Call Me Chihiro

This piece discusses key moments from Call me Chihiro. If you have not seen it yet, you may want to experience the story first.

After seeing one too many reels insisting that Call Me Chihiro was something special, I finally decided to spend an evening with this film. It took a hundred and thirty one minutes but I can definitively say that the reels were right. It became evident quite early on that this not a film driven by plot twists or interpersonal drama. Rather, it’s a meticulous, caringly crafted character study of Chihiro herself; who is one of the more unqiue protagonists I’ve come across in the recent years. Chihiro seems to embody this principle or philosophy of caring about people without owning them. She expresses a kind of detached, lonely empathy that nevertheless draws people in. In the film we see her interact with lonely or troubled children, an elderly homeless man, and a blind woman recovering in hospital with the same openness and understanding and helping each of them in different ways. She doesn’t seem interested in drawing people closer to herself, yet she takes some joy in seeing people draw closer to one another. It’s a paradoxical kind of compassion, that is deeply involved, yet strangely detached.

You cannot own someone’s heart exclusively. Also, I don’t want to be owned …. I realized that if love is about owning well then I don’t need love.

And this detachment is more than just a habit for Chihiro. It feels to me more like a reasoned philosophical stance. Chihiro remains a lonely person at heart throughout the story. She drifts from place to place and moves through people’s lives almost like a ghost. While she often leaves the lives of the people she meets better than she found them, she also seems to possess a wanderer’s heart that prevents her from staying in one place for too long. We see this in the first half or so of the movie where it is revealed that she left behind sex work quite suddenly, without telling her regulars, citing the saying: “always leave them wanting more”. After moving to the small town and starting work as a cashier at a bento shop, she quickly creates a small “family” of sorts around her with the people that she runs into. And towards the end of the movie she is seen disappearing in the middle of a small gathering of the people she has come to care about, having made the decision to go far away. Far from being impulsive decisions of a flighty heart, these felt like deliberate choices that is shown to arise from a profound sense of detachment from the world, driven by a desire to avoid being possessed or owned by anyone. At one point in the film, she even reflects on her distaste for the very idea of possessive love: “You cannot own someone’s heart exclusively. Also, I don’t want to be owned …. I realized that if love is about owning well then I don’t need love.”

In the hours after I watched the film, Chihiro’s decision to leave so abruptly felt random and almost arbitrary. It was only in the days after that it began to make sense to me. By the time she finds herself at the rooftop gathering, she had allowed herself to become part of a small community. People had come to rely on her, and perhaps she had begun to rely a little on them in return. I wonder if she sensed that the warmth of belonging was beginning to crystalllize into expectation or obligation, and that it was therefore ceasing to be the kind of freely given love she values. Perhaps she even recognized herself becoming a little intoxicated by that sense of belonging, and knew it was time to move on. Or perhaps, having brought together this unlikely little family, she simply felt that there was nothing more for her to do; her presence was no longer needed. What came after was not for her.

“People are aliens in boxes. Everyone’s from a different planet. Maybe that’s why we have trouble understanding each other.”

The film also has a poignant perspective on family, relationships and immense difficulty of getting humans to understand one another. It suggests that the divide exists not merely between generations, classes or even men and women but between every individual. At one point in the movie Chihiro remarks on something she heard one of her clients say: “People are aliens in human bodies,” she recalls, “Everyone’s from a different planet. Maybe that’s why we have trouble understanding each other.” And indeed, many of the conflicts between the characters in the film are driven by how difficult it is for people to truly understand another person, another alien in a box. We see this in Kuniko’s relationship with her parents. Although they clearly care for her, they often seem more beholden to the rules and expectations of what a daughter ought to be than to the daughter standing in front of them. Rather than seeing Kuniko in all of her contradictions, they seem to relate to an idealized prototype assembled from social convention, personal hopes, and inherited notions of filial duty. Their disappointment is directed not so much at Kuniko herself as at the distance between the real person and the image they have constructed in their minds.

Makoto’s mother falls into a similar trap. When Makoto surprises her with a birthday present, her first instinct is not to recognize an unexpected act of thoughtfulness from her son, but to assume that Chihiro must have orchestrated it. Chihiro then has to convince the mother that the gift was entirely Makoto’s idea, subtly pointing out that his mother is failing to see the kindness that already exists within the boy. Again, the person is obscured by the expectations placed upon them.

Now it’s easy to feel anger at Kuniko’s parents or at Makoto’s mother. I did feel a little angry when I first saw their interactions. But the film suggests that this kind of misunderstanding is often not born from malice but from our tendency to mistake our mental models of people for the people themselves.

