“Kiki and the New Magic” by Eiko Kadono
The young witch Kiki, protagonist of Eiko Kadano’s beloved Kiki’s Delivery Service, is now fourteen years old. After a quick visit at home to see her parents, she’s returning to a life she carefully built for herself in the seaside town of Koriko, where she moved the year before. She now runs the town’s famous delivery service using her only magical skill—flying on her broom.
Kiki and the New Magic is the sequel to Kiki’s Delivery Service, a story most familiar to non-Japanese audiences via the 1989 film, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The 1985 novel, translated into English in 2020, also by Emily Balistrieri, introduced a witch who was more optimistic and persevering than her counterpart in the film that followed, a story that is more episodic, and a narrative that, while perhaps smaller in scale, is funnier and more whimsical. (Emily Balistrieri’s light-handed translation adds to the novel’s fun and magic.)
The story in Kiki and the New Magic has grown along with the novel’s protagonist. The tale still includes plenty of whimsy, including a scene of Kiki delivering a baby hippopotamus which has been charmingly illustrated by Yuta Onoda. But some of the emotional conflicts from Miyazaki’s film find a place in the sequel. Kiki feels the first stirrings of romantic attraction—and also jealousy. Fourteen-year-old Kiki also begins to encounter mortality and death. (Kadano still approaches these themes with an extremely light touch and in coded and indirect language. The middle grade fiction by Japanese author Sachiko Kashiwaba, such as Temple Alley Summer or especially The House of the Lost on the Cape, both translated in the last few years by Avery Fischer Udagawa, writes about death and grief in a more sophisticated, sometimes painful, way.)
The novel also includes some themes older English-language readers might find strikingly relevant in 2026. Although the novel is episodic, the central conflict is about Kiki’s self-image. When a child asks her to deliver a letter as a prank, Kiki realizes she might someday deliver something harmful without knowing it—that her work might contribute to wrongdoing, no matter what her intentions are. “What is my work, really?” she asks herself. She begins to lose confidence in herself and it affects her magic; soon afterward, she has an accident while flying:
It felt like the accident had been caused by the anxious feelings she’d had… That was what confused her even more. She felt as though she was missing even though she was here. How could she recapture the version of herself who was happy to be a witch?
By the end of the novel, Kiki is finally able to find herself again, along with a little new magic, by investing in the life of her community. She helps an elderly man go on a final journey. She makes a new friend. She helps another friend give away an excess crop of potatoes to the people in the town. She takes care of her neighbors when they all come down with colds. By the time Kiki’s mother, from whom she inherited witch magic, shares this advice, it seems like Kiki has already discovered the truth on her own:
Instead of worrying, observe in stillness. Look into your heart. But also at everything around you. Look closely at the invisible things, too. Then I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Kadano has written eight stories about Kiki, most recently publishing a volume in 2022, shortly after the author’s 87th birthday. The series’ third volume, Kiki and the Other Witch, is expected to debut in English in 2027.
