21 Princess Mononoke Quotes in Japanese and English, Explained

Ashitaka says this after showing Lady Eboshi the iron bullet he found inside Nago and being asked what he intends to do after learning its secret.

Strictly speaking, it does not really answer her question.

Nevertheless, it has become one of the most famous lines in Princess Mononoke.

One important detail is that the phrase “eyes unclouded” is not originally Ashitaka’s own language.

It is something Hii-sama tells him before he leaves his village.

There are several ways to interpret that fact.

During Ashitaka’s long journey westward, Hii-sama’s instruction may have been his only real source of guidance. Even though she was the person who effectively sentenced him to exile, he continues to trust her.

That suggests just how deeply respected she must have been within the Emishi community.

There is also a slightly less flattering interpretation.

Even at this stage of the story, Ashitaka is still using someone else’s words to explain what he intends to do.

In that sense, the famous line may also reveal his immaturity.

He has not yet developed the language with which to describe his own answer to the conflict.

The English translation is remarkably direct.

The Japanese kumori naki manako literally means something close to “eyes without cloudiness,” and both the subtitle and dub use the elegant phrase “eyes unclouded.”

The word manako is itself somewhat literary, making the elevated English phrasing especially appropriate.

Ashitaka says this after carrying San out of Irontown while barely remaining conscious from the gunshot wound he has suffered.

San confronts him, and at the point where he is almost collapsing, he tells her to live because she is beautiful.

This is also the moment when the famous promotional word ikiro—“Live”—finally appears in the film.

At first glance, it is an undeniably powerful scene.

Yet from a modern perspective, it has also become one of the film’s most famous “Wait… what exactly does that mean?” moments.

The obvious joke is that if “You’re beautiful, so live” is true, does the reverse implication become “If you’re ugly, die”?

Or does Ashitaka’s motivation ultimately come down to San’s appearance?

I do not think that is what he means.

Most importantly, Ashitaka does not seem to treat beauty as some objective admission requirement for deserving life.

If anything, he is a character who seems unusually willing to find something worth admiring in almost everyone he meets.

There is another important point.

Ashitaka is basically the only person in the entire film who describes San as beautiful.

Moro calls her beloved daughter, but of course she is San’s mother.

If we view Princess Mononoke as a story filtered partly through Ashitaka’s subjective perception, it is even possible that San is not supposed to be objectively beautiful at all.

She is beautiful because Ashitaka sees her that way.

That is considerably more romantic.

Let us give the man that much.

The English expression itself is essentially unavoidable. The Japanese sonata is an old-fashioned second-person pronoun, which adds a slight archaic dignity that the plain English “you” cannot reproduce.

Ashitaka says this during his confrontation with Moro.

Along with “Live… you’re beautiful,” it is probably one of his defining lines.

From Moro’s perspective, however, this must be an incredibly frustrating thing to hear.

Her internal response was probably something close to:

“Do you think I haven’t known that for years? If simply releasing her solved everything, none of us would have suffered this much.”

This tendency to present someone with an unquestionably correct principle without necessarily appreciating the impossible reality beneath it is one of Ashitaka’s characteristic behaviors throughout the film.

He is right.

San is human.

But Moro’s entire speech immediately afterward exists to explain why that fact does not provide an easy solution.

The English subtitle is completely straightforward.

The dub expands the distinction:

“You must set her free! She’s not a wolf. She’s a human.”

By explicitly adding “She’s not a wolf,” the dub makes the identity conflict even more direct than the Japanese.

Ashitaka says this to one of the wolves after San has nursed him back to health and the wolf has escorted him away from the forest.

This scene rivals “Live… you’re beautiful” as one of the great uncomfortable moments of Princess Mononoke.

At the beginning of the story, Kaya gives Ashitaka her precious crystal dagger during their deeply emotional farewell.

Ashitaka then calmly gives that exact dagger to San.

I first saw the film in elementary school, and even then I remember thinking:

“Wait… you’re giving it away?”

To make matters even more awkward, San receives the dagger, thinks it is beautiful, and happily wears it.

San! That was remarkably easy!

