Revisiting My Neighbor Totoro
or, teach me how to live
She woke me in the middle of the night and told me her water broke. It took me a moment to understand what she was telling me because it definitely wasn’t April yet.
I would’ve remembered the month of March, if nothing else.
We need to go to the hospital.
I called my mom, who is often awake in the middle of the night, and asked her to come over and watch our eldest son, who was sleeping, while we went to the hospital. We waited anxiously for my mom to get there and then we went to the hospital where the doctor confirmed that my wife’s water was broken.
We’re going to admit you.
When will I go home?
When the baby’s born.
This simple exchange left my jaw on the floor. Thought she meant we were having the baby right then and there, but she went on to assure us that their goal was for my wife to make it to 34 weeks. At that point, the risk of infection outweighs the risk of premature birth.
As we settled into the reality that my wife may be spending the next two weeks at the hospital, I thought about my three-year-old back at home with his grandmother.
It was, I think, about 6:30am when I left the hospital alone.
Eight years ago, I wrote about My Neighbor Totoro.
Back then, not only was I childless, I wasn’t even married yet.
Unlike many, I didn’t grow up with the movie. I had seen it, yes, of course, but not until I was an adult. I had probably only seen it a few times before I first wrote about it back in 2015, but I have now seen it dozens of times with my son.
I have seen it so many times that I can replay long stretches in my head from memory. More importantly, I remember so many beautiful moments of my son watching the movie.
I will forever remember the way my son and his cousin tried to help Totoro and friends grow the plants that became the massive tree during one oneiric sequence that sends Totoro and Mei and Satsuki flying up into the air on a top over the surrounding village, eventually playing flutes on the branches of that grand tree while the girls’ father works in his room.
As children do, my son’s obsession with Totoro was both intense and temporary. We watched it over and over to the point that I could feel the tempo of the movie beating within me. I could leave the room when they encounter the first soot gremlin and return, on purpose, at the exact moment the girls and their father laugh hysterically in the bath together.
But ever since the week before you were born, my relationship to Totoro forever changed.
When I called my mom, she told me that she took Fritz back to her house when he woke up, which was probably the right decision, but it also made another chore for me.
Once home, I packed up all the things Chelsea would need for her time in the hospital: clothes, computer, books, whatever. I then packed up a separate bag for my son while he stayed with his grandparents.
And he would stay with his grandparents until we moved into our new house. None of us could have expected that he’d wake up that morning to his last moments spent in the only house he’d ever lived in.
We had sold our house at the beginning of February with a closing date of March 7th. It was, at that moment, February 21st. So along with everything that just fell into my lap, I also needed to pack up our house and move in two weeks. Our unsuccessful house hunt temporarily put on hold.
The night before, my wife and I talked about what we needed to do for the move. She was going to go to Home Depot that very day to get a bunch of boxes and start the packing process while I worked.
Now I was running back and forth over the metro to be with her, make sure she was okay, and then to be with my son, to make sure he was okay.
Reader, no one was okay no matter what I did.
My Neighbor Totoro is a very simple movie. It’s one I love to hangout in and it’s that hangout feel that makes it so perfect for children.
People have spoken a lot about its conflict or lackthereof—including me!—but I think this is mostly missing the point. Totoro is a movie about being alive. About being a child. When the entire world seemed open and anything felt possible.
You could wake up to a friendly monster growing a forest and you’d hop on and soar through the air clinging to his furry belly to sit atop a towering tree only to wake up in the morning to no tree but a few green sprouts in your garden. You could wait for your father at the bus stop only to see that same friendly monster get on a catbus with your father’s umbrella or you could tumble into a hole in the earth and fall asleep on that monster’s enormous belly.
But all of this happens while Mei and Satsuki’s mother is sick at the hospital. The hospital is a bit of a journey to get to, so they can’t visit her often, and they’re uncertain when or if she’ll ever return home.
I don’t like the hopital.
I try not to cry when I facetime his mom so she can sing him a lullaby after I read him stories.
Later, at the hospital, we both try not to cry over the fact that she hasn’t seen our son in six days. Her mother’s there now, all the way from Tennessee. She came as soon as she heard, which was a great help to me as she helped pack our house but also kept my wife company while I worked or packed or visited our son.
The night that you were born, I was cleaning our house.
She told me that evening she thought I should stay the night but let me go anyway. A few hours later, she called me and told me to come back.
A few hours later, you were born. So small and so frail. You were a skeleton wrapped tightly in skin. So different from your brother who was double your size at birth. Eight weeks early, you would spend days with tubes shoved up your nose, down your throat, piercing into your tiny veins and arteries.
A cyberpunk nightmare kept you alive while I was in constant motion.
For the first week you were in the NICU, I was either at the hospital with you, holding you, or working, or packing up our belongings, preparing to move, or with your brother.
