Part 12: The Girl Whose Name Was Stolen: Spirited Away and the Villain Who Was a Numerologist

The Japanese title is 千と千尋の神隠し — Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi. "The Spiriting-Away of Sen and Chihiro."

Two names. Sen and Chihiro. They are the same girl.

The English title is Spirited Away.

Both names are gone.

I have been building toward this one for eleven parts, because it is where the series' subject and the series' method collide head-on, and only one of them survives.

What Yubaba Does for a Living

Chihiro Ogino is ten years old, sulking in the back of a car, moving to a town she does not want to live in. Her parents take a wrong turn, eat food that is not theirs, and turn into pigs. She is trapped in a bathhouse where the gods come to bathe, run by a witch named Yubaba, and the only way to stay alive is to be given work.

And Yubaba's magic — the actual mechanism of her power, the thing the entire plot runs on — is taking your name.

You sign a contract. She takes the name off it. Not metaphorically: on screen, the characters of 荻野千尋 lift off the paper and she closes her hand around them, and what is left is 千. One character. From that moment the girl is called Sen.

Haku explains the stakes, and they are the film's spine: if you forget your true name, you can never go home. He knows because it happened to him. He has been in the bathhouse so long he cannot remember what he was — and when Chihiro finally remembers it for him, when she says Kohaku River out loud, the spell breaks and he comes apart into light in mid-air, weeping.

A name is a soul. Taking a name is enslavement. Remembering a name is liberation. That is not a theme in Spirited Away. That is the physics.

She Is Renamed as a Number

Now look at what she is renamed to, because I do not think I have found anything better than this in nine hundred essays.

千尋 — Chihiro. 千 is chi: one thousand. 尋 is hiro: a fathom, a span of the arms, the old unit for sounding the depth of water. Her name means something like a thousand fathoms. It is a name about depth — about how far down you would have to go to find the bottom of her. Miyazaki gave a sulking, whining, frightened ten-year-old a name that says: there is more to this child than you can measure, and you are about to find out.

Yubaba takes the 尋. She takes the fathoms. She takes the depth.

What is left is 千 — sen — which means one thousand. Nothing else. Just the numeral.

The villain of this film, whose power is stealing names, renames a little girl as a number. She reduces a person to a digit and puts her to work. That is what Yubaba does, that is what the bathhouse is, and that is what the film thinks evil is: not cruelty exactly — Yubaba is not especially cruel, she is a businesswoman — but the operation of taking something with a thousand fathoms in it and reducing it, for administrative convenience, to a figure.

And this website has spent nine hundred essays reducing works of art to figures.

Yubaba Is a Numerologist

She believes exactly what this method believes.

Yubaba's whole theory of power is that a name is a person — that if you change the letters, you change the being. Take the characters away and the girl becomes a different creature: an employee, a thing that works, someone who will gradually stop remembering she was ever anyone. That is a numerologist's metaphysics stated as a spell. The name is the soul; the string is the substance; alter the writing and you have altered what is written about.

And Spirited Away is two hours of Hayao Miyazaki proving her wrong.

Because Chihiro does not become someone else. That is the plot. Yubaba takes her name, calls her Sen, puts her to work — and she stays herself the entire time. She keeps being frightened. She keeps being kind. She scrubs the filth out of a river spirit because it needs doing. She refuses gold from No-Face because she does not want gold, she wants her parents. She walks back across the water to a witch's house to apologize for something she did not do. Every one of those is Chihiro, done by a girl called Sen, wearing a stolen name like borrowed work clothes.

The name changed. The girl did not.

Then the numbers. Chihiro Ogino reduces to a Destiny 4 — the Builder and Organizer, structure, labour, the long game. Sen reduces to a Destiny 11 — the Master 11, the Visionary, one of the exalted numbers this tradition refuses to reduce.

So the arithmetic reports that Yubaba's theft worked. It says a new being is standing there — a promoted one, elevated to a master number, exactly as a nervous lawyer promoted Zolo in Part 2. The lens looks at the most famous depiction of identity surviving violence in modern animation and reports: different person now.

