For your stray attention this weekend

In which we are all hungry ghosts

Hello,

Careful readers of this newsletter will have noticed that I’m on a bit of a Hayao Miyazaki jag at the moment. The Japanese animator - auteur of My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and The Boy and the Heron - has a way of constructing stories that seem to colonise my brain in mysterious ways. I’m convinced by the grim determination of his protagonists, but also by the genuine ambiguity of many of the people they meet. In Miyazaki’s imaginative world, we are often shown battles for life and death in which heroes steal and deceive, and the bad guys are generous and reasonable. It’s all utterly fantastical in ways that fall outside my Western frames of reference, and somehow also real in ways that other stories are not. I find myself watching intently to understand how it’s done.