time, Miyazaki struggles desperately with love, while Suzuki and the rest of us stand by and enjoy his predicament.
Howl makes a pact with a falling star and becomes a heartless playboy, forever retaining the innocence of childhood. In presenting Sophie as a meddlesome old woman, perhaps Miyazaki is shyly commemorating his love for his mother. Neither Nausicaä nor Kushana received her mother’s love in full: Nausicaä’s mother was tormented by the deaths of her children, while Kushana’s mother was poisoned by King Vu and lost her mind, unable to recognize even her own family. The poisoning is a metaphor for Miyazaki’s mother’s tuberculosis, which also finds expression in My Neighbor Totoro. His sick mother, knowing she would not live much longer, tearfully taught her children to be independent rather than giving Miyazaki excessive care and protection. This made the already frail boy still more withdrawn. He has always tried to heal himself through animation, and so many of his female characters possess, in varying degrees, a maternal radiance and a strong, independent character. Nausicaä and Kushana are the two extremes, the two archetypes. Nausicaä tenderly calls both the Ohmu and the innocent wormhandlers her children. Kushana needs no introduction: she does not flinch when Namulis tries to force her into marriage, and she leads her soldiers from the front. One inherits all the maternal tenderness; the other, all the strength and confidence. All the women who follow in the dream-world are, to some extent, combinations of these two. The woman pirate in Castle in the Sky hides an intellectual side beneath her fierce exterior. Osono in Kiki’s Delivery Service cares for and supports Kiki away from home. Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke is perhaps closest to Kushana in character, yet she is also her people’s mainstay and spiritual support. The old woman in Ponyo even moved Miyazaki to tears of grief as he remembered his mother.
Returning to Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie reconciles the opposition between Nausicaä and Kushana in a stranger, more amusing, and yet entirely natural way. We can, of course, see her changing appearance as a projection of her psychological age. But how should psychological age be measured? Better to say that when Sophie becomes strong and confident, she becomes a girl again; when she patiently tends Howl with loving care, she becomes a “mother.” Howl, by contrast, often erupts into childish petulance. He cries and makes a fuss because his hair has turned blue; frightened of the royal summons to war, he has Sophie pose as his mother and ask to have him excused. All this expresses a child’s dependence. Sophie, too, thus comes to embody the mother. Since this is the first time Miyazaki has entrusted his view of love to an animated work, perhaps we might say that he belongs to the more traditional camp: he hopes that a wife will quietly support her husband from behind the scenes and be someone he can lean on. The same view of love is projected into The Wind Rises, though Jiro and Nahoko are more mature and composed. Yet that composure does not conceal or erase their reckless ardor. It becomes a picture frame, fixing forever the moving image of the two supporting each other as they face life’s cruelty.
Jiro inherits Ashitaka’s composure and persistence, yet has a startling, revelatory force that Ashitaka lacks. This is precisely because, in both his work and his love, the shadow of sin dances beside his choices. Only with war as their sacrificial offering do the airplanes attain their grandeur; only with Nahoko’s withering as its sacrificial offering does Jiro’s love attain its tragic beauty. Even as a child, Jiro catches the scent of death spewing from the planes, but he does not want to think about it. When the ministers of war spell out what they require of his aircraft, he stands apart and turns a deaf ear. He also knows that marrying Nahoko means his wife’s tuberculosis will not be cured. Yet he rejects Kurokawa’s advice, merely on the grounds that he can work with peace of mind only if his wife is beside him. This can only be called selfishness. Yet what is precious about this selfishness is that Nahoko tacitly accepts it—indeed, she wants it too: to show her husband her most beautiful self, then vanish with the wind. Jiro struggles in anguish within these two contradictions. Though everything is already destined to end in pieces, he ultimately chooses to do all he can, to give it everything he has. Pointing to the meadow where they first met, Caproni says, “This is our kingdom of dreams.” But Jiro replies, “It feels like hell to me.”
