Susan Napier is the author of Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, published in 2018 by Yale University Press. She is also the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric and Japanese Studies at Tufts University, and a former Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published five books and numerous articles on anime and Japanese culture. In 2018 she was named "Woman of the Week" by The M Dash magazine. Her 2017 TED talk "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Being an Anime Expert" can be found here.
ML: In the prologue to Miyazakiworld:
A Life in Art, you write that the book is an examination of how and why
Hayao Miyazaki came to be the preeminent director that he is today, but what
inspired you to write such a book?
SN: I suppose the most obvious inspiration behind my
decision to write the book was that I had begun to notice that, when I told
people that I was researching Japanese animation I increasingly noticed that
they would say, "I don’t know much about anime but there’s this director
I really like—Miyazaki!” And they would often mention a particular favorite
film - the top three would be Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke,
and Totoro, although younger people might bring up Howl’s Moving
Castle.
Over the
years I have observed anime become increasingly accepted in American society but
with Miyazaki I was witnessing something even more exciting, a specific
director whose work was being acknowledged and appreciated by mainstream
Americans. I began teaching a seminar on Miyazaki at Tufts about six to seven years ago, and was excited to see how much enthusiasm there was for the
work of this director. It began to seem increasingly obvious that someone
should write a book about him and, given my experience in working on animation,
the seminar that I was teaching, and my knowledge of Japanese culture and
history, I began to think that I was a good candidate!
When I first started planning the book I was also really pleased with the positive feedback the project received. This included a fellowship to the prestigious Bellagio Foundation in Italy where I was able to “test drive” some of my ideas in front of the other fellowship recipients who were from all different backgrounds with little knowledge of animation or of Japan, and then a contract with Yale University Press, an excellent press that was moving to expand its arts and popular culture offerings. Overall, it was very clear that Miyazaki was being appreciated as a global cultural artist, not just some obscure Japanese animation director. I like to think that the book itself has helped him gain even more recognition.
ML: In Miyazakiworld you
use a series of essay-like chapters to mostly focus on one Hayao Miyazaki film
at a time. Why did you decide on this structure for the book?
SN: Actually, my editor at Yale, Sarah Miller, helped a
lot with the structure. Although I had always wanted to discuss each of
Miyazaki’s films individually as they are each so unique and fascinating, it
was Sarah who came up with the idea of taking a biographical approach. Not only
did this allow me to explore some really interesting aspects of Miyazaki’s life
and times but, as I worked on the book with this approach, I was able to get a
real feel for how his art and thoughts have evolved over the years (and also
what elements have remained unchanged).
ML: How did you approach writing individual chapters knowing they needed to form a cohesive whole for the reader?
SN: From my seminar teaching experience and my own
viewing, I was already very aware of each film’s particular distinctive aspects
including what was appealing, interesting or sometimes problematic about
them. For example, one of the most memorable aspects of Miyazaki’s work - for
both me and my students - was his consistent use of strong, intelligent and
independent female characters from very early on in his career. I really can’t
emphasize that enough. As early as the 1980s when there were very few such
female characters in the West, Miyazaki was creating fascinating females who
played important or even dominant roles in his films - to name a few from the
80s, there’s Nausicaa of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Ma
Dola of Castle in the Sky: Laputa, Kiki and all her female friends and
helpers in Kiki’s Delivery Service - well, I could go on and on. Not
only was this interesting from the point of Japanese culture and society but it
made for very interesting comparisons with female characters in Western studios
such as the Disney “princesses.” So this was an obvious element that could
be traced throughout his work.
Another
incredibly important trademark was Miyazaki’s consistent fascination with
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios, from as early as his 1970s
television series Future Boy Conan, to his recent Ponyo and even,
arguably, his most recent film The Wind Rises. I had already noticed
this apocalyptic trend in many anime and manga in my previous research but now,
with Miyazaki’s life to draw upon as well, I could really make connections
between his life and ideas - the impact of World War II, his youthful embrace
of left-wing ideology, that allowed me, again, to make a more cohesive portrait
of both the man and his works.
