What did you love about Spirited Away?
Howl's Moving Castle
Howl's Moving Castle gives you another girl who has to claim her power by refusing the identity others force on her.
Piranesi
Piranesi traps you inside another vast, mysterious place with rituals you have to learn to survive.
The House in the Cerulean Sea
The House in the Cerulean Sea treats every strange creature with the same gentle curiosity Chihiro shows the spirits.
6 books like Spirited Away
- Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones — If you loved Spirited Away, you may already know that Miyazaki adapted this novel into another maste…
- The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune — If you loved Spirited Away's warmth — the way even its monsters are treated with compassion — this n…
- The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh — If you loved Spirited Away's spirit world — its bathhouses and river gods — this novel draws directl…
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — If you loved Spirited Away's sense of wandering through an impossible, self-contained world with its…
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly — If you loved Spirited Away's darker undertones — the way Miyazaki never shies from fear even in a ch…
- Uprooted by Naomi Novik — If you loved Spirited Away's vision of the natural world as a powerful, morally complex force, Uproo…
Picked for the feeling of Spirited Away, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One movie isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
Spirited Away is the rare film that feels like a dream you do not want to wake from — a world where bathhouses serve gods, rivers have names and memories, and a ten-year-old girl finds courage she did not know she had. These books capture that same quality of enchantment laced with real emotional stakes, stories where enchanted worlds are not escapes from growing up but the means through which it happens.
Howl's Moving Castle
If you loved Spirited Away, you may already know that Miyazaki adapted this novel into another masterpiece. A young woman cursed into an old body moves into a wizard's walking castle, and the novel shares Spirited Away's central insight: that enchantment reveals who you really are when everything familiar is stripped away.
Read it with your book club →
The House in the Cerulean Sea
If you loved Spirited Away's warmth — the way even its monsters are treated with compassion — this novel radiates the same generous spirit. A lonely caseworker is sent to evaluate an orphanage of children with strange gifts, and what follows has the same quality of discovering a hidden world that makes you more human for having entered it.
Read it with your book club →
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea
If you loved Spirited Away's spirit world — its bathhouses and river gods — this novel draws directly from that same well of Korean mythology. A girl offers herself to the Sea God and enters a spirit realm of shifting loyalties, with the same atmosphere of wonder and danger.
Read it with your book club →
Piranesi
If you loved Spirited Away's sense of wandering through an impossible, self-contained world with its own rules, Piranesi delivers that same experience. A man lives in a vast house of infinite halls, tidal oceans, and silent statues, and like Chihiro, he must piece together who he was — a mystery that unfolds with gentle, astonishing inevitability.
Read it with your book club →
The Book of Lost Things
If you loved Spirited Away's darker undertones — the way Miyazaki never shies from fear even in a children's story — Connolly's novel walks the same line. A grieving boy enters a world where fairy tales have turned dangerous, and his way home is as much about loss as Chihiro's is about growing up.
Read it with your book club →
Uprooted
If you loved Spirited Away's vision of the natural world as a powerful, morally complex force, Uprooted shares that same ecological imagination. A girl discovers that the corrupted forest threatening her village is not simply evil but wounded, and like Miyazaki, Novik refuses to reduce nature to a villain.
Read it with your book club →Is Spirited Away based on a book?
Spirited Away isn’t based on a book — it’s an original story by Hayao Miyazaki.
What should I read if I loved Spirited Away?
Start with Howl's Moving Castle, The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea. 6 books on this page were picked for the feeling of Spirited Away, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like Spirited Away?
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. If you loved Spirited Away, you may already know that Miyazaki adapted this novel into another masterpiece.
These are for everyone who loved Spirited Away. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved Spirited Away and The Greatest Showman reads different books from someone who loved Spirited Away and Hidden Figures. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — Spirited Away already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.