To know one’s own sin and still choose to live without fear: this self-devouring pain belongs not only to Jiro, but to Howl, to Ashitaka, to Porco, to Kushana, to Nausicaä—to Miyazaki. In the original script of The Wind Rises, Nahoko’s apparition opens her arms to her husband and says not “Live,” but “Come”—come, my love … Your task in this world is complete. You have done everything you could to approach your ideal. Now it is time to pay for your sins. Toshio Suzuki says Miyazaki preferred the original ending. This seems to mean that the struggle within Miyazaki when he was creating Nausicaä has still not ended. The path to release he articulated through Nausicaä has taken a turn and led back into nothingness.
In a dream, Nausicaä sees the holy monk’s skeleton. It tells her that humanity is a cursed race: only by burning it to ashes can the world be reborn. Nausicaä exposes the true face of nothingness and wakes in tears. She flies to where the slime molds are gathering, and there sees swarms of insects circling above a forest sprouting amid death. The southern forest whose cry for help the Ohmu spoke of turns out to be the mutant slime mold, struggling in torment. The insects bring about the legendary Daikaisho both to devour and to be devoured. Human beings are like the mutant slime mold: they must merge with the forest to find peace. Nausicaä understands all this and yields to nothingness. She resolves to become forest with the Ohmu, greeting the world’s rebirth through death.
“Nothingness was not wrong. We are a cursed race. Wounding the earth, plundering, polluting, knowing only how to burn everything down … We are hideous creatures to begin with … The insects are so much more beautiful than we are. There is no point in asking forgiveness now … The Ohmu are soothing the earth’s wounds, becoming seedbeds for the Sea of Corruption while still alive. I too will become forest. If I too can become a tree while I am still alive, let me go with you.”
And so perpetual purification began.
V. Nothingness and Rebirth
Searching for Nausicaä on the newborn earth, Chikuku and Chalka encounter Selm of the Forest People. Selm tells them that Nausicaä is gazing into the abyss within the Ohmu’s heart; whether she returns from that cliff is a decision she must make herself. Meanwhile, Miralupa’s shadow slips into the depths of Nausicaä’s heart. She sees the Holy Emperor’s wretched true form, and out of compassion still chooses to lead him through the forest. Selm tells Nausicaä, “This forest exists within your heart. Those who come from darkness should return to darkness.” Nausicaä objects: “There is darkness in my heart too. If this forest is within me, then he too is part of me.” Selm smiles without answering. The three reach the far end of the Sea of Corruption, where the world has come back to life. The shadow finds release and disappears into the distance, laughing. Nausicaä lifts her foot from the flowers and grass she has bruised and leaves, holding back her tears: “In another thousand years, or longer, when you have grown wider or stronger, and we have not perished but have grown wiser, I will return to you.” She returns to the waking world, determined to stop the Dorok Principalities from invading Torumekia.
Namulis sets about purging the priesthood loyal to his brother and has Chalka bound at the execution ground with the other priests. Nausicaä arrives on the wind. Hearing the white bird’s long cry, the people cheer the name “Kurubaruka.” Just then, the levitating vessel carrying the God Warrior crosses the sky. Nausicaä calls out: “Down this road lies nothing but an endless cycle of hatred and revenge. Please go and live around the Sea of Corruption. Though the Sea of Corruption is the fruit of our karma, it is not our enemy. Why not choose love and friendship instead of hatred?” She shows the people the paradise beyond the forest. Namulis orders her to stop, accusing her of beguiling the people with heresy. Nausicaä orders Mito to attack the God Warrior with the gunship. The heedra break their bonds and charge the crowd. At the critical moment, a Mani warship fires on them, its people shouting, “The Mani choose Nausicaä’s path! The Mani want no emperor!” Asbel arrives and throws Nausicaä the God Warrior’s control stone. Alone, sword in hand, she faces Namulis’s army. Fire is her skirt! Namulis laughs: “Girl in blue! So you’ve used fire after all? You burned the sack that sealed this monster away. You, wearing the mask of a savior, have unleashed it on the world!” The two sides join battle. The instant a heedra seizes Nausicaä, the God Warrior awakens and burns its mother’s enemies to ash. Namulis, battered and torn, returns to the cockpit, only to find Kushana waiting with troops in revolt. Enduring the pain, he reveals the existence of the Master of the Tomb. At last Nausicaä faces her final choice: to destroy the Tomb of Shuwa, which has cast its shadow over the world.
