Character · Spirited Away
Haku
The boy who explains the rules of the bathhouse cannot remember the one thing about himself that matters.
In Otakana the clue reads: Boy in the bathhouse who is also a river dragon
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Spirited Away
- Letters
- 4 · Easy
Haku finds Chihiro at the moment she starts turning transparent and puts food in her mouth so that she does not disappear. He knows the bathhouse from the inside: which door to use, when to bow, that she has to ask Yubaba for work and cannot stop asking until she gets it. He is calm, roughly twelve years old, and clearly in trouble himself.
He is also a dragon, white with a green mane, flying errands for Yubaba that leave him bleeding. Working for her has cost him what it costs everybody in that building. She holds his name, and without it he cannot leave. The only reason Chihiro can help him at all is that she went through the same trade days earlier and paid attention.
What he actually is, is a river. Miyazaki hangs the whole thing on a single childhood memory of Chihiro's, and the film treats a waterway that got filled in with the same weight it gives a person, which is roughly the argument Ghibli keeps making about what development costs and who never gets asked.
Spelling HAKU
HAKU is four letters, and once you know it is short you have it. The film writes the name in katakana, a fragment left over after Yubaba took the rest of it, and his full name, Nigihayami Kohakunushi, is not what the game wants. No long vowels and nothing doubled. Two consonants and two vowels in strict alternation.