Character · Ponyo
Sosuke
Five years old, keeps a fish in a green bucket, and treats a promise as a legally binding instrument.
In Otakana the clue reads: Five-year-old who keeps a fish in a bucket
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Ponyo
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Sosuke lives in a house on a cliff above the sea with his mother Lisa, who drives like she is late for something important, and a father who is usually away on a ship. He finds a goldfish stuck in a jar, frees her, names her Ponyo, and carries her to nursery school in a bucket. When the sea takes her back he is heartbroken in the specific, total way small children manage.
What Miyazaki gets right is that the boy is competent without being a miniature adult. Sosuke works a signal lamp, looks after the residents of the care home next door, handles a boat in a storm, and is still five. He cries, he clings, he believes things flatly. The film asks whether he means his promise and never suggests his age makes the question unserious.
His mother is the other reason it holds together. Lisa treats her son as a person whose opinions count, hands him real responsibility during the storm, and softens nothing on his behalf. That relationship, rather than the magic, is what most people find they remember about Ponyo years after watching it.
Spelling SOSUKE
SOSUKE hides a long vowel. The Japanese romanises strictly as Sousuke, and English drops the extra beat exactly as it drops the one inside Toukyou to get Tokyo. Six letters, two S's, two U and O sounds, and an E on the end that Japanese pronounces fully even though English speakers tend to swallow it.