Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is one of Hayao Miyazaki’s earlier works, with both the manga and its movie adaptation being released before he founded Studio Ghibli in 1985. But even before he was churning out such classics as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle, his work still had a strong sense of style, atmosphere and thematic clarity that came through to give the movie adaptation of Nausicaa a timeless quality. Yet with that movie being my first introduction to this story and its world, my expectations for the manga weren’t actually that high. I’ve always loved dystopias and post-apocalyptic settings, and I appreciated both the aesthetics of the movie as well as the story’s environmentalism, but I had the impression that its core premise and ideas had been better executed in the decades since this work was penned. And why would I expect the manga to prove me wrong? As skilled and talented as Miyazaki obviously is, he made a name for himself as a director, not as a mangaka, and in the afterword of the second deluxe volume he himself professed to having “no talent” with this format. Well, as it turns out, the adaptation and Miyazaki himself sold this manga short, and what I hope to do with the rest of this post is explain how that’s the case by showing you why Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind works so well.
For some context before jumping into the meat and potatoes, it’s probably a good idea to summarise the basic plot and setting of the story first in the event you’re reading this without having read or watched Nausicaa for some reason. The story is set a thousand years after humanity has suffered a planet-wide civilisational collapse, with what few human societies that still survive being largely consigned to the fringes of a toxic and ever-growing Forest infested with giant insects. Our eponymous main character, Nausicaa, lives in one such society as the daughter of the local chief, and devotes much of her care and time to her community and the Forest before the scourge of war turns her life upside-down. The story uses this pairing of a kindhearted protagonist in a bleak and violent world in order to send a broader message about the triumph of hope and the human spirit over despair and decay. In that critical respect, Nausicaa serves as an embodiment of the story’s ideals and her heart serves as the site of much of its conflict as she attempts to resolve the battle within herself as well as the war between her world’s two major empires.
We’re introduced to Nausicaa in a sequence where she explores the Forest, before rushing to save the life of a traveller who’s being pursued by an angered Ohmu – a sort of mutant isopod the size of a plane. The sequence shows her adventurous heart, her selflessness in risking her life for a stranger* and her role in the story as mediator between nature and humanity through the compassion she shows towards all living things. It’s simple enough to see this scene as a microcosm of the wider story, and to see Nausicaa being positioned as a near messianic figure, the manga even overtly frames her as the subject of a prophecy later on, and as the saviour of humanity. Yet there are cracks in this conception of the story that start to show the direction that Miyazaki would ultimately take with Nausicaa’s character to add more complexity and nuance to the manga and its thematic framework. When Princess Kushana arrives in the Valley of the Wind and Nausicaa feels her home is under threat she is shown to be violent and quick to anger, duelling one of the Torumekian soldiers accompanying the princess before someone else intervenes to de-escalate the situation. Throughout the story, she walks the path of blood, being responsible for death and suffering all the way through to the last chapter, even if she wasn’t often the primary instigator of that violence. Nausicaa is shown to be confrontational, hypocritical, violent and manipulative at different stages, just as much as she is considerate, determined, compassionate and sincere. Rather than glossing over these seeming contradictions in her character, the story confronts them head on, ultimately embracing such contradiction as an innate quality of human nature.
By the end of the story, Nausicaa comes to understand that life entails hardship, despair and suffering, but that that fact can never fully negate hope or joy. Restated, she accepts that light and dark are inherent aspects of life, and that any worldview that shies away from either is a perversion of life itself, no matter how noble the goal. Her role therefore becomes not the reconciliation of humanity and nature, but the reconciliation of humanity with itself, because we can never move forward if we cling to blind optimism or if we abandon ourselves to nihilistic fatalism. In the same vein, Nausicaa is a good person not in spite of her flaws and conflicts, but because she is able to acknowledge and accept them as part of herself. As someone who grew up a huge Superman fan, it was great to have a story revolving around a character who remained unwaveringly good. She has moments of weakness and doubt, and circumstances force her hand from time to time, but she never truly compromises on her ideals. The world of the story is fairly bleak at points, and Miyazaki doesn’t shy away from depictions of graphic violence and the consequences of various actions and ideas throughout the story. Nausicaa gets exposed to all of the worst of humanity and she still chooses good and hope and light, and that’s what lends her character and by extension the story at large an enduring and timeless quality.
