Spirited Away

A New Beginning Gone Wrong

Chihiro Ogino is a ten-year-old girl travelling with her parents, Akio and Yūko, to their new home. The family drives in a car packed with belongings, and Chihiro appears from the very first moment as a sulky, frightened girl, clinging to a farewell bouquet given to her by her friends and dreading the change ahead. She does not want to move, does not want to change schools, and makes no effort to hide her displeasure. This state of childish resistance to change defines her starting point: she is an ordinary girl, somewhat spoiled and cowardly by her own admission, who has not yet developed any special capacity to face the world.

During the journey, Akio takes a wrong turn and the family ends up stopping in front of a stone tunnel surrounded by vegetation. Despite Chihiro's unease, her parents decide to explore it. On the other side of the tunnel lies what appears to be an abandoned space: an old, deserted amusement park with food stalls filled with delicacies that no one seems to have touched in years. Akio and Yūko, fascinated and entirely uncautious, begin eating the displayed food without asking permission or paying. Chihiro, uneasy, refuses to do so and continues exploring on her own. It is then that she briefly meets Haku, a mysterious dark-haired boy who urgently warns her that she must cross the river and leave before nightfall. Chihiro runs to find her parents, but it is already too late: both have been transformed into pigs as punishment for having consumed the spirits' food without permission.

The Spirit World and Its Rules

With the coming of darkness, the place transforms radically. The old amusement park comes to life as a bustling bathhouse frequented by gods, spirits, and supernatural creatures of every kind. Chihiro, terrified and alone, discovers that her own body is beginning to turn transparent: she is fading away because humans have no place in that world without a name and a purpose to anchor them to it.

Haku reappears and guides her. He gives her food from that world to stop her from vanishing and explains the situation clearly: she is in the spirit world, her parents have been turned into pigs by Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse known as the Aburaya, and the only way for Chihiro to rescue them and return to the human world is to find work at that establishment. Without employment, Yubaba has the power to transform human intruders into animals or make them disappear entirely.

Yubaba is an enormously proportioned old woman with a despotic character who runs the Aburaya with an iron fist. Her primary motivation is power and the accumulation of wealth; she controls her workers by stealing their names, which causes them to lose the memory of their identity and binds them to her service indefinitely. Her more moderate counterpart within the establishment is Lin — also known as Rin — a human or semi-human worker who becomes Chihiro's first ally inside the bathhouse and teaches her the basics of how to survive there.

Haku, for his part, also works for Yubaba as a sorcerer's apprentice and acts as the witch's right hand, though his true loyalty is ambiguous from the start. He shows a familiarity with Chihiro that goes beyond their first meeting: at some point in the past they knew each other, though Chihiro retains no memory of it. This as-yet-unexplained connection becomes one of the narrative threads the story will develop.

The Contract and the Loss of Name

Chihiro finally manages to appear before Yubaba and, following Haku's advice, demands work from her with a determination that surprises the witch. According to the rules of the spirit world, Yubaba is obliged to give employment to anyone who requests it with sufficient insistence. The old woman agrees, but imposes her usual condition: she strips Chihiro of her name. Through a magical contract, she extracts the characters of the girl's name and keeps them for herself. From that moment on, Chihiro is to be called Sen, the name Yubaba has chosen to give her.

Haku privately warns Chihiro that she must never forget her true name, because if she forgets it completely, she will never be able to return to the human world. That warning establishes the central conflict of the story: Chihiro must preserve her identity, rescue her parents — locked in a pigsty alongside other pigs with no memory of who they are — and find a way out of the spirit world, all while working at the Aburaya under Yubaba's watch and surrounded by beings who neither understand nor accept the presence of a human girl among them.