Uncovering the truth is cruel. The ignorant take the Sea of Corruption to be the source of disaster and dream of burning the forest to the ground with the God Warrior. The Forest People worship the Ohmu as gods of nature; they believe the Sea of Corruption arose to purify a polluted world. Yet everyone has guessed wrong. Human beings, Ohmu, and the Sea of Corruption alike are creations of ancient technology, the desperate struggle of those who came before. The Master of the Tomb gives a bitter smile: “Can you imagine an age so filled with hatred and pain? Poisonous air, a savage sun, an exhausted earth, endless death. All those religions, all those versions of justice, all those conflicting interests … We could even manufacture gods to mediate between them. But nothing worked. There was no time left. We had to entrust everything to the future.” So they collected the embryos of every living thing and preserved them in an ark—the Tomb—then activated the Ohmu’s purification program and began a thousand years of dormancy. And the people living around the Sea of Corruption? Mere slaves, there to usher in the new humanity. Their bodies have already been altered to withstand pollution. Exposed to air that is too clean, their lungs will gush blood and they will die. How pitiful! “Our lives are like wind and sound … living echoes … that will fade away.”
In the film adapted from the manga’s first two volumes, Nausicaä’s divinity is plain to see. With her frail body she calms the earth’s fury, then rises from death in answer to the Ohmu’s prayers. Inevitably, this recalls the story of Jesus atoning for all humanity’s sins. The manga, too, emphasizes Nausicaä’s status as savior: “Clad in blue, that one shall descend upon a golden field.” The prophecy is fulfilled twice. The first time, Nausicaä stands upon a meadow of Ohmu feelers, her clothes stained blue by their blood. The second, she stands upon a wilderness lit by the rising sun, her robes stained blue by the Master of the Tomb’s blood. Yet the closer we come to the ending, the more we discover that the truth is not as simple as people imagine. The savior’s purity is called into question. At the execution ground, the people recite an ancient rite: “The hour has come for the polluted world to end. The white bird flies, proclaiming to the world that perpetual purification has begun. Bid farewell to this world of nothing but pain!” Kurotowa is startled: “The white bird is not a savior, but a god of death?” Selm answers, “They are different faces of the same prophecy. Sometimes it is hope turned toward life; sometimes it is longing for the other shore.” Both identities—a guide toward life and a guide toward death—find an echo in Nausicaä. This is the most difficult riddle in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Miyazaki hints at her role as a guide toward death at least three times: (1) Nausicaä orders the gunship to fire at the sac enclosing the God Warrior, inadvertently bringing it into the world, and Namulis mocks her as “the mother of the god of death”; (2) on leaving the garden ruins, Nausicaä murmurs, “Perhaps this journey of mine will bring about humanity’s extinction instead … Even so, I must destroy the Tomb of Shuwa!”; (3) confronting the Master of the Tomb, Nausicaä declares that this preprogrammed god of purification does not understand what it means to live, because everything about it is laid down in advance and it denies death altogether. In this final revelation, death becomes indispensable to life: “Why didn’t those people realize that purity and impurity together are what we call life? Suffering, tragedy, and folly cannot be eliminated even in a pure world, because they are part of being human. That is why, even amid hardship, human beings still possess joy and radiance.”
Nausicaä was meant to be a guide toward life, yet in the end she becomes a guide toward death. With her own hands she destroys the old world’s embryos and the technology that could restore humanity to its former state. Until the very last moment, she cannot be certain that what she has done is right: “I am trembling at the wrong I have done. Those embryos should have grown into gentle, wise human beings, unlike us in our cruelty.” Had the new humans already been born into the world, Nausicaä could not have harmed them. It is not the embryos she rejects. Nor is it technology, for the people around the Sea of Corruption have always relied on ancient technology to stay alive. Still less does Nausicaä oppose artificial life: the Sea of Corruption and the Ohmu are both artificial, and within them “tenderness and friendship can still be born.” Only one possibility remains. What Nausicaä resists is the god of purification’s arrogance toward nature, and the dense nothingness that flows from it.
