Reading "The Boy and the Heron" as Children's Fantasy Literature

• Author: Adam Wescott

• Editor: Masha Zhdanova

When The Boy and the Heron came to theaters in 2023, English language critics were quick to claim it as a film worthy of an older viewership. Dana Stevens at Slate called it “startlingly adult.” Brendan Hodges wrote for Inverse that the film “rejects the ‘Cozy Ghibli’ aesthetic his films have too often been reduced to…” This was not the Miyazaki of My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo. Here was horror, dark magic and a storyline that demanded close reading (and knowledge of Miyazaki’s biography) to make sense of.

I will argue the opposite here. The Boy and the Heron is a film about a child and his psychology, directed by a man who played a key role adapting children’s classics like Heidi, Girl of the Alps to animation. Its original Japanese title references Genzaburo Yoshino’s classic children’s novel How Do You Live? Whether or not The Boy and the Heron is intended for children, it is as entwined with the conventions of children’s literature as it is with Miyazaki’s life story.
What do we mean when we say “children’s literature?” Japan has its own tradition that is over 150 years old. Maria Chiara Oltolini, in her book Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation: The Adaptation of Children’s Novels into the World Masterpiece Theater Series, cites the Meiji era (1868-1912) as the “birth of children’s literature in the modern sense” in Japan. (Oltolini, 6.) The industrialization of the country led to “an infrastructure able to support the rise of children’s literature.” (Oltolini, 7.)

Japan’s push towards Westernization in the Meiji era led to the publication of classics from Europe, Canada, and the United States. These included fairy tales, some of which were already known thanks to the influence of Christian missionaries. But “also books by Jules Verne, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lewis Carroll.” (Oltolini, 8.) These works were then serialized in children’s magazines at the time.

Thanks to the advancements of the 1920s and 30s, book sets (or “enpon,” one-yen books) became an affordable commodity. Sets of classic novels, or “zenshu,” were often marketed to children and their families as an aspirational dream of literacy. Says Oltolini, translated children’s literature made up a significant percentage of sets published by rivals ARS and Kobunsha-Bungei, and even “surpassing Japanese contents in Kobunsha-Bungei.” (Oltolini, 26.)

Despite Japanese imperialism leading to a diminishment in foreign influence, the popularity of translated classics was solidified when book sets came back into style in the 1960s. Children’s author and translator Momoko Ishii, in particular, is credited for influencing not just what books were canonized but also how they were taught and read. Her own preferences were shaped by a fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation as well as her love of English literature.

I say all of this to contextualize just why literature in translation is so influential for Hayao Miyazaki. In 2010 he recommended fifty children’s books published via Iwanami Shoten as part of their “Blurbs for 50 Books Chosen by Hayao Miyazaki” exhibition. Only two of these books were originally written in Japanese: Kenji Miyazawa’s The Restaurant of Many Orders, and the collection of Buddhist folk tales Nihon Riyoiki. The rest include many titles that anglophone readers will recognize (The Hobbit, The Little Prince) as well as some deeper cuts (The Flying Classroom, The Rose and the Ring.) 

That’s not to say that Miyazaki is unfamiliar with Japanese children’s literature. The Boy and the Heron after all was originally named after Yoshino’s novel How Do You Live? rather than another book Miyazaki likes such as Swallows and Amazons. But international children’s literature is indisputably an influence on The Boy and the Heron. You could dig through the film for references such as how the film’s otherworldly archipelago evokes Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels (which were, themselves, previously adapted into a Ghibli film by Hayao’s son Goro Miyazaki.) Instead I want to dig deeper into the history of what Miyazaki is borrowing from.

In their book Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, scholars Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn argue that British children’s fantasy literature progressed in distinct stages from its birth around the 1700s to the present day. First came the children’s story as moral instruction, meant to instill them with the correct values rather than to entertain them. Then came “domestic fantasies” in which the action was constrained to the home and garden. World War II and the intensification of violence led to children’s fantasies in which children left the home so that they might play an active role in world affairs.

