Genzaburo Yoshino

Copper had an odd feeling. The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy. In Copper’s chest something like a wave began to pitch and roll. No, it felt as if Copper himself were pitching and rolling.

Miyazaki makes films for whole people and makes films about consequences. When I worked on the English-language script of his film Princess Mononoke, I was astonished when I finally realised that everything in the film was about consequences of acts and actions: seemingly unrelated events are actually the consequences of other events or actions, and everyone in the film is acting according to what they believe to be their best interests without realising that what they do affects everyone else.

So although there’s no doubt that everyone wants to avoid physical pain, in this sense, it’s something that we should be grateful for, something we need. Because of it, we know that a failure has occurred inside us, and at the same time, we also come to know exactly what the natural state of the human body should be.
In the same way, when a person is living in a way that’s not normal for a human being, suffering and hardships of the heart let us know that. So then, thanks to that pain and suffering, we can clearly grasp what a human being should naturally be