ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with how devouring acts of some characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning animated film Spirited Away reveal their multiple identities and argues that Miyazaki’s implementation of a postmodern approach to language influences his depictions of these devourers who resist being reduced to any fixed identities. Unlike many other Miyazaki’s films that are set in European cities, Spirited Away chooses as its main setting a bathhouse, one of the Japanese traditional places. Miyazaki also uses a strange character named No Face, who needs to swallow the bathhouse’s workers in order to speak because he himself is voiceless. No Face runs on a rampage and starts devouring as many foods as possible only to throw up what he has swallowed after he is given a dumpling by Chihiro, the ten-year-old girl protagonist in the film. Some have argued that Miyazaki’s choice of the bathhouse for the film’s setting expresses his return or his desire to return to the traditional Japan that evokes nostalgia. However, the elements and constituents of this film cannot be categorized into the traditional Japanese nor into something foreign; rather, they are eclectic. No Face wears a mask that looks like a Noh mask from a genre of classical Japanese drama, but he still does not know his identity. At the moments of his devouring acts, he changes his form and adopts different voices only to reveal that there is no fixed self behind the mask. Similar to No Face, Chihiro’s parents end up becoming pigs as a result of their devouring acts. Arguing that the film’s main topic is the multiple identities, the second half of this chapter links the topic to enigmatic signs of Japanese kanji and hiragana, behind which there are no fixed meanings, either.