Considering that I’ve spent this entire post so far just talking about Nausicaa, it may shock you to learn that there are in fact other characters in this story that are interesting in their own right. Kushana eventually develops along a somewhat similar trajectory to Nausicaa in terms of striving to do and be better in the face of her own shortcomings, she also does what Zuko should’ve done at the end of The Last Airbender. Then there’s Charuka, who was probably the Dorok character with the single most development throughout the story as he evolved through challenges to his faith, and the Dorok Emperor himself was a deeply entertaining though one-dimensional character. Then, we have characters like Ohma and the Master of the Garden who were late additions to the story but received enough characterisation to very quickly become engaging on their own terms, the latter of the two inadvertently being the final catalyst in the progression of Nausicaa’s character even through the conflict they had. And beyond even them there’s the Wormhandlers and Forest People who don’t necessarily receive the most characterisation but whose presence adds so much to the scale and lore of the manga through their unique cultures and beliefs, and after all these characters there’s still a lot of others to consider, like Yupa, and the Pejite prince and so many others that accompany Nausicaa at different stages of her journey. The cast of this manga is enormous, and Miyazaki does an excellent job of balancing their presence in the story so as not to take away from the central plot while still giving them enough substance to make the world of the story feel more real and lived in.
I could go on to gush about how insanely good the art is – there’s individual panels so visually dense it feels like you could get lost in them if you let your mind wander – but after all the praise I’ve heaped onto the manga at this point it’s probably reasonable to delve into some aspects of it that I wasn’t completely in love with. I want to preface this by saying these criticisms are more nitpicks than anything because they didn’t meaningfully detract from my enjoyment of the manga, but they do still bear mentioning. The first issue is related to the cast, just as a function of how large and spread out it is we don’t get enough time with a lot of the characters for their personal stakes and challenges to feel especially impactful. A lot of people died in this manga, and there were points where a lot of characters had their lives at risk and the vast majority of the time I didn’t feel anything reading that, because the spectacle of what was going on around those moments was more interesting than the characters themselves. It’s obviously not the case that I didn’t care for any of the characters at all, but it’s still not great when a character might be dying and instead of feeling bad for them I’m just trying to remember what their name even is. Then there’s the fact that certain character relationships, motivations and dynamics can end up feeling a bit too flat. There’s some minor romance between two characters that was fairly obvious to me from the start of their interactions just because of the facial expressions they’re drawn with (once again, the art is top notch), but their actual interactions felt stilted and one-note. There’s also issues when it comes to the story being too heavy handed with its exposition at points, but that just comes with the territory when you’re reading manga so it’s not especially noteworthy, and I didn’t necessarily mind since there are in fact a lot of interesting things to learn about this world anyway.
By this point you probably get the idea, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a story with big ideas, an immersive fantasy world, and a cast of characters that – while not perfectly handled – adds a lot to the reading experience, and everything is tied together by its titular protagonist whose presence and journey looms large over the themes and world of this manga. If you were a fan of the movie and wanted to know if the manga was worth checking out, it absolutely is! I’ve avoided talking about the Daikaisho, the Forest People, the role of the forest itself and the relationship humans have with it, the mysteries of the crypt of Shuwa and so many other things that made the story so incredible and changed the ideas the movie presented around Nausicaa herself so drastically. The movie is in fact only about the first chapter or two of the deluxe edition, which was enough to earn it a good score when I watched it last year, but the manga blows it out of the water to the extent that I am willing to give it 100/100, there’s ultimately nothing about the story that I would change and no issue that I felt it failed to resolve or make up for by the end of its final chapter.
There’s so much more I could talk about, and might talk about in future with this manga, but this is it for now. If you want to read my thoughts on another manga from the 1980’s steeped in environmentalism, check out my review of Parasyte.
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