I listened to Philip Roth and Roberto Bolano novels while I drove back and forth, falling into their metafictions even as I tried to cling to the strangeness of my own life. I watched Angel’s Egg repeatedly on youtube and let the apocalyptic beauty and the opaque symbolism carry me along.
When your mother came home from the hospital, she kept returning to be with you.
And your brother, our firstborn, struggled with her absence. With my absence.
With the seeming intangibility of having a brother that he was unable to see or meet due to Covid precautions.
The darkness hovering at the edges of My Neighbor Totoro have led to fan theories about Totoro being a god of death. Miyazaki is also known for his own strange and opaque statements about the film, like his advice that you should only watch the movie twice: once as a child and once as an adult.
But there’s an anecdote from an animator during the interview process at Studio Ghibli where Miyazaki told the hopeful candidates that Totoro was not cute, but a dangerous predator. This animator, who would be the only of the hopefuls to become a Studio Ghibli employee, pointed out that Totoro had round teeth.
This made Miyazaki smile.
Or so the story goes.
But Totoro, while definitely not a predator, is not without the ability to terrify. The first time our eldest son watched it, Totoro’s roar scared him so much that we had to stop the movie for a few minutes. His large cavernous mouth reminds me, at times, of a hippo, which is one of the most dangerous animals lumbering across the skin of the earth.
And while Totoro may not be a god of death, the spectre of death looms over the movie. The mother’s unnamed disease. Mei missing, possibly drowned.
But it’s the hospitalized mother that has grown larger and larger in the year since you were born.
Most morning when we woke up, I’d take your mother to the hospital where she’d spend much of the day holding you. Speaking to you. Singing to you.
Every morning, your brother begged us not to go.
And even when I returned, he was aware of his mother’s absence. Especially because I still needed to work and so he spent the month you spent in the hospital with your grandparents. They did the best they could, but my father would begin having a series of strokes in a few short months.
Every day, your mother and I would talk about the impossibility of the situation. When we were at home with your brother, we thought of you, alone at the hospital. When we were with you at the hospital, we thought of your brother, begging us to stay, to hurry home.
It was hard on him. Hard in ways that are difficult to reckon with.
What was it like to be Satsuki and Mei during the long months their mother was in the hospital?
They, too, had just moved to a new house. They, too, had a forest nearby. A forest to fill with hopes and fears. With something to take place of their mother, so long absent. A forest where they could become themselves.
A forest filled with totoros, with catbuses, with sprites and spirits.
And then the fear of her death, which leads to a joyous reunion facilitated by Totoro and catbus.
I will forever remember the day your brother was finally allowed to meet you. You were theoretical to him and he was so young still. Only three years old, he was not particularly interested in meeting you when we told him we were all going to the hospital.
But how he smiled. How he wanted to hold you.
You were so tiny in his lap. You stared up at him and he stared down at you and I hope that feeling lasts forever, for all of us.
It’s been a year since you’ve been lashed to machines that filled your lungs and filled your stomach and kept you alive.
So different from your brother. So different than we could have expected. Like all babies, you were mostly a lump of flesh that we carried around, except only more so. Even when we took you home, when you were at last able to nurse, you were so small. Smaller, still, than your brother when he was born.
But we have come to know you more and more with each day. The way you stare sternly at those who want your attention. The way that expression eventually breaks into a smile. The way you shout as if practicing the use of your voice, the way you constantly babble and flail your arms.
You chase your brother through the house and he explodes in laughter or you crawl over to his magnetiles to smash whatever he’s put together, much to his frustration and anger.
Not your brother nor me nor your mother. Every day, you become more yourself. More a person that I’m grateful to know. I’m happy to know you, to watch you grow and develop and become the person you’re becoming.
Today you are one.
You came with great trauma, with great chaos, but you’re our sweet, gentle boy. Our cuddler.
Today you are one and I think of the long year in between and all that we’ve been through. I think of the magic that is alive in the world for you and your brother and all the beauty and awe that you will experience that my adult eyes have grown too old to see.
That magic so close yet hereafter beyond my fingertips even as it bubbles and burbles and gurgles before your eyes when I see them light up with joy as that irresistible smile opens your mouth wide.
There is much I would change about the last year if I could go back and rewrite this story, but I would change nothing about you.
Through all the pleasant joys and awesome experiences and encroaching darkness, Totoro ends with a promise of life. A desire to live and continue. As the credits roll, we see Mei and Satsuki’s young sibling toddling after them and we know that all turned out well.
A mother returned home and a family reunited.
Today you are one and I cannot wait to see who you become over the next year.
Happy birthday, little guy.
Love the way you've rightly situated Totoro among life's other great milestones, where it belongs.
My word that was a beautiful and moving piece of writing. I was born nearly three months prem and this really helps me to appreciate how wrenching an experience it must have all been for my lovely parents.