Character · Spirited Away
Yubaba
She will hire anyone who asks for work, which sounds generous until you read what she takes as the fee.
In Otakana the clue reads: Big-headed witch who runs the bathhouse
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Spirited Away
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Yubaba owns the bathhouse: an enormous head, a small body, jewelled fingers and an office at the top of the building that she reaches by flying. She is bound by an old rule against refusing anyone who asks her for a job, which is the only reason a ten-year-old human girl ends up employed there instead of eaten with the rest of the leftovers.
The fee is a name. She takes the written characters, keeps most of them, and hands back a single syllable, after which the worker slowly forgets who they used to be and stops wanting to leave. It is a contract rather than a curse, and the film is careful about that distinction. Every spirit in the building signed one.
Her weak point is her enormous baby son, Boh, kept in a padded room full of pillows and the only person she has never charged for anything. Her twin sister Zeniba is drawn identically and behaves as her opposite, which lets Miyazaki argue that greed is a job somebody took rather than a face they were born with.
Spelling YUBABA
YUBABA is six letters and the name is two words: yu, the hot water written on the bathhouse curtain, and baba, an old woman, so she is roughly the bathhouse hag. Three A's and one U, with the B repeating in the third and fifth positions. Her sister Zeniba shares the tail, built from zeni, an old word for coin.