Character · Grave of the Fireflies
Seita Yokokawa
Fourteen years old, in charge of a four-year-old, in a city that has just been set on fire.
In Otakana the clue reads: Teenage boy caring for his sister in wartime Kobe
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Seita is the older of the two children in Grave of the Fireflies. After an American firebombing raid destroys their home in Kobe in 1945 and their mother dies of her burns, he takes his sister Setsuko to a relative, then out of that relative's house when the arrangement sours, and into an abandoned shelter beside a river.
He is not stupid and he is not cruel. He is a fourteen-year-old with a naval officer for a father, a strong sense of what he is owed, and no way to feed anybody. Isao Takahata makes the pride legible on purpose. Every decision Seita takes is one a proud child would take, and the film declines to step in and correct him.
Studio Ghibli released the film in April 1988, on a double bill with My Neighbour Totoro, a programming choice people have been arguing about ever since. Akiyuki Nosaka wrote the 1967 short story it comes from about his own sister, who died of malnutrition during the war. Takahata said afterwards that he did not consider the result an antiwar film.
Spelling SEITA
SEITA is five letters and the difficulty is the vowel pair. EI in Japanese is two beats, se-i, rather than the single long sound English hears in vein, so the I is easy to drop when typing from memory. One S, one T, and three of the five letters are vowels, which makes the row easier to crack than it first looks.