The scene continues to generate debate, but as I have grown older, I have actually become much more sympathetic to it.

I explore the reasons in detail here:

Princess Mononoke (1997): Why Did Ashitaka Give Kaya's Dagger to San? A Psychological Analysis

This article is an analysis of why Ashitaka gives Kaya's dagger to S...

Seen as an object that emotionally supported Ashitaka after his exile, the dagger can be interpreted not simply as a romantic gift from Kaya but as something that helped him survive the worst period of his life.

Passing it to San may therefore mean that Ashitaka no longer needs that emotional anchor and wants its protective meaning to pass to her.

That interpretation does not eliminate every awkward question.

But these days I can at least watch the scene and think:

“You know what? Maybe this is actually rather beautiful.”

There is nothing especially unusual in the English wording. The dub is also very similar.

This is Ashitaka’s final line in Princess Mononoke.

It sounds extraordinarily romantic.

It also marks the beginning of what will probably be an extraordinarily difficult life.

Miyazaki himself has discussed the basic problem in various contexts.

After the ending, Ashitaka will effectively live between San and Irontown.

If he fully accepts San’s demands, Irontown cannot function.

If he fully accepts the needs of Irontown, he will inevitably come into conflict with San.

That sounds exhausting.

But compared with being expelled forever from his homeland while waiting for a curse to kill him, it is still an enormous improvement.

San is there too.

Ashitaka will manage.

There is another meaning in the line that interests me even more.

The forest and the mountain have become places that Ashitaka can “go to.”

That sounds completely normal to us today.

But within the world of the film, it represents an enormous historical shift.

The sacred forest is no longer simply an overwhelming divine realm beyond human control. It has become a place separated from human settlement—a place one may visit.

I explore that transformation, together with the meaning of killing the Forest Spirit, here:

Princess Mononoke (1997): The True Meaning of the Forest Spirit and the Trauma of "Deicide"

This article is an in-depth analysis of "Princess Mononoke," focusin...

Considering the film’s Muromachi-period setting, I do not think that interpretation is entirely excessive.

The dub expands Ashitaka’s practical plan:

“You’ll live in the forest and I’ll go help them rebuild Irontown. I’ll always be near. Yakul and I will come and visit you whenever we can.”

The basic meaning is the same, although the subtitle’s “Together, we’ll live” preserves the Japanese tomo ni ikiyō more beautifully.

San says this after the Forest Spirit heals Ashitaka’s gunshot wound.

It sounds like a simple explanation.

But I cannot help feeling that San is hiding something about her own emotions.

In other words, perhaps she is already beginning to fall in love with Ashitaka.

The previous night, she had clearly been thrown off balance by his “Live… you’re beautiful” declaration.

If that sentence alone was enough to make her fall for him, one might say that San is a little too easy.

On the other hand, it may very well have been the first time in her entire life that anyone had ever told her she was beautiful.

Some people go through their whole lives without hearing that.

Perhaps we should not be too harsh.

There is also very little else in the story that could serve as the decisive moment when San begins viewing Ashitaka romantically.

But because San defines herself through opposition to humanity, she cannot simply admit that she personally wants to save a human boy.

So she places the decision on the Forest Spirit.

If the god chooses to let him live, she can help him.

The next morning, the Forest Spirit has indeed saved him.

San wins her little emotional bet and immediately begins insulting him again.

I choose to believe that is what happened.

The English sentence is direct and preserves the logic of the Japanese very well.

After Lady Eboshi shoots off the Forest Spirit’s head and the Night-Walker begins its catastrophic rampage, Ashitaka tries to save the badly wounded Eboshi.

San screams that she hates humans.

Ashitaka responds:

“You are human too.”

San answers:

“I’m a wolf!”

This is personally the line that strikes me hardest in the entire film.

I am not sure that “favorite” is even the correct word for it.

San has spent her whole life trying harder than anyone to become a wolf while simultaneously suffering more than anyone from the reality that she is human.

This line is the scream produced by that contradiction.

I do not think anything more needs to be added.

The Japanese uses yamainu, literally “mountain dog,” an old Japanese term associated with wolves.

