To recover continuity with her past, Chihiro must create a new identity.
—Ando Satoshi
Spirited Away is a Fairy Tale of a young girl trapped in a dangerous netherworld due to the greed and heedlessness of her parents. She suffers the sin of her parents, but it is up to her to save them. In order to save them, she must save herself. In order to save herself, she must risk growing up. What does it mean to grow up? Miyazaki tells us: that it means to remember. To return. To arrive where you started, and know the place for the first time.
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Transgression
It begins with this: There is always a line that must not be crossed. Sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden. Sometimes sensible, sometimes seemingly arbitrary. Ixion lusting for Hera. Orpheus’ irresistible glance back. A few leaves of Gothel’s rapunzel. For Chihiro’s parents, it is the eating of the food of the spirit world.
Chesterton calls this idea, that “the whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread,” the core of ethics. There are always limits, and we will always cross them, and crossing them flings us into terrible peril. Our story begins in peril, and how we choose to confront it.
Thresholds
There are always borders between worlds, between states of consciousness, between stages of a human life. Ritual is an embodied means of navigating these thresholds, which is why we enter a church to worship God or to get married or to say goodbye even though God is indeed everywhere and in everything. This embodiment is given for us, as a gift and a guide. The crossing of a threshold is a transformation, usually irreversible, for good or ill. The wood that has passed through the threshold of fire can never again be what it was. But oh, the light it gave.
Thresholds are intimidating, and often dangerous, and yet to refuse to cross them does not ensure real safety, but only stagnation. For Chihiro, there is the crossing through the dark tunnel, the crossing of the riverbed, the crossing of the bridge to the bathhouse, the crossing of the sea by train. Each brings its own peril, and transformation. But most importantly, Chihiro must choose to cross the threshold from childhood to responsibility.
The opening scene is one of passivity and helplessness: a little girl in the backseat, being driven somewhere she does not want to go, for reasons she does not understand, at the total mercy of adults. She does not yet know how weak adults really are; she does not yet know the strength of her own inner resources.
Names
Names are extremely powerful. On this, everyone agrees. God granted Adam the authority to Name the animals, which is to say, he gave his creation a share in the power of shaping Creation itself. When God calls someone to his task, there is often a new name involved. Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, Simon becomes Peter. These days, someone who wishes to change the consciousness of a nation will often spend what seems like an irrational amount of energy and political capital on the project of altering or erasing certain names. But it is far from irrational. Anyone who has heard their lover speak their name in the dark or over a crackling phone cord knows this already.
Thus Chihiro, the scared and naive little girl, becomes Sen: hardworking, daring, defiant, capable of both loving and fighting.
And yet this renaming is a complicated thing. It is also a curse, and a prison. Yubaba exercises her control by stealing names, like our modern slavedrivers confiscating passports. Without your real name, you can never go home; it is theft not only of identity, but of memory and thus personhood itself.
Chihiro cannot simply remain Chihiro; that is death-in-life. She cannot simply remain Sen, for all of Sen’s virtues; that is permanent exile from her Self. She must pass through Sen, and through Sen recover Chihiro, and Chihiro must absorb Sen, to become something new: A Chihiro-With-Sen. But this new Chihiro is what she has had inside of her all along. A paradox: “To recover continuity, she must create a new identity.”
We also see that this process cannot happen in isolation. It requires relationship. She needs Haku to remember her own name, and Haku needs her to remember his. We become ourselves again in the mirror of the Other. Is this a paradox, or a sort of koan, an image of the divine?
Purgation
In Miyazaki’s vision, evil is a sort of sickness within. The bathhouse is not just a place of relaxation, but a symbol of purgatory. The putrid river spirit who comes to be cleansed is not simply encrusted within the accumulated filth of living, but is polluted and warped at his very center by foreign invaders, like an infection. Sin means things in the wrong place, the world disordered.
Haku is not just suffering from the external mistreatments of Yubaba, but is being both depleted and controlled from within by the stolen seal he has swallowed. Sin means slavery, and death.
No Face seems bent on devouring the whole world in his rage, and must be forced to relinquish it by Sen’s emetic. Sin requires penance and restoration: “You will never get out until you have paid the last penny.”
In each case, Sen is the minister of purgation, and cleansing, and healing. And yet, sin leaves its mark, like the scars of the risen Christ. Like the long shadow of Adam’s original fall. Or like what has come to be known as generational trauma. As Sen is told: “Everything that happens stays inside you, even if you can’t remember it.”
This is Good News. But it is also painful news.
