You Love to See It: Princess Mononoke (Patreon)

“Life is suffering,” the leper Osa husks from within his caul of soiled bandages. “It is hard. The world is cursed, but still you find reasons to go on living.” On his deathbed, his body rotting, this quiet man finds words of clear-eyed guidance for a visiting stranger. This single moment of human connection is as moving as any glimpse of spiritual transcendence, as powerful as anything the film has to say about war, loss, or the rape of the natural world by industry. It’s hard not to think about that moment now as we sicken, as we watch our loved ones die, as we fight our own desperate battles to find a reason to live.

The lepers of Irontown are a fascinating part of Miyazaki’s film, taken in with genuine compassion by the domineering Lady Eboshi and put to work engineering and manufacturing the firearms that give her small mining settlement its disproportionate power. By entering Eboshi’s service they make themselves complicit in her destruction of the forest and its spirits, in her fighting against the local samurai lord, Asano. Without her, they are outcasts despised by their fellow men, assured only of poverty and isolation. Her kindness, while far from selfless, is genuine, and illustrates the ways in which societal rejection of disability leaves the sick and the disabled open to exploitation at the hands of their “benefactors”.

Osa’s words accept this reality. He knows there is no nobility in gunmaking, no joy to be had from war. But there is peace in community, and dignity in a quiet death surrounded by one’s friends. Here, as he would nowhere else, he will be cared for in his final days. He will not suffer abuse and degradation over the random accident of his illness. Voice actor Corey Burton, in the film’s English dub, imparts a deep, whispery melancholy to the character, as though Osa knows he will never have a chance to reconcile the traumatic whole of his life, to wrestle with the  brutal choices prejudice forced him to make. The world is cursed. But still. But still.