I would also like to mention something that I call a “feel” for the material. By the time I wrote on Miyazaki I had already written four books on aspects of Japanese culture - a book on two politically engaged writers from roughly the same time period as Miyazaki’s youth; a book on fantasy in modern Japanese literature in which I first included research on anime; a book on Japanese animation in which I introduced the particular aspects of anime that made it so distinctive, and which included a chapter on Miyazaki and female characters in anime; and then a book on the Western fascination with Japan from French impressionism to anime, which included a chapter on Miyazaki fandom in the West. I had also studied, read, and taught about Japanese culture for several decades and lived in Japan for eight years, off and on from the time I was seventeen.
In other
words, I guess what I’m saying is that I know my stuff, and I was bringing all
this “stuff” to bear on the Miyazaki book, but hopefully in a fairly subtle and
reasonably entertaining fashion. I worked very hard to create a
user-friendly style.
ML: You dart seamlessly between memoir, biography and analysis in Miyazakiworld, but did blending elements of life writing with more traditional film criticism ever present a challenge to your own voice in the book? Did you ever hear inconsistencies in your writing voice in the different elements of the text?
SN: Yeah, that was actually a bit tricky. Some of the
“model” biographies that Yale suggested I read included quite a lot of author’s
input from their personal life. I kind of tried that a bit but never felt
really comfortable talking too much about myself. One example I remember was
for the chapter on Porco Rosso - a movie about a world-weary ex-pilot
who had become disillusioned by his experiences in WW1. There were obvious
influences from the movie Casablanca in it, and I initially tried
beginning the chapter with an anecdote about going to see Casablanca at
the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square with my mother and how much I had loved
the movie. But, honestly, it didn’t really have a direct connection to either
Miyazaki or Porco Rosso and so I eventually scrapped it.
The few
other personal references I kept in were mainly about my visiting
Miyazaki-related sites in Japan and how I experienced them. I also did keep one
anecdote from my first year in Japan about how I lived and worked on my own in
Tokyo when I was seventeen because it really did resonate with the Miyazaki’s movie Kiki’s
Delivery Service, and it allowed me to bring in my Miyazaki seminar in a
hopefully seamless way that might be of interest to readers and be a bit of a
break from the film analysis.
ML: Writing creative nonfiction often comes with the unique challenge of trying to represent real, complex people as characters on the page, and that challenge must be all the more difficult when writing about beloved public figures like Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki. How did you approach constructing the characters in Miyazakiworld, and were you ever nervous about how your depictions of them might be received?
SN: Of course I was nervous. And I remain nervous! My next book is going to be a comparison of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli with
Disney/Pixar studios, so there will be LOTS of opportunities to talk about
living persons and potentially offend them. Seriously, I tried to be VERY
careful about commenting too much about living people. I am glad that I was
able to meet Miyazaki three times over a period of almost ten years which helped
form my impressions of him. I also did an enormous amount of reading of his
interviews in Japanese - not only was this material not in English and so was
more likely to be somewhat more spontaneous but reading the way Miyazaki spoke
in often informal Japanese, sometimes with old friends, really helped give me a
sense of him as a person.
I was also
aware that my last Miyazaki-related visit to Japan, when I met with the
director for a formal interview and met with a number of people who had
worked with him, occurred only a few months after he had officially retired.
This was a tense time for everyone related to Studio Ghibli so I tried to be
careful in how much weight I put on certain responses and to be aware of how
what I experienced as a palpable sense of melancholy on the part of the
director in my last interview may well have been related to the specific time
and circumstances.
As for how
my depictions have been received - well, I haven’t gotten any letters of
protest from Ghibli after the book was published so I guess I didn’t make any
truly heinous mistakes. I was actually in Japan when the book came out in
Japanese and did a couple of radio and newspaper interviews which were very
well received (thank goodness!).
SN: Without doubt the toughest thing was bringing in
biography AND of a living subject! I was quite, quite nervous. Being able to
read and speak Japanese was a godsend, though, because there is a lot of
material on Ghibli and especially on Miyazaki in Japanese - similar to the many
books on Disney in English for example. Although god knows it was time
consuming, especially reading all those interviews in informal Japanese where
you are really trying to get a “feel” for what’s happening between interviewer
and interviewee. Kind of fascinating though.
All that
being said, I should mention that Japanese society seems far less willing to
probe into the lives of its most beloved celebrities and Miyazaki is virtually
a national treasure. I will also say that Ghibli, his studio, is very
protective of him, and I’ll be dealing more with this in my next book!