Hierarchy
You can never escape hierarchies, even in magic realms. Yubaba is half-monarch, half-CEO, sitting atop the kingdom-corporation of the bathhouse. Below her, physically and organizationally, are descending substrates of authority and respect, all the way down to Kamaji in the boiler room.
Spirited Away presents us with the stereotypically inverse relationship between authority and authenticity: Kamaji is gruff but kind and noble; Jin is sharp but loyal; real life happens in the solidarity and rivalries of the servants’ quarters. Meanwhile, at the top, Yubaba is isolated, sophisticated but cruel, her stresses and responsibilities and machinations driving a wedge between her and the thing she values most, her giant baby Boh.
Yet there is also a sense that hierarchies are meant to be inverted; that they are not meant to be merely climbed, but at times challenged and mocked and outmaneuvered. Perhaps sometimes toppled; but perhaps the better term would be: renewed. The hierarchy of the bathhouse is bitter because Yubaba is deeply wounded and internally divided, locked in a power struggle with her sister. But though abusive, her authority over her world is no less real; it cannot really be toppled, but only somehow healed, and, until that can happen, endured or bargained with or fled from.
In this way the Fairy Tale gives us a more grown-up vision of hierarchy and authority than our own childish views would normally allow.
Oaths
Likewise, every world, even the spirit world, has rules. Some rules, like the One Thing Off Limits, carry grave consequences. Others are more like speeding tickets, and can be bargained with. The problem is the difference is not always clear, and the world is full of tricksters: some will tell you an important rule doesn’t matter, and others will invent a nonsense rule to see if you will voluntarily comply.
We are to be particularly careful with oaths, for one of the rules is that word is bond, even for the most powerful. Even for Yubaba, who laments: “What a ridiculous oath I took. I’m bound to give work to whoever asks.”
Persistence
And yet, oaths must be enforced. This otherworld is bound by a sort of law of persistence. You have to show that you really mean it. Yubaba must give work to whoever asks, yes, but she uses every trick in the book to evade or obfuscate this duty. Sen is repeatedly confronted with the necessity of asking again and again, formulating and reformulating her requests, and finally sharpening her requests into demands. She matures from passivity, to fear, into anger, and then into healthy assertiveness.
Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened.
Work
Why is it so important that Yubaba is bound to give work? Because work is protective. Work is another way of saying: participation, belonging, of having a role. A place in the hierarchy, if only at the bottom.
The terrorizing No Face is not just wounded and lonely. He is placeless. He has no role, and it drives him insane. His attempts to invent a role for himself, being rejected, drive him to destructive fury. He is soothed by Sen’s healing dominance, but he is really only restored in the moment when Yubaba’s sister, Zeniba, gives him a job in her household.
In Jungian language, we might say this is a symbol of the need to “get into life,” to activate and channel the libido, to project oneself into the outside world and in turn be responded to by it. Through creative participation in daily tasks and duties, however humble or even humiliating, one is transformed from an object to a subject, from a Thing to a Person. Only a Person can be humiliated; only a Person can be restored.
Gifts
It is a commonplace in folklore that spirits must be invited in. Likewise, as we know from the Christian tradition of exorcism, demons must somehow be given an invitation, whether explicitly or through the doorways created by the wounds of sin.
This means that there are few things more fraught than the exchange of gifts. There are few things more powerful than the truly freely-given gift, and few things as rare.
No Face must wait to be invited in by Sen, who does not know any better; this causes calamity but it is also the “happy fault” by which the process of growth and ultimately liberation can proceed. God turns all things to the good, even our naiveté and our mistakes.
But Sen, by some luck or intuition, rebels against receiving No Face’s proferred gifts of gold. She knows somehow that these are not freely offered, that this exchange would trap her. And in rejecting corrupt gifts, she stands in contradiction of the mania of greed that surrounds her, and she places herself against her parents’ sin, of taking what was not theirs to take. This renunciation creates, or reveals, within her the spiritual authority which allows her to confront the oppressive hierarchy of Yubaba’s dominion.
Dragons
To paraphrase Chesterton, the Fairy Tale does not tell children that dragons exist, which they already know, but that dragons can be defeated, which they must learn. Spirited Away does not exist to tell us that there are malevolent forces at work in the world, that we will make terrible mistakes, that we will feel lost and alone. We already know these things. It shows us that these things are not insurmountable, that we need not, we must not, sink into hopelessness. That our task is to navigate these dangerous waters, without losing ourselves, with courage, wisdom, love, daring, and steadfastness. That if we wish to grow up, to return to who we were made to be, we must accept this, we must risk this, or else we risk forever forgetting our real Name.
