When Chihiro first arrives at the bathhouse, Yubaba makes her sign a contract and snatches her name away in one grab. The four characters of Ogino Chihiro are erased, and only one remains on the paper: Sen. Haku warns her that once your name is taken, you can never find your way home. He tells her to hold on to it. He himself failed to. He does Yubaba’s bidding, cannot remember who he is, and can never return to his own river.
This is the single most important stroke in Spirited Away. The film’s Japanese title carries two names. Chihiro is her real name; Sen is the label assigned after the theft. Same person, and between the two names lies a stretch of getting lost that could easily become permanent.
The film came out in 2001. More than twenty years on, over two million users on Douban have rated it 9.4, first among all animated films. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and the Golden Bear at Berlin, and it remains the only animation ever to take both. Yet in China it first spread through discs and bootlegs. Many born in the eighties and nineties first watched it on a VCD rented from a corner shop. When it finally got a proper mainland release in 2019, it broke Totoro’s box office record in nine days. The poster was painted by Huang Hai, showing a grown-up Chihiro crouching down to embrace her younger self. The children whom No-Face once frightened to tears were now adults, lining up to pay back their tickets.
The story, briefly. Ten-year-old Chihiro is moving to a new town with her parents. They take a shortcut through a tunnel and come out into an abandoned theme park. Her parents smell food, sit down, and start eating, uninvited, with growing appetite. Chihiro dares not touch it and wanders off. Dusk falls, lanterns light up, and shadows begin crossing the street. She runs back to find her parents already turned into pigs, still snout-deep in the trough. To save them, she has to survive in this world, and there is only one way to survive: get a job. Kamaji, Lin, Yubaba. A ten-year-old girl goes from one to the next, begging, please let me work here. She signs the contract, takes the new name, and becomes the lowest rung of the bathhouse staff.
Miyazaki did not write the parents-turned-pigs scene as a casual fairy-tale punishment. He later explained that it stands for Japan’s bubble economy of the eighties: the adults, swollen with appetite, lose control first, and the children are left to clean up. One reviewer put it harshly. There is no single moment when a person becomes a pig. It is a way of life that began long before, a daily translation of “I want” into “I deserve.” The pig was made long ago. The tunnel merely settles the account.
The bathhouse, the Aburaya, serves eight million gods who come to soak and be scrubbed, and it is also an unmistakable portrait of society. Yubaba is the owner, one who reads value, never tears. Gold is stacked in her room, and the moment you sign, your name is hers. The staff are sorted into ranks. The Lins sleep in dormitories; the frogs lean out of windows collecting tips. Chihiro’s first job is to attend a stinking “rotten god” everyone else dodges. She grits her teeth and cleans him, and out comes a heap of old bicycles, scrap metal, and dumped trash. He is a river god, polluted beyond recognition. In that scene Miyazaki keeps the ledger of what we have done to the environment.
Then there is No-Face. The character was originally added just to trim the running time, and even Miyazaki never expected him to become a classic. He stands on the bridge where nobody sees him. Chihiro sees him, and asks whether he would like to come in out of the rain. That small warmth of being seen, he remembers. Later he discovers that everyone in the bathhouse loves gold, so he produces gold. Everyone flocks to him, feeds him delicacies, and he grows bigger and fiercer, until he swallows two workers whole. He believes gold can buy Chihiro’s attention. Chihiro says, I don’t want it. The thing that always worked suddenly fails, and he collapses, retching, vomiting up everything he swallowed, all that appetite, until he is clean again, and follows her onto the train.
How many adults see themselves in No-Face. Hungry to be seen, unable to ask for it, they trade in whatever everyone else recognizes: money, titles, the appearance of fitting in. What it buys is attention. What it cannot fill is loneliness. Only on the day you vomit it all up do you return to your own size.
My favorite passage in the film is the train over the sea. Miyazaki had planned a great battle here and replaced it with a train. Chihiro takes No-Face to Zeniba’s cottage to return the seal. The train runs on tracks laid in shallow water, past endless flats of sea and distant islands, and the sunset pours in, gilding the whole carriage. The passengers are black silhouettes, boarding quietly, stepping off. No one speaks. Chihiro sits with her arms around her knees, watching out the window.
The scene grew out of Miyazaki’s childhood memory of riding a train alone. He painted the view as a haze, the rails sunk in clear water, the train gliding as if on the surface of the sea. He once said something rather bleak: as long as you are alive, you will lose things. That is what life is. Which is why so many people say that all growing up ends as a solitary journey. Those who travel with you reach their stop and get off, and all you can do is feel grateful and wave goodbye.
What truly moves me is Chihiro’s change. She arrives spoiled, timid, prone to complaining, whining after two steps uphill. Later she walks steadily across a pipe where one slip means death, breaks into Yubaba’s territory alone to save Haku, and faces Zeniba to own her mistake plainly. Only one thing made her sturdy: she never forgets who she is, Ogino Chihiro, here to save her mom and dad. As long as the name is not lost, the person cannot be lost. At the end Haku remembers his true name too, Nigihayami Kohaku Nushi. He was a river all along, a river whose channel had been filled in and paved over.
Miyazaki’s starting point for the film was Chiaki, the daughter of his friend Seiji Okuda. He noticed that no film had ever been made for girls of about ten, so he decided to give them a gift. What he wanted to tell them was simple: it’s all right, you can absolutely do this. Chiaki’s pink sneaker that fell into a river, the evening light of the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, all of it was stitched into the film. After its release he said he hoped the children who watched it would grow old and bring their own children to see it again.
I first watched Spirited Away in middle school. What stayed with me was the glitter of the bathhouse, the scary No-Face, the beautiful train. Years later, on some night after overtime, I watched it again and suddenly understood a great deal. Yubaba is the boss who only recognizes KPIs. The rotten god is the dirty job nobody wants. Take it, do it beautifully, and how others see you changes. The night No-Face started making gold, I thought of people around me, and of certain nights I came home reeking of business dinners myself. The strange thing about a name is that it doesn’t hurt when it is taken. Sign one more unreasonable contract, say one more thing you don’t mean, give in one more time and tell yourself it doesn’t matter. Look back, and the ink on the paper has faded further. One day, when someone asks who you originally were, make sure you can still answer.
When Chihiro leaves, Haku stands on the grass slope and tells her, go, and don’t look back. She doesn’t. She walks back through the tunnel, her parents are waiting, as if nothing had happened. Miyazaki never shows what became of them afterward. But we in the audience know: the girl whose legs once went soft can now ride a long way on a train, alone.
Remember the name, and it is not too late.