The English naturally chooses the much simpler “wolf.”

San says this to Ashitaka from the back of a wolf near the end of the film.

At the very end of the story, she finally says something openly affectionate about a human being.

Throughout Princess Mononoke, San has suffered between two identities:

the identity she desperately wants—being a wolf—and the knowledge that she is biologically human.

In order to protect the former identity, she directs an almost excessive hatred toward humanity.

That hatred may even be deeper than Moro’s.

After all, San was abandoned by her human parents.

Yet there is no law saying that she must be either entirely “wolf” or entirely “human.”

She does not need to choose one identity and destroy the other.

After the film ends, I hope San gradually realizes that she can simply be San.

Ashitaka will probably be extremely important in helping her reach that point.

During the film, San becomes a kind of salvation for Ashitaka.

After the film, perhaps Ashitaka will become the same thing for San.

Or rather, I sincerely hope so.

The dub changes the direct “I love you” into:

“Ashitaka, you mean so much to me, but I can’t forgive the humans.”

“You mean so much to me” means that someone is extremely important or precious to you.

It is emotionally softer than “I love you,” but it also avoids forcing the Japanese suki into only one possible English category.

Lady Eboshi says this after Ashitaka places himself between her and San and shouts that they must not surrender themselves to hatred.

If there is one line that defines Eboshi’s voice, this may be it.

The fact that she can produce such a brutally precise insult in the middle of an emergency is magnificent.

More importantly, this is one of the rare moments in the film when the normally controlled Eboshi appears genuinely emotional.

In other words, Ashitaka really irritated her at that exact moment.

Ashitaka has just revealed his terrible curse to the people of Irontown and then, while displaying the physical proof of his suffering, delivers a morally righteous speech about refusing hatred.

It looks heroic.

Eboshi hates it.

If we try to imagine why, her thoughts may have been something like this:

Another way of saying it is that Ashitaka’s almost painfully fresh idealism briefly makes her jealous.

The Japanese is much more complex than the subtitle.

Sakashira suggests cleverness, knowingness, or self-satisfied wisdom.

Wazukana fuun literally means a “small misfortune.”

Eboshi is therefore dismissing Ashitaka’s fatal curse as merely a minor piece of bad luck that he is showing off while acting morally superior.

The English subtitle simplifies the entire insult to:

“Enough talk of your curse.”

The dub uses essentially the same idea:

“I’m getting a little bored of this curse of yours, Ashitaka. Let me just cut it down.”

The English loses much of the extraordinary cruelty of wazukana fuun, but preserving the whole Japanese nuance in a subtitle would be extremely difficult.

Ashitaka reaches Eboshi in the Forest Spirit’s woods and tells her that Irontown is under attack and desperately needs her.

Eboshi responds with this wonderfully sarcastic line.

But the line also exposes the central contradiction in her position.

Irontown is more than an ironworks to Eboshi.

It is the foundation of her attempt to overturn the social world that once abused and discarded people like her and the women she rescued.

Yet she does not possess enough political or military power to protect that project permanently.

That is why she enters into an arrangement with the Imperial Court and pursues the head of the Forest Spirit.

I explore that interpretation in detail here:

Princess Mononoke (1997): Lady Eboshi's Dark Past and the Doomed Fate of Irontown

Explore the true motives of Lady Eboshi in "Princess Mononoke." Why ...

The strange result is that Eboshi is trying to secure her future by killing a god who never personally harmed her while refusing to abandon that mission to fight the samurai who are actually attacking her people.

She is aware of the absurdity.

But the situation has moved beyond the point where any individual can simply stop it.

In that sense, this short exchange shows how nearly everyone in Princess Mononoke has become a prisoner of circumstances.

The subtitle is almost completely direct.

The dub says:

“So, it’s don’t kill the forest gods. Now you want us to kill samurai instead.”

This is Lady Eboshi’s final line in Princess Mononoke.

She speaks with an expression that seems almost relieved, yet her voice remains powerful.

It sounds extremely optimistic.

But it can also be interpreted as the moment Lady Eboshi announces the death of her original ambition.