This is perhaps why Basil’s view of love feels so fundamentally incompatible with Chihiro’s. Where Basil’s style affection is rooted in possession and exclusivity, Chihiro’s is grounded in the idea of allowing others to remain fully themselves, the alien in the human body. Throughout the film, Call Me Chihiro returns repeatedly to this idea that love begins with seeing another person as they are, rather than as we wish them to be. Simply belonging to the same family, sharing the same blood, or even loving someone deeply does not mean we truly understand them. Everyone is inhabiting an inner world that no one else can fully enter.

The film itself represents well this tendency of mental models replacing real people in the scene where Chihiri strikes up a conversation with a stranger in a ramen shop who was prepared to fight an office worker who was bullying the staff. The stranger has a tattoo on his arm that reads “Form is Emptiness”. This phrase is a reference to the idea in Buddhist philosphy that everything in this world lacks a fixed, independent essence. Rather, every person is more fluid, contingent, and relational than the concepts that we impose upon them. To mistake a person for a static identity, to see only “the daughter,” “the child,” or “the lover” instead of the person before us is precisely to deny their emptiness. A person can never be fully described by the labels or roles we assign them because who they are is always emerging from a web of relationships, experiences, and change.

And this shared feeling of being from different planets seem to be what bring together the small family of sorts that Chihiro creates in the town. The people she meets are all struggling with their own inner worlds and the difficulty of being understood by others. Yet within this unlikely circle, and within Chihiro, they discover a rare kind of acceptance. No one is expected to conform to an ideal or play a prescribed role. They are simply allowed to be the strange, complicated “aliens” that they are, and in doing so, they begin to understand one another a little better.

Speaking of alien natures, if there’s one aspect of Chihiro herself that might feel truly alien to many, it is her extraordinary resilience. The film reveals her past only in fragments: passing remarks, brief confessions that you might miss if you blink for a second, and subtle visual details. We catch sight of a scar running across her back before later learning that it came from a client who, as she casually puts it, “liked me a little too much.” Even after leaving sex work behind, she finds that the past is not so easily discarded. The townspeople remain wary of her. And despite her kindness and generosity, Makoto’s mother even goes all the way to the bento shop specifically to ask Chihiro to stay away from her son and to stop feeding him because she doesn’t want her neighbours to think that she’s not taking care of her son properly.

But we see Chihiro meet moments of rejection, misunderstanding, and painful memories with an inspiring level of inner peace. She recounts being stabbed with almost disarming matter-of-factness. When confronted by Makoto’s mother, she apologizes without making an attempt to defend herself or persuade the woman that she is mistaken. But Chihiro’s accepteance of the world doesn’t feel to me like passivity or resignation. Quite the opposite, in fact. In spite of all that she has endured, she retains an inner light that allows her to delight in small pleasures, to be whimsical, to be joyful and curious. She finds a profound freedom in her acceptance of herself and of the fact that the world is not fair.

There is, perhaps, a touch of absurdism here too. Midway through the film, Chihiro receives a phone call informing her that her mother has died. When asked whether she will return for the funeral, she declines. The scene immediately reminded me of Camus’ The Stranger. Like Meursault, Chihiro refuses to perform emotions simply because society expects them of her. But where Meursault’s emotional distance feels like indifference, Chihiro’s springs from a deep commitment to living honestly. Throughout the film, she seems content to feel only what she genuinely feels, rather than what others believe she ought to feel. She can remain detached from the world without becoming detached from the people in it. In that sense, Call Me Chihiro feels almost like a compassionate response to Camus’ famous protagonist: someone who accepts the world’s absurdity, and feels alienated from people, yet still retains a love of humanity.

The film moves very slowly and watching it is almost like a form of meditation. It’s like sitting by the beach and watching each wave of the story slowly roll ashore. I really liked the film’s masterful use of silence. It often paused long enough between moments and words to give you the space to think about and feel what you’ve just seen. It’s something that’s not so common in cinema these days; it seems to be an accepted norm that dialogue must be a rapid back and forth between characters.

At its heart, I think that Call Me Chihiro is an invitation to see another person. To strip away the labels, the roles and expectations that we place upon people and try to glimpse the inner world of another human who can never be fully known or understood. It’s an exploration of the fundamental loneliness that comes with being a conscious being whose inner experience is forever inaccessible to others. But it is also a celebration of the beauty and joy that can be found in the very fleeting moments of connection that we do manage to share with one another.