I Found Spirited Away in Odysseus

I still haven't watched The Odyssey.

I did see a Short with the scene where the men turn into pigs. Circe puts out food, the men eat, and their human bodies turn into pigs.

The moment I saw it, I thought of Spirited Away.

The Place Before They Become Pigs

Chihiro's parents also eat food in a strange place and turn into pigs. If all they shared was the pig transformation, it could just be a common transformation scene.

But what snagged me was everything around it.

In both scenes, people first surrender themselves to food and hospitality in an unfamiliar world. The price is their place as humans.

The bathhouse in Spirited Away isn't just a bathhouse. In an interview at the time, Hayao Miyazaki brought up Japan's sex industry as the most fitting way to depict contemporary Japan. Yubaba's bathhouse takes away names, provides room and board, makes workers serve customers, and does not let them return outside easily. So reading the place with the shadow of a brothel behind it does not seem like nothing more than an urban legend. A summary quoting the interview

That does not mean the entire film should be forced into one metaphor about sex work. It is closer to a fantasy bathhouse where gods come to bathe, with the texture of the sex industry layered over it at the same time.

Circe's island looked similar to me.

That does not mean the island was historically an actual brothel. But men who have finished a war and drifted across the sea arrive there, where they are offered food, wine, sexual temptation, and rest, then stay for a long time. The crew become pigs, and Odysseus spends a year on the island after beginning a relationship with Circe. An overview of the Circe story

They look different on the outside, but both can be read as spaces of pleasure and hospitality that hold people in place.

Chihiro Is a Worker; Odysseus Is a Traveler

But their positions are completely different.

Chihiro works inside that place. She loses her name, signs a labor contract, and has to earn her keep in the way that world demands. To return, she has to become not a consumer of the space but someone who keeps it running.

Odysseus is a traveler. He is an outsider who arrives on Circe's island, gets held there, and eventually leaves. If Chihiro's story inside that space is about recovering her own name, Odysseus passes through the space on his way home.

The same kind of pleasure space, but one person is a worker and the other is a traveler.

Placed side by side, the pig scenes looked a little different too.

Chihiro's parents enter as consumers and become things to be consumed. Odysseus's crew surrender themselves to unfamiliar hospitality and become animals. Both can be read as punishment for desire. But more than desire itself, I became curious about how a space built to receive desire changes a person's name, body, and will to return.

Why Do Stories Keep Pulling Out Similar Blocks?

This suddenly made me think of other folktales.

In The Tale of the Rabbit, the rabbit goes to the Dragon King's underwater palace, learns that its liver is wanted, and tricks its way back to land. Princess Bari travels to the underworld to find medicine, returns, and saves her parents.

They aren't the same story as Odysseus. Still, the shape repeats: entering an unfamiliar world, getting caught in its rules, paying some price, and returning.

At that point, I could dismiss it as a structure humans commonly make when explaining travel and return.

But it gets stranger when Kongjwi and Cinderella enter the picture.

The Same Shoe on Opposite Sides of the Earth

Kongjwi and Cinderella are alike in more than the broad idea that a good protagonist suffers and eventually gets rewarded.

In both stories, a stepmother and stepsister move into the place left by the protagonist's mother. The protagonist is made to do the hardest labor in the household and receives tasks she cannot finish alone. Animals or supernatural beings then appear to help her.

In a widely told version of Kongjwi and Patjwi, Kongjwi wears clothes and shoes given to her by a fairy and goes to a feast. She loses one shoe while crossing a stream, and a local magistrate or governor finds it. After searching for the owner, he marries Kongjwi. The shoe performs almost exactly the same function as Cinderella's glass slipper. Plot summary of the Kongjwi and Patjwi folktale

If all they shared was a good daughter abused by a stepmother, that could be ordinary family conflict. But the impossible labor, supernatural helper, feast, lost shoe, identification through the shoe, and rise in status through marriage line up in sequence.

The similarity is too high to shrug off as two stories from opposite sides of the earth. Folklore research also compares Kongjwi and Patjwi with ATU 510A, the international Cinderella tale type. A comparative study

They are not completely identical. Cinderella usually ends with marriage, while Kongjwi and Patjwi continues into murder, rebirth, and revenge. A block repeated around the world sits at the front, with a block that grew more strongly in Korea attached behind it.

So did the two really become similar without knowing each other? Or did the story travel with people from a very long time ago and remain on both sides?

I don't know at this point. Either answer is strange. If they arose independently, humans assemble similar narratives. If the story spread, humans chose this structure out of countless others and preserved it for an unusually long time.

So it still feels too early to call this either simple convergent evolution or the copying of one original.

Are Myths and Folktales Tetris Blocks?

This is just a personal question that came out of all that.

Could myths and folktales be something like Tetris blocks shaped to fit the human brain, assembled after the fact to explain lives that have already happened?

Life is much messier. Leaving does not mean you will return. Resisting temptation does not guarantee a reward. Labor does not always give a name back.

But stories cut that messy experience into a few blocks.

• departure
• an unfamiliar place
• something that must not be eaten
• losing a name
• labor
• transformation
• deception
• return

Then they tell us: this was a departure, this was a trial, and this was a return.

Of course, this is a hypothesis. I am not saying myths and folktales were assembled only inside the mind, unrelated to history or transmission. Maybe these blocks remained precisely because so many people went through similar things for so long.

The question still stays with me.

Why do we react to a story we have never seen as if we have discovered blocks we already knew?

PS. Woni's Geoje Episode

I remembered the part of Liner's review of RESCENE's AnWonjjalbu where he compares Woni to Odysseus. The review

Liner called this structure nostos: homecoming. Woni was born in Geoje, finished high school there, and left for Seoul to pursue her dream. Even after becoming an idol, Geoje remains in her dialect, her habit of talking easily to strangers, and the hands that put bait on a hook without hesitation. Then that person returns home.

When someone returns, the hometown is the same and also different. The person coming back has already changed. At this point, Liner brought up the homecoming story of The Odyssey and the question, “Where did I come from, and what kind of person am I?”

Another moment he pointed out earlier in the video connects to that. Woni enters a shop and says, “Auntie, I'm Deokyeon's daughter.” The owner comes out with dough still on her hands to welcome her. Liner called this moment the heart of the video. A piece of real life that would be difficult to stage appears between carefully planned idol images, which is why, in his reading, people felt that the idol content was “like a movie.” That part of the analysis

There are probably many reasons people loved Woni's Geoje episode. But the explanation that an old homecoming structure met an unstaged moment of real life inside one video sounded fairly convincing to me.

Writing this post brought that line back to mind.

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