I might as well warn you that this includes spoilers, if you haven’t seen the film.
One of the pleasures of living with a small child, for me, has been the opportunity to immerse myself fantasy worlds more or less constantly. I’ve enjoyed sharing the old fantasy worlds of my childhood: stories from the Beatrix Potter collection, for instance. But now that my daughter is seven the imagined worlds we’re exploring have become more and more compelling to the adult version of me.
We’ve been reading The Hobbit at bedtime for more than a month. I think we’re reading A Wrinkle in Time next. And I’m trying to convince her that she can handle Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy, even though I’ve already told her there’s something in there that will make her very sad. One of the things I love about these fantasy stories, of course, is that they give me imaginative access to all kinds of underworlds. An underworld of one sort or another is an almost constant feature of fantastic cosmologies.
For the past several years the Studio Ghibli films have been part of this fantastic currency we’ve shared. Matilda likes to brag that she’s seen My Neighbor Totoro more than thirteen times. Last week we went to see Miyazaki’s most recent release, The Boy and the Heron, in the theater. According to Matilda, it’s not as good as either My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. But it’s equally as good as Princess Monoke. My interest in the film was totally different. For me, The Boy and the Heron offered a glimpse into a galactic underworld: a form of the underworld that reveals ambiguities between what lies above and what lies below. It’s a form of the underworld that doesn’t clearly distinguish between the heavens and the underworld, between earth and sky.
This (as you might have guessed) is the sort of underworld I’m most interested in. I inhabit a cosmology where the heavens have collapsed into the earth. The gods don’t live there anymore, at least not for me. And this can make the heavens look cold and empty. But, I think, if we’re looking carefully, it can also reveal some hidden proximities between the heavens and the earth. Not in a way that provides an escape from all this gravity. But, as I think Miyazaki’s film suggests, this sort of underworld can have healing dimensions.
Miyazaki’s Underworld
Readers of this Substack might remember what I recently wrote about Baba Yaga as guardian of an underworld that can be accessed through the forest. It would appear that Miyazaki’s galactic underworld is accessed through the forest, as well. In the film the main character, a young boy named Mahito, moves to a house in the countryside after his mother is killed in a World War II air raid, in Tokyo. His father ends up marrying his mother’s sister, who looks exactly like her. As Mahito is trying to adjust, emotionally, to his new mother and environment he watches her descend into the forest and disappear.
He knows exactly where she’s gone, because he’s already been exploring the underworld portal that she’s descended into. It’s accessed through a decaying tower in the woods, once inhabited by a great uncle who apparently went mad among his books and disappeared. After he was gone, the family discovered a network of underground tunnels deep below the tower. Perceiving danger, they sealed the tunnels and the tower off. Later in the film we learn that the tower was built around an object that had fallen from the sky.
Mahito has been lured toward this underworld by a strange heron. While the bird is lovely when it flies, there’s something a bit horrific about it right from the beginning. It tells Mahito that his mother isn’t really dead, and that she’s calling to him. It tells him that his presence is necessary. As the heron speaks to him, the teeth of a man and a great bulbous red nose peek out from below the beak. The heron is an unsettling figure, and it’s clear that he’s hiding secrets that have something to do with the dead.
When Mahito’s aunt/new mother goes missing he makes his way into the forest, toward the tower, to find her. Once there, the doors open up and he quickly finds himself falling—with the heron as guide—through the ground and into a strange underworld. As you might expect, it’s a place where the spirits of the dead live. Mahito learns quickly to avoid disturbing the graveyards.
But this underworld is a place where new spirits of the living are born, too. These little spirits, the wada-wada (or wara-wara?) were far and away my daughter’s favorite part of the film. It’s unclear exactly how they’re produced, but they do receive nourishment and sustenance in the underworld. Once they’ve developed and matured, they rise to the skies of the underworld like little constellated stars as they coo and laugh and bubble up to the earth. There’s a really lovely scene where the wada-wada dance joyously together toward their new horizon in life, which is interrupted by an attack from a savage set of pelicans.