While novels like Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865) and The Water Babies (full edition 1863) feature child protagonists, they were not intended for children necessarily. George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872) was intended for children, but specifically to teach them spiritual lessons. MacDonald conceptualized his child protagonists as archetypical innocents, what Mendlesohn and Levy call “the Beautiful Child.” (Mendlesohn and Levy, 38.) E. Nesbitt, on the other hand, wrote children with distinct personalities and needs in novels such as The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904.)

Of particular interest to me is the contrast between the domestic fantasies of the 19th century and the World War II-influenced fantasies of the 20th. The former take place in bounded settings such as gardens (The Secret Garden), mirrors (Through the Looking Glass) and Hundred Acre Wood (Winnie-the-Pooh) which (reminds Levy and Mendlesohn) “is at the bottom of the garden.” (Mendlesohn and Levy, 42.) Even Nesbitt’s novels, which let the protagonists travel via flying carpets and other contrivances, always had them return home at the end of the day.

The reason for this was simple: people believed at the time that children belonged in the home. No matter their feelings, their intelligence, they had no place in the adult world. The house then became their universe and every object a door to someplace else. There was not yet a reason to imagine otherwise, even as children’s literature solidified as a demographic and realistic rather than archetypal characterization of children in literature became fashionable.

World War II changed that. Suddenly kids were being bombed and losing their parents to fire and bullets. Some of the older ones were even going off to war themselves. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was a response to that shift. In some ways it cleaves to the traditions of the past; after all, it is a domestic fantasy, in which the protagonists travel to a fantasy world just by walking into a wardrobe. But Lewis, as a Christian, wanted “to position religion, immanence, destiny and other worlds at the center of fantasy for children…” (Mendlesohn and Levy, 78.) His fantasy world, Narnia, is the site of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Its fate rests not with its greatest hero, the lion Aslan, but with the four Pevensie children (per Lewis) “sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.”

The worst a Nesbitt character could do would be to make their brothers or sisters uncomfortable for a chapter. Lewis, by comparison, made Edmund a Judas figure responsible for the torture and murder of Aslan. In a way, it’s outrageous for Lewis to rest the moral weight of the universe on the shoulders of a child, even a mean one. Yet it was also a crucial step towards recognizing the agency of children in fiction. As this paradigm took hold, argue Levy and Mendlesohn, “the child protagonist–now dominant–has become a moral actor/agent in the world.” (Mendlesohn and Levy, 47.)

Each of these stages in the development of British children’s fantasy can be seen in The Boy and the Heron. The story begins when the protagonist, Mahito, goes with his father to live with his mother’s sister and new stepmother. Miyazaki takes care to contrast the Western-style house where Mahito sleeps with the Japanese-style property. When Mahito travels to a fantasy world in the second half of the film, he does so by walking into an old tower in the house’s garden. He never truly leaves home.

Once he enters the fantasy world, Mahito becomes an active agent in the tradition of the Pevensie children. One by one, the inhabitants of that world make their case to him. The seafarer Kiriko argues for the importance of the child-like warawara, and the cruelty of the pelicans that eat them. A dying pelican confesses to Mahito that they are trapped within the tower and would rather eat anything else but warawara if they had a choice. The parrots demand to consume Mahito, as they do everything else. Finally, Mahito’s granduncle asks that he take on the responsibility of maintaining the fantasy world for another generation.

This is where the old-fashioned concept of children’s literature as moral instruction comes into play. Again, the Japanese title of The Boy and the Heron is “How Do You Live?” Mahito discovers a copy of that book signed by his mother early in the film. While The Boy and the Heron does not adapt Yoshino’s novel, it is similarly bound up in ethics and responsibility. Mahito is taught the importance of gutting a fish by Kiriko and learns from experience what happens when you break social taboo by entering the birthing chamber. Otherwise, he acts: cutting arrows by hand, running from place to place, bashing his head with a rock after fighting with his classmates.

The last point in particular is of crucial importance to Mahito’s character and the film’s climax, because it is the reason why he turns his granduncle down and rejects godhood. The kind of boy who would hit himself with a rock and lie about it to his parents, he says, is too dirty to build the perfect world his granduncle envisions. This realization is portrayed by the film not as a moment of weakness but as a perfectly understandable choice; perhaps even the best outcome considering the circumstances. Mahito is not a “beautiful child” but a real one with desires and imperfections.

