The last year, maybe year and a half, I was thinking about this one thought — that Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are sort of a manifestation, a love letter to regular women who demonstrate strength not through exercising power or physical abilities, but by drawing it from love and care for the people and things they care about the most.
In Nausicaä, we see a little girl who believes in the friendly intent of nature, standing between her people and a seemingly hostile world, establishing peace through sacrificing herself for the things she loves. Similarly, in Spirited Away, Chihiro takes care of her family and her friends, starting as a person who doesn’t care much about anything but herself. She is a child, after all — moving from one city to another, new school and so on. Why would you expect any different? But then she grows through hard labor and a bunch of obstacles. She demonstrates care for people you wouldn’t expect her to care about — Lin, the girl she met in the bathhouse who became her friend, then even Yubaba’s baby, then Haku. They were all a little hostile towards her at first, and still that pulling desire to help, to save the day.
In Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie takes care of Howl, who at first seems like a child in a grown man’s body — vain, dramatic, falling apart over a grey hair. But Sophie just tends to things. The house. The people in it. Small acts, one after another. And somehow, without any announcement, that changes everything.
In Totoro, we have a similar picture where a little girl holds the household together in a family pulled apart — her mother is sick, they’ve moved to a different place, finding new friends and so on.
For a long time those movies were a way for me to express gratitude for how much regular women hold the world together behind the curtain, staying in the shadows. It resonated with me a lot. I feel that same gratitude towards my wife, my mother, women in general who stay home and do a lot. It’s usually not an epic story you would hear as a legend — not Iliad and Odyssey sort of stuff. You don’t hear much about that routine, everyday, work-your-way kind of action.
Then I started wondering. Most popular stories, most heroic narratives — Bushido, samurai, the warrior mythology — are built around ultimate self-sacrifice, annihilation in a supernova explosion kind of style. And Miyazaki’s stories, with these women at the center, are an attempt to show what is behind that curtain. What is in the shadow. What is that love that feeds all those people who have the luxury to sacrifice themselves and be part of a bigger story. Those dragon slayers still need to eat, right? It’s not like they’re magically finding food out of nowhere. Hayao Miyazaki is bringing it up to the light, telling the story of little things — not necessarily changing the world, but maintaining it, one little piece at a time.
I also realized that his female characters are usually not alone. The stories I love most happen to be told through the lens of female characters, but there are others in his work told from the standpoint of men as well — maintaining the world in a different way, through craftsmanship, through farming, through fighting their own little fights. Not warriors who go and kill, but people maintaining order, providing for their families, shielding them from something harmful.
If you think about it, it’s just a story about regular life. About men and women. For a very, very long time — almost our whole existence — we lived that way, where everyone suffered a lot and everyone did their part. Someone stayed home, cooking and keeping things together. Someone went to the field for hard labor, or went hunting and might never come back. Child mortality was brutal. Real stories about regular people. The heroism of persistence. The happiness of supporting each other. That’s why they resonate at that deeper level, where the fairy tale at the surface somehow makes you feel part of the story.
I’m just writing this to share some thoughts and to spill some gratitude — for hardworking men and women both, and for my wife, who has been taking care of our home and staying beside me for, God knows how long. Twenty years. Twenty-one. There is no conclusion. It is just some soul spilled over a sheet of paper.