We learn that this is the only food these pelicans can find. Apparently, these sky creatures have been pulled down into this world by the master of the underworld—that great uncle of Mahito’s mother, who disappeared long ago. The great uncle has apparently created his own world, in that underworld, and he’s pulled in others from the world of the living. He apparently likes to bring flying creatures down into this underworld. In addition to the pelicans (who can’t find a thing to eat) there are giant parakeets who are like soldiers and guardians of this underworld.
We also learn that Mahito’s mother and sister are down there, in the underworld, as well. Time and space exist differently in the underworld. Mahito meets his mother, as a child. And his aunt has apparently descended into the underworld to give birth to her child. It’s a space of lifedeath: a place where things go both to die and to be born. It’s a liminal zone. Is his aunt really different person than his mother? There was some ambiguity around this question, which felt intentional. Mahito doesn’t get to bring his mother back to the world of the living, but he does get to embrace her. And he seems to find some comfort in the ambiguous connection between these sisters that helps him process his grief. There’s something healing about his encounter with the dead that enables a return to life.
While there are lovely and enchanted elements to this galactic underworld, it’s nevertheless the case that (like almost any mythical underworld) it’s dangerous for the living, who belong on earth. We learn that Mahito has been dragged down to the underworld by the great uncle himself. He’s apparently created this little underworld they’re now inhabiting, but he’s about to die and he needs someone in his own bloodline to take over and become the new master of this world. But Mahito is too honest, and maybe too human. He doesn’t want to become a world master, he just wants to learn how to live in one.
What was never entirely clear to me was what, exactly, the great uncle had created. Did he create the entire underworld? The entire world of the dead? The entire world where new souls were born? Or did he merely create one pathway into it, one way of inhabiting it as a living person? I was left with some logistical cosmic questions, and I’m not sure if these matters were left intentionally vague or if the world was just underdeveloped.
Galactic Underworlds
I’m sure that there were elements of this underworld pulled from Shinto tradition. There are Shinto features in many of the Studio Ghibli films. But there are also elements from European children’s literature in these films, too. There’s nothing culturally exclusive about these movies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular underworld were just an indiscriminate and impulsive mix of stories and myths from a wide range of traditions, as well as some elements entirely fabricated by Miyazaki and the Studio Ghibli production team.
In this film, as with many depictions of the underworld, there’s a porousness between the world above and the world below. The underworld isn’t merely a realm of horror and death, where things go to rot. It’s also a space where things can soar, and fly, be born, and live. It’s earth-bound, but what it reveals to us is something more like an interior of the earth—a spiritual sort of inner life, within the earth, that can allow it to take flight within itself, as we do.
Yet it’s not a fantasy escape. There’s a realism and heaviness to the underworld, even a galactic underworld like this. Why do I find images and visions like this so appealing right now?
The Boy and the Heron is a wartime film. And we’re watching it in a post-pandemic wartime. I crave the healing comfort of a certain kind of uplift, the ability to feel like my spirits have been lifted. But not if this comes at the expense of honesty, or with a denial of things as they really are. It feels important to me, right now, to really see the horror and the ugliness of things here on earth. But this doesn’t mean that I want to completely surrender the desire to fly just a little, to see or feel something beautiful, to be lifted up. I feel like I need this, to keep going. I just don’t want to fly completely away.
In my last substack, I mentioned that the blog AUFS was doing an event on Sister Death. You can now read all of the posts from the book event, including an intro from Marika Rose, posts from Adam Kotsko, Anthony Paul Smith, Amaryah Armstrong, Rajbir Singh Judge, Rachel Wheeler, and my own response. Adam Kostko also wrote a little bonus post: a critique of pro-life ideologies, using ideas from Sister Death. The responses were so incredibly thoughtful, and I was really grateful to my friends and colleagues for spending this time with my book!