What a Book Can Do for a Girl

Less than halfway through Hayao Miyazaki’s animated feature Spirited Away, a 10-year-old girl gets her name back. She’s lost too many things since stumbling into a supernatural world—her parents, even briefly her physical body. The retrieval of her name, followed by a friend’s kind gift of a fresh meal, loosens up all her stored grief. Chihiro cries freely for what’s been taken between bites of steamed rice balls.

For the writer Gabrielle Bellot, Miyazaki’semotionally sensitive depictions of female protagonists, such as Chihiro, offered as a transgender girl growing up closeted in the Commonwealth of Dominica. Fictional characters showed her—as they have shown countless other girls—a fuller and more nuanced path through the world than what her immediate reality would allow.