What’s funny is that Miyazaki started out making films about “beautiful children.” His early heroes and heroines sometimes came off less like people and more as transcendent forces able to overcome injustice through force of will. The children of My Neighbor Totoro are much closer to reality but live in perpetual summer. Kiki’s Delivery Service, which instead followed a relatable heroine, was originally led by director Sunao Katabuchi before Miyazaki took over. It wasn’t until Spirited Away that Miyazaki creates a young lead from scratch who grows over the course of the film via hard work into a self-reliant young adult.

Mahito is somewhat like the determined, driven protagonists of Miyazaki classics Future Boy Conan and Castle in the Sky. Where he differs is that he does not just change the world; the world also changes him. In the opening act of the movie, Mahito loses his mother to a firebomb dropped by Allied forces. The scene in which Mahito runs to the site of the fire, as animated by the great Shinya Ohira, is rendered in a much more impressionistic style than the rest of the film. 

The violence of World War II is never addressed again aside from the fact that Mahito’s father runs a factory that produces military planes. Yet it shadows the fantasy world: the parrots march in fascist lockstep, the ocean waves bear ships piloted by spirits of the dead, and “fire girl” Himi is revealed to literally be Mahito’s mother on an otherworldly childhood jaunt decades before she married. The Boy and the Heron then is a journey into the heart, where the emptiness of a fantasy world is filled by a child’s anxieties.

In this respect the film resembles another novel, one of its closest inspirations: John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things. That work tells the tale of a young boy who loses his mother, resents his stepmother’s child and then matures over the course of a fantastical adventure in a fairy world. Its ending reveals that the monstrous wolves haunting the fairy world are the creation of the young boy’s trapped relative, whose fears literally infest the surrounding woods.

This is just one of many similarities between The Boy and the Heron and The Book of Lost Things. There is a Crooked Man who guides the protagonist just as the Heron does Mahito; a long-lost relative of the protagonist rules the fairy world just as Mahito’s grand-uncle does in The Boy and the Heron. Per John Connolly himself, The Boy and the Heron even added a “special thanks” crediting The Book of Lost Things in the streaming version of the film. 

In Japan, The Boy and the Heron’s debt to The Book of Lost Things was by no means obscure. A July article from Nippon.com, just a few weeks after its Japanese release, reveals that the proposal for the film “was based on The Book of Lost Things, a novel for children by Irish writer John Connolly…” It then goes on to say that “praise by Miyazaki is prominently displayed on the Japanese translation of the book.” Despite this the film did not list Connolly’s novel in its credits until the later “special thanks.” Why?

Well, as somebody who read The Book of Lost Things long before The Boy and the Heron was a glimmer in Miyazaki’s eye, I believe that I am qualified to explain. The Book of Lost Things is specific in its remixing of fairy tales. Its Little Red Riding Hood gives birth to werewolves. Snow White is overweight and cruel to her dwarves. Connelly wants the reader to recognize the tension between David’s childlike view of the world and the adult dangers lurking in fantasy. At times he even leans in a little too far, but that too probably makes the book memorable to its audience.

The Boy and the Heron, by comparison, is marked by Miyazaki’s own preferences. While the Crooked Man of Connolly’s novel is a Devil figure, the corresponding Heron is a buffoon. The fire girl Himi, hungry parrots and warawara have less in common with fairy tales than they do with past Miyazaki films. I am reminded of Miyazaki’s tendency, both admired and abhorred by fellow animators, to redraw everything that passes his desk in his own style. Just as he once reshaped the art of his collaborators, his stories transform source text so thoroughly that they are often less “adaptations” than merely “inspired by.”

Even so, the influences peek through so long as the audience looks closely enough. An ungenerous viewer might call this a failure of imagination. I choose to think of it as an acknowledgement. 

The Boy and the Heron is built from the stones of past children’s stories. If it cannot be untangled from Miyazaki’s life, neither can it be untangled from the books he read and the books that his favorite authors read. Like Mahito and Himi, the tower binds the present and past, but this time, so long as the film exists, it does not fall.

Bibliography

Oltolini, Maria Chiara. Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation: The Adaptation of Children’s Novels into the World Masterpiece Theater Series. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Mendlesohn, Farah, and Michael Levy. Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.