Fictional Fantasy or Cultural Fact? The
Search for Japanese Identity in Miyazaki Hayao's Mononokehime
To
call Miyazaki Hayao the "Walt Disney of Japan" would be to apply the most
convenient, yet also one of the most misleading labels possible. Although
Miyazaki's high-quality animated films have been giving serious competition to
Disney and other domestic films for over a decade, Mononokehime, his latest project,
broke Japanese national box-office records when revenues topped those of Steven
Spielberg's E.T.
This record has since been bested by Titanic, but this is the first
time any Japanese film, let alone an animated feature, has attracted this much
attention in the otherwise Hollywood-dominated domestic market. Although the
secret to this particular film's financial success is doubtless due to many
factors, including Miyazaki's established reputation and the considerable
amount of funds spent to publicize the film, what is distinctive about Mononokehime is its deconstruction
and re-examination of Japanese culture, past and present.
Recent
discussion on the concept of culture has focused on its ideological and constructed
nature - in fact, on the idea that it is a set of commonalities "imagined"
to be shared by a group of people. "Culture" may be a purely "imaginary"
narrative, but it differs from fiction in that it possesses a strong truth
value for groups whom the narrative is constructed for or about: in other
words, for those groups it appears as reality. In spite of Miyazaki's adamant claim that there
is no message to this movie, the cultural facts and fantasies that emerge
from Mononokehime
reveal a concern with (imagined?) relationships Japan and her people have
had with their environment, and an attempt to represent as well as reconfigure
the cultural symbols associated with those relationships. I argue that the
messages carried by the visual images and narrative currents in Mononokehime
not only tell a story, but function simultaneously as "cognitive metaphors"
dependent on cultural knowledge: they are literary manifestations of ideological
concepts which speak directly to the Japanese cultural imagination.
Though
Mononokehime is a slick, modern production and is watchable on a purely
fantasy/adventure level, the narrative's location in historical time and space
(fifteenth century Japan) forces a dialogue with the complicated discourse
on Japanese culture - which is often synonymous with the issue of Japanese
national identity. The intent of this paper is to expose the ideological origins
of the cultural narratives at play in Mononokehime and to explore the possible meaning(s) constructed
by the film's literary interpretation and representation of Japan's modern
myths.