Her dream of creating an entirely new political order has collapsed.

Now she will begin again with a different goal.

That may be healthier.

But there is also something sad about it.

Throughout Princess Mononoke, almost every major character or faction acts according to some enormous desire.

Yet nobody receives exactly what they wanted.

Nobody receives an ideal present.

And yet they continue living.

Perhaps that is ultimately one of the most important messages in the film:

Even after losing the world you wanted, you still have to live in the world that remains.

The dub is similar:

“We’re going to start all over again. This time, we’ll build a better town.”

Interestingly, “better town” subtly suggests not merely reconstruction but improvement—an acknowledgment that the original Irontown itself contained serious problems.

Moro says this after the boars arrive to protect the Forest Spirit’s woods and angrily complain that the god did not save Nago.

Okkoto appears soon afterward, and Moro describes him as someone with whom she can at least have a conversation.

That suggests Okkoto understands the point she is making.

And if that is true, I cannot help thinking that Okkoto and the other boars may have come to the forest for slightly different reasons.

The younger boars seem to believe they can fight humanity, defend the forest, and perhaps regain the favor of the Forest Spirit.

After Moro’s statement, they even complain that the wolf clan may somehow be monopolizing the god’s protection.

The hope beneath that accusation is obvious:

“If we win this war, perhaps the Forest Spirit will support us again.”

But that is not how the Forest Spirit works.

Whether the boars win or lose changes nothing about the god’s nature.

Okkoto seems to understand that already.

That makes me wonder whether he has actually come to protect the forest at all.

Perhaps he has come looking for an honorable place to die.

Victory may no longer matter very much to him.

Perhaps death in a final magnificent battle would even be preferable.

Nago may have entered his own final battle with similar feelings.

But he failed to achieve an honorable death. Instead, he fled in agony, became a Tatarigami, and died far away in Ashitaka’s village.

In that sense, perhaps the Okkoto we see in the film is also a representation of the part of Nago’s story that we never witnessed.

Of course, “an honorable death” sounds easy when turned into words.

When death actually approaches, fear takes over. We run. We cling to anything that might save us.

Moro, who ultimately accepts her approaching death with extraordinary calm, may simply be exceptional.

The subtitle removes Moro’s final insult toward the boars, focusing entirely on the theological statement.

The dub uses:

“The Forest Spirit gives life and takes it away.”

Moro responds with this speech after Ashitaka tells her:

“Set her free. She’s human.”

“Silence, boy!” has become an extraordinarily famous phrase in Japan. It is still occasionally used jokingly in everyday conversation.

I have certainly used it.

But everything that follows “Silence, boy!” is what makes this one of the greatest speeches in the film.

The line:

“She is neither human nor wolf.”

identifies the suffering that San herself can never properly articulate.

Moro understands it completely.

That is why this scene reveals, more than almost any other, that Moro is not merely San’s guardian.

She is, in the deepest and saddest sense, San’s mother.

The English choice “Silence, boy!” is especially good.

A normal contemporary translation might be “Shut up, kid!”

But placing “Silence” at the beginning gives Moro an elevated, almost royal presence.

The dub is also worth quoting:

“Silence, boy! I caught her human parents defiling my forest. They threw their baby at my feet as they ran away. Now my poor, ugly, beautiful daughter is neither human nor wolf. How could you help her?”

The word “defile” means to pollute, desecrate, or violate something regarded as pure or sacred.

The contrast of “poor, ugly, beautiful daughter” also preserves the deeply contradictory tenderness of Moro’s Japanese wording remarkably well.

Toki says this when her husband finally returns to Irontown after everyone feared that he had been killed during the wolf attack.

Thanks partly to Sumi Shimamoto’s performance, it is immediately obvious that the insult is really relief turned inside out.

But the line performs another important function.

In one sentence, it tells us a great deal about the relationship between men and women inside Irontown.

We already know that Irontown’s leader is a woman.

Toki’s attitude makes it equally clear that this confidence extends throughout the female workforce.

The women who operate the bellows perform extraordinarily hard physical labor, but that work also gives them economic importance and social power.