What, then, is nihilism?3 For Nausicaä, nihilism means believing that life has a particular purpose for which the present, and even life itself, may be sacrificed. If the present exists only for some future purpose, it no longer matters how people live it. Nihilism is born from this—and this is also what drives Namulis to give up on himself and degenerate into the Holy Emperor. For the Master of the Tomb, however, nihilism means believing that life itself needs no purpose. Nihilism is what Nausicaä calls “the planet deciding its own fate,” because then every form of life would be justified, and there would no longer be any distinction between impurity and purity. If we confined ourselves to the wording, we might read Nausicaä as a variation on Kantian moral philosophy or existentialism: life is an end in itself, not a means; there is no eternal supreme value. Even Bergson’s Creative Evolution could be made to fit: the planet itself is seen as one immense life, with creation continuing from moment to moment; the future is forever unknown, something for which we must pray with all our hearts. Another interpretation holds that Miyazaki used the ending of Nausicaä to bid farewell to his former communist beliefs. The evidence is that the Master of the Tomb’s two faces resemble Marx and Engels, while communism is said to be the very model of prescribing a course for human history.
But we must see that Nausicaä’s answer has her entire journey behind it. She has witnessed the insects’ love for one another, the merging of slime mold and forest, and countless people laughing heartily even in suffering. These pure facts of nature are what make her believe that life will find its own way. “Even if our bodies have been artificially altered, our lives are still our own. Life survives through life’s own power! If that day is to come, we will live to meet it! We are birds who will fly beyond that day, even if we cough up blood again and again! 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!”
The Tomb of Shuwa attempts to remake the world exactly as it was, but “they did not realize that this itself was the greatest insult to life.” Humanity’s sin lies in its yearning for immortality. That yearning takes another form in the veneration and defense of civilization. Sealed away in the holy city of Shuwa is not only the whole of human civilization, but also the obsession with protecting it to the death, even at the cost of starting wars. As long as humanity clings to that obsession, it will remain arrogant and crown itself master of the world. That crown severs humanity from the planet’s life as a whole, turning it into a floating castle in the sky, doomed to perish.
Through Nausicaä, Miyazaki articulates the path to redemption: live with death, live with suffering, live with sin. As long as we go on living, everything will gradually get better. We must trust in life’s own power. Biologically, the Sea of Corruption is deadly poison to humans, yet it nourishes countless living beings. The distinction between impurity and purity ceases to matter, because if human beings can survive in the Sea of Corruption, it does not count as impure. Spiritually, “suffering, tragedy, and folly cannot be eliminated even in a pure world, because they are part of being human.” Endure the pain, and there will be strength to laugh aloud. Given patience, people can always come to understand one another. Life is forever changing, and as long as it changes, a turning point will come one day. Only in this light can we understand why Nausicaä leads Miralupa into the forest, why she rejects Selm’s proposal and chooses to live in the “twilight world”; why Jiro chooses to marry Nahoko, knowing it will worsen her illness, and to “give it everything he has,” knowing his airplanes will cast the shadow of death.
Because “life is a light flickering in the darkness.”
Yes, we all know how terribly painful this is. But as the last sentence of Nausicaä says, “However painful it is, we must go on living.” We must believe, even if it means lying to ourselves, and cry out as Nausicaä does: “Even if our bodies cannot bear that purity, even if our lungs gush blood the very next moment, we will fly there like birds. I believe we can survive, again and again … In the Sea of Corruption, spores drift down time after time so that just one may germinate. Countless others die before they can sprout. Behind my life stand ten dead brothers and sisters, sustaining it. Even the most wretched life can survive by its own strength. Because on this planet, life itself is a miracle.”
The tale that began in the wind ends in the wind. There lies Miyazaki’s dream-world. Live, Nausicaä cries. Live, Nahoko cries.