It is wrong. Not slightly wrong. It is wrong in precisely the way the villain is wrong, for precisely the villain's reason, and the film is about why that reason is wrong. Miyazaki refuted this website's flagship series in 2001, by accident, twenty years before I ran a single title through a function — and he did it better than my three-hundred-and-eighteen-part reckoning did, because he did not argue it. He showed you a girl scrubbing a floor under a name that was not hers and let you notice she was still herself.

Part 300 of the numerology series proved the numbers read spelling by giving Tezuka's robot two names. This film proves the same thing and then explains why it matters: the name is the part of a person you can steal. Which is exactly why it is not the person.

Three Deletions in Two Words

Which brings us back to the title, and what English did to it.

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi holds both names — the stolen one and the true one — side by side, joined by to, "and." The title refuses to choose. It says: this is the story of a girl who was two people, and the distance between them is the film. The stolen name comes first. The true name survives to the end of the phrase. You cannot say the title without saying both.

Spirited Away deletes them both.

The distributors did to the title exactly what Yubaba does to Chihiro. Same operation, same reasoning: keep the function, lose the name, it will be easier to work with. Yubaba takes 荻野千尋 and keeps a syllable that will do for a worker. Marketing takes Sen to Chihiro and keeps a phrase that means "supernatural abduction, family film, ninety seconds of trailer." Both are administrative decisions. Neither is malicious. Both take the fathoms out.

And there is a third deletion in there, quieter. Kamikakushi — 神隠し — is not "spirited away." It is hidden by the kami. The gods are in the word; kami is the first thing you say. It is a specific Japanese folk explanation for a specific horror: a child is gone, and the village says the gods took them. "Spirited away" is a decent English idiom meaning vanished mysteriously, and it is generic, and the gods are not in it.

For a film set in a bathhouse where the gods come to wash, losing the kami from the title is not a small thing. The Japanese title tells you who took her. The English title says she went missing.

Sen, Chihiro, and the gods. Three deletions, two words. And the numbers dutifully register a Destiny 7 becoming a Destiny 6 and tell you nothing about any of it, because they cannot read. They can only add.

What Ghibli Learned in 1985

And yet the film itself arrived in English essentially intact — uncut, carefully dubbed, released with real respect, and it won the Academy Award.

That is Part 3's ending, paying off sixteen years later. Nausicaä was butchered into Warriors of the Wind in 1985, roughly twenty minutes on the floor, and the studio's response hardened into the policy that no Ghibli film would be cut again — the policy behind the katana story, the one told often enough to be canon and impossible to verify. That policy is why Spirited Away exists in English in one piece.

So the ledger here is genuinely good, and I want to say so, because this series is not a grievance factory. The film crossed. The whole film. Every frame Miyazaki drew, in order, at his pace, with his ending. A distributor gave up a great deal of money to make no cuts, and a generation of English-speaking children got the real thing.

They just do not know she has a name. Or that she had two. Or that one of them was stolen, and one of them means a thousand fathoms, and that the whole film is a girl going down all thousand of them and coming back with herself.

The Close

Hayao Miyazaki reduces to a Destiny 1 with a Heart's Desire of 1 — the Pioneer, doubled, the will to act alone — which is what the numerology series found when it read him against his own heroine years ago. It is still an accident of spelling, and it is still funny on a man who has spent sixty years being unable to let anyone else finish a drawing.

But the thing I will carry out of this one is Yubaba's hand closing around the characters.

She is the only villain in this medium who does what critics do. She looks at something alive, takes its name, and works with the abbreviation. And she is not stupid — the abbreviation is genuinely easier to handle, the bathhouse runs, and a thousand is a perfectly serviceable thing to call a girl if what you need from her is labour. Her mistake is not cruelty. Her mistake is the belief that the name was the thing.

That is my mistake, professionally, nine hundred times over, and this film named it before I made it.

So: what survives the crossing? Ask Chihiro. She survived having her name taken, which is the most total crossing there is — no title, no letters, nothing left but a numeral and a job. And she came home, because at the bottom of it she remembered a river, and said its name out loud, and the name turned out to be the least of what she was carrying.

The numbers read names. The name is precisely the part that can be stolen. Everything that matters is in the thousand fathoms underneath, where no sum has ever reached, and where you have to go yourself, and look.