They are not working simply because the men have ordered them to do everything.

It is a tiny line, but it shapes our impression of Irontown immediately.

The interesting English point is “Then I could…”

Her husband was not eaten by wolves, so the imagined consequence—finding another man—also did not happen.

The sentence therefore describes an unreal past possibility.

The dub makes the counterfactual structure explicit:

“I wish the wolves had eaten you. Then maybe I could have found a real husband.”

That is a textbook example of the past perfect inside an unreal past condition.

This does not look like an especially memorable line on paper.

But the production documentary How Princess Mononoke Was Born reveals that Sumi Shimamoto had considerable difficulty finding the correct tone.

The problem was that her performance naturally sounded too kind and welcoming toward Ashitaka.

When we think carefully about the situation, Ashitaka has simply walked into an extremely demanding workplace and begun inserting himself into the women’s established routine.

For people performing brutal labor according to a precise rhythm, he is basically an obstacle.

Toki would probably prefer him to leave.

But Ashitaka saved her husband, so she cannot simply treat him coldly. Her solution is to let him try the bellows and thereby move him through the situation as quickly as possible.

This is typical of Princess Mononoke.

The characters’ visible behavior is constantly accompanied by an interior motive that is slightly different from what appears on the surface.

The subtitle changes the meaning slightly toward:

“Let him experience what this is like.”

The dub says:

“It’s okay. Might as well let him try.”

The real question is whether English-speaking viewers can hear the hidden message:

“You are actually in the way.”

Jigo says this after Ashitaka gives him the iron bullet and explains that it came from a giant boar who had been mortally wounded.

By this stage, Jigo has probably already understood far more than he reveals.

Yet he gives Ashitaka only one important piece of information:

the Forest Spirit’s woods.

He responds directly to the phrase “giant boar” while carefully avoiding discussion of the bullet itself.

His internal calculation seems obvious:

“You saved my life, so I owe you some information. But I am not going to tell you anything that interferes with my own job.”

That single exchange is enough to establish that Jigo is exactly as slippery as he looks.

Still, giving Ashitaka the Forest Spirit as a destination is enormously important.

Without Jigo, Ashitaka might never have reached Irontown at all.

In that sense, Jigo may be one of the greatest accidental benefactors in Ashitaka’s entire story.

The most interesting English construction is:

“Deep in the mountains… is a forest where none may tread.”

The normal order would be:

“A forest where none may tread is deep in the mountains.”

But English sometimes places an expression of location first and inverts the subject and verb, especially when the subject is long or when the writer wants to create a dramatic sense of revelation.

The famous phrase “Here comes the sun” uses a related structure.

In this scene, the inversion gives the Forest Spirit’s woods an appropriately legendary quality.

Nago says this at the moment of his death after attacking Ashitaka’s village as a Tatarigami.

One of the themes running throughout Princess Mononoke is the control—or failure to control—hatred.

Nago’s final words express something fundamental about hatred before the story has properly even begun.

As Eboshi later explains, the people Nago originally had reason to hate were Eboshi herself and the inhabitants of Irontown.

Yet after becoming a Tatarigami, Nago does not return to Irontown.

He runs east and attacks an Emishi village whose inhabitants had absolutely nothing to do with his suffering.

Then he curses them with this final declaration.

Hatred expands.

It does not necessarily remain focused on the person who caused the original injury.

It spills outward onto strangers and then onto entire groups associated with the original enemy.

Someone is harmed by one person from another country, and soon they begin hating everyone from that country.

Nago demonstrates exactly that mechanism.

I explore the Tatarigami as a physical embodiment of hatred and irrational calamity here:

Princess Mononoke (1997): What Was the Tatarigami (Demon)? - Hatred as an Absurd Calamity

This article analyzes the Tatarigami from "Princess Mononoke." It ex...

Of course, saying “That is simply the nature of hatred” cannot be the conclusion.

If we accept every destructive instinct simply because it is natural, there is little meaning in trying to live intelligently.

Ashitaka spends the entire film fighting against precisely that expansion of hatred.

