Creating Space for Empty Space
By Isabella Broccolo
Photo by Lindsay Love
I watched Spirited Away for the first time almost two years ago. Sitting on the floor and surrounded by my family, I witnessed the protagonist, a young girl named Chihiro, be transported to a mystical world through a strange tunnel. I watched as her parents were turned into pigs by a witch named Yubaba and she, guided by several characters, began to work in a bathhouse for spirits while she figured out how to save them. Throughout the film, she meets and befriends a dragon named Haku, a spirit referred to as No Face, a little mouse, and a tiny black bird.
About midway through the film, Chihiro watches as Haku is attacked and falls from the sky, wounded by paper shikigami that attacked him because he stole a magical seal from the witch Zeniba. In an effort to save Haku, she vows to return the seal. Before she can, she is chased by No Face, who had grown monstrous in size and began eating bathhouse workers. She escapes from No Face and makes her way to a train, whose tracks run along seemingly endless water, in hopes that it will take her to Zeniba.
The film is, admittedly, a bit strange. The action of the screen held my attention, and I watched much of the film with moderate interest. But when I got to the scene where Chihiro sat quietly on the train, with the little mouse and bird on her lap and a once again calm No Face beside her, amongst shadowy spirits. The scene wasn’t sad, it was just quiet. But still, I stared at the screen and I wept. Fat, salty tears poured down my face and my mouth opened meekly. Emotion poured out of me and swirled within me. I was surprised that my body had become so overwhelmed with emotion when I was not watching much of anything.
I talked to my younger sibling, Rio, about the scene the next day, still struggling to understand what exactly made me react in such a raw and genuine way. No film had ever garnered such a reaction from me before. Rio listened to me clumsily articulate my feelings, and finally, when I had finished speaking, they introduced me to the concept of 間 (Ma).
M, is a Japanese word that refers to a pause in time, or empty feeling. It is commonly used by artists to portray “empty space” and is showcased in the artist’s medium of choice with as much value and intention as the rest of a film's more action-packed scenes. It’s space in art created to honor empty space in life. Important to note is that empty space is different from liminal space. It isn’t empty, forlorn, melancholy, or spooky. It is merely the quiet moments in life that are frequently overlooked or dismissed as unimportant, that we try to erase in our hurry to bustle to our next stimuli of choice, but that are just as important as the moments in our lives that are filled with energy and chaos.
Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away and many other Studio Ghibli films, uses this concept in his movies to give his audience time to breathe after an action-packed scene. In Spirited Away, Ma is used in the sequence of Chihiro on the train. This scene comes right after she is chased through a bathhouse by No Face, a spirit who had morphed into a scary monster eager to devour everything in his path. In another Miyazaki classic, My Neighbor Totoro, ma is used again when two girls stand at a bus stop next to the forest spirit Totoro after a hectic adventure. The characters do not speak, and the audience only hears the sounds of the rain pouring down.
I find Ma to be so powerful, that I actively search for it in other pieces of media I consume. I find that it is very difficult to locate. Most Western films that I have seen seem all too eager to shut Ma out in an attempt to cram in as much action as possible. Even when there is downtime, there is still dialogue, which tells me I need to focus more on the characters instead of the space in time that they are occupying. And while I am eager to find Ma in the media I consume, I have found that I go out of my way to avoid it in my own, real life. I am desperate to fill the empty space I experience with something- music, video games, Youtube videos, conversations, social media, and so on. I do nothing to honor it because I cannot handle the feeling of the emptiness. And I think that that is the reason I wept so hard during the train sequence in Spirited Away. I think my body, in that moment, mourned for the empty space that I deprive myself of appreciating in my own life.
