It’s time for Kiki to wave goodbye to her parents and friends and begin her training to become a witch! She ventures south on her broom with her black cat, Jiji, and finds a town by the sea that looks gorgeous, seems busy enough to satisfy her desire for activity, and has no witch already residing there. The problem? The town has various views on what witches are — and not all positive! How will Kiki manage to carve her path on her own while dealing with this?
Well, if you’ve seen the film then yes you know Kiki ends up finding her footing eventually. However, if you come into Eiko Kadono’s novel thinking it’s quite like the film, you’ll get a nice dose of shock after the first couple chapters!
This is not to say the core tenets seen in the Ghibli film aren’t in this novel. There’s Kiki and Jiji, with Kiki in her iconic black dress and flying her broom, roaming around making deliveries. The town she goes to — Koriko — hasn’t changed much, and neither does how Kiki end up meeting Osono, the lady who runs the bakery. Even her first official delivery doesn’t exactly change either: she is tasked to deliver a cat toy to a boy, the toy gets lost in the forest, Jiji has to stand in, and from there you know from the film what occurs.
But you’ll soon understand the liberties Miyazaki and Ghibli took in record time while conversely seeing Eiko Kadono’s original vision. You’ll find out with the one change that happens with Osono, but when you get to Kiki’s first service job, the fashion designer she meets seems to have a different personality than the one in the film; when making her first delivery it was Jiji being a brat that leads to their first gaffe. And hey, didn’t Kiki arrive to Koriko via train? Wasn’t there an officer reprimanding Kiki when she arrives in town? Not in this novel! So this also means Tombo isn’t even seen in these first couple chapters!
…But when we do see him he still is an Aviation Club member so…
Point is, when reading it you will be fascinated at what ultimately was adapted to the screen. And after finishing the novel, three thoughts came into my head:
- Wow there’s so much I’d love to see animated!
- The novel is really great!
- The anime is really great!
Not to spend too much time on this, but chances are you will be surprised at the amount of changes between these two works and yet be enchanted by them anyways. Despite slight personality changes, the core of Kiki still remains — she’s a young girl who aims to make it on her own and has to grow up really fast. You’ll naturally have things from a work that won’t make it in an adaptation. Knowing that though, it’s still impressive that the film was fantastic despite all the changes.
Now, what the novel focuses on is what you might imagine: Kiki and Jiji aim to find a place to grow and call home. They are met with slight disdain from the townspeople that affect Kiki’s confidence. But after delivering a pacifier to Osono’s customer, this begins Kiki finding her one skill, and the launch of her business…which gets no customers. However, a couple of things happen along the way that eventually allows her business to start getting more traffic.
But it’s thanks to that and the type of deliveries she makes that eventually irritate her. As you would expect though, she manages to overcome this…and it might be thanks to a handywoman who washes laundry?
So yes, you’ll read 11 chapters where Kiki experiences a number of things. You’ll see her joining everyone else at the beach; actually “ringing” in the New Year; delivering a belly band from an old lady who has assortments of belly bands; racing after a train and retrieving instruments for some “professional” musicians so they can perform in the cold. Yep, the stories in these range from “what” to just plain comical. And all of it is highly entertaining. In novel form we get to see not only how Kiki overcomes adjusting to unfamiliar situations, but how she interacts with the cast of characters in Koriko.
There are a couple of illustrations throughout that enhance things, but overall the sentences in the novel are clear and engaging. After finishing it, it only made me realize how much anyone can take a shine to what Kiki experiences. Will say, whether you have to — let’s get this right — deliver a pen and poem to a boy from a girl who doesn’t want her name on either and is a block away from said boy (!?!?) to delivering a doctor’s forgotten stethoscope is something a little bit out of the ordinary though!
While it might take an adjustment, Kiki’s Delivery Service in novel form is as lovely as it is in film form. Knowing there’s still more of Kiki out there intrigues me, and I can only hope more can be released down the road.