Humanity has not won that battle yet.

Somewhere today, someone still hates someone else.

Perhaps that battle has no ending.

The English vocabulary is appropriately severe.

“Loathsome” means deeply disgusting or hateful.

“Agony” means extreme physical or emotional suffering.

“Hatred” means intense hate.

The dub uses more ordinary words:

“Disgusting little creatures. Soon all of you will feel my hate and suffer as I have suffered.”

Kaya says this after giving Ashitaka the crystal dagger as he prepares to leave his homeland forever.

Up until the moment Ashitaka later gives that dagger to San, this is an extraordinarily moving farewell scene.

I saw Princess Mononoke for the first time when I was in elementary school, and even then the later handoff produced an immediate:

“Wait… he’s giving that away?”

I now have considerably more sympathy for the scene, and I explore the dagger problem in detail here:

Princess Mononoke (1997): Why Did Ashitaka Give Kaya's Dagger to San? A Psychological Analysis

This article is an analysis of why Ashitaka gives Kaya's dagger to S...

The interesting English phrase in Kaya’s subtitle is “without fail.”

It means certainly, reliably, or without exception.

The dub changes the emotional direction rather dramatically.

Instead of Kaya promising that she will never forget Ashitaka, she asks him not to forget her:

“You must take it with you, please. I want you to have it so you won’t… forget.”

Those two emotional gestures are not quite the same.

The Japanese is Kaya making a promise about her own heart.

The dub makes it a request concerning Ashitaka’s.

One of the sick men says this jokingly after Eboshi asks them to make the firearms lighter.

It is delivered as humor.

I nevertheless think Eboshi’s intention to pursue something like kunikuzushi—literally “bringing down the country”—was very real.

That larger ambition helps explain why she forms a secret agreement with representatives of the Imperial Court and agrees to participate in the Forest Spirit hunt.

I explore her political goal in detail here:

Princess Mononoke (1997): Lady Eboshi's Dark Past and the Doomed Fate of Irontown

Explore the true motives of Lady Eboshi in "Princess Mononoke." Why ...

Why would Eboshi want to overthrow the established order?

Given the world from which she and many of Irontown’s women appear to have escaped, that question may be central to understanding her entire character.

The subtitle translates kunikuzushi as “rule the country.”

That conveys political ambition, although the Japanese has a more explicitly disruptive sense: bringing down, overturning, or destroying the existing order.

The elder says this inside Eboshi’s hidden garden when Ashitaka’s cursed arm begins trying to draw his sword against her.

This line may explain more clearly than anything else why Irontown remains so united around Lady Eboshi.

Almost everyone there probably feels some variation of the same gratitude.

That is why the women continue enduring the brutal work of operating the bellows.

It is why the cattlemen do not immediately turn against Eboshi even after she leaves fallen men behind during Moro’s attack.

Irontown is the final refuge of people who had nowhere else to go.

Eboshi did not merely employ them.

She recognized them as people when the surrounding society did not.

Eventually, Ashitaka himself becomes another person who has lost his original home and makes Irontown his new place in the world.

The English translation is direct and particularly effective.

“I beg you” is stronger than simply “please.” It expresses a desperate plea.

The boars scream this after arriving in the Forest Spirit’s woods and learning that the god saved Ashitaka.

From their perspective, it is a perfectly reasonable question.

Why save a human while allowing Nago, one of the forest’s great gods, to die?

Yet the very fact that the Forest Spirit saves Ashitaka reveals something fundamental.

To the Forest Spirit, the categories that dominate everyone else’s thinking may be completely irrelevant.

Human.

Boar.

Wolf.

Forest creature.

Enemy.

Ally.

The Forest Spirit does not appear to operate according to any of those political categories.

That is an extremely painful reality for the boars, who have crossed the sea to fight and die for what they regard as the god’s forest.

But perhaps a god, in the deepest sense, should be exactly that indifferent to our factional expectations.

The subtitle gives only the first half of the Japanese line:

“Why did he not save Nago?”

The dub uses the slightly more conversational:

“Why didn’t he save him?”

The meaning is essentially identical.