The second volume in Hayao Miyazaki's memoir is now available in paperback and on digital as an e-book. This memoir is full of rare interviews, sketches and more from 1997-2008. Get inside the mind of Hayao Miyazaki through films like Howl's Moving Castle and his Academy Award® winning film Spirited Away.

Enjoy this exclusive excerpt—featuring the original proposal for the film Princess Mononoke!

In this film, samurai, lords, and peasants who are customarily featured in period dramas hardly make an appearance. Even when they do, they perform only in very minor supporting roles.

The main characters are humans who do not appear on the main stage of history and ferocious gods of the mountains. The human characters are ironworkers, members of the iron-production group: engineers, laborers, blacksmiths, iron sand gatherers, and charcoal makers. They are transporters such as packhorse and ox drivers. They were in those days armed and had formed organizations that we might today call cottage industry manufacturing groups.

The ferocious mountain gods that confront the humans appear as wolf gods, boar gods, and in the form of bears. The Forest Spirit (Deer God), the key figure in the story, is an entirely imaginary creature with the face of a human, the body of a beast, and antlers of tree branches.

The young male protagonist is a descendant of the Emishi people who disappeared after being defeated in ancient times by the politically powerful Yamato people. And if we search for a likeness for the female lead, she is in appearance not unlike a clay figurine from the Jōmon period (12,000 BCE–300 BCE).

The main locations are the foreboding deep forest of the gods and the fortresslike Iron Town where iron is made.

The conventional period drama settings of castles, towns, and farming villages with rice paddies are merely distant backdrops. Rather, what I plan to recreate is the landscape of Japan when there were far fewer people, when there were no dams, and when the forests were dense—when nature had a high level of purity with its deep mountains and dark valleys, pure and rushing streams, narrow dirt roads, and large numbers of birds, beasts, and insects.

With this setting, my aim is to depict a freer image of the characters without being bound by the conventions, preconceptions, and prejudices of traditional period dramas. Recent research in history, ethnology, and archaeology has shown us that our country's history is far richer and more diverse than we are generally led to believe. The poverty in period dramas has almost all been created from the drama in films. Disorder and fluidity were the norm in the world of the Muromachi period (1336–1573), the setting for this film. It was a time when present-day Japan was being formed out of social upheaval, when those below overcame those above from the days of the Southern and Northern Dynasties period (1336–1392), and the ethos of eccentricity, swaggering scoundrels, and the chaotic rise of new arts held sway. It differed from the period of Warring States (1467–1568), when organized battles were fought between standing armies, and also from the Kamakura period (1185–1333) with its fierce and earnest warriors.

This was a more unpredictable and fluid time, more magnanimous and free, with less clear class distinctions between warriors and villagers and women as depicted in the drawings of artisans and tradespeople. In such a time, the contours of life and death were very clear. People lived, loved, hated, worked, and then died. Life was not full of ambiguities.

Herein lies the meaning in creating this work, as we face the coming chaotic era of the twenty-first century.

I am not attempting to solve the entire world's problems. There can never be a happy ending in the battle between humanity and ferocious gods. Yet, even amidst hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist.

I will depict animosity, but that is in order to show the fact that there is something more precious.

I depict the bondage of a curse in order to show the joy of liberation.

What I will show is the boy reaching an understanding of the girl, and the process of the girl's heart opening up to the boy.

In the end the girl may say to the boy, "I love you, Ashitaka. But I can't forgive human beings."

The boy will smile and say, "That's all right. Won't you live together with me?"

This is the kind of film I want to make.

Order your copy of Turning Point: 1997-2008 by Hayao Miyazaki now in paperback and digital here.