Hayao Miyazaki Selects His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Once upon a time, books served as the de facto refuge of the “physically weak” child. For animation legend, Hayao Miyazaki, above, they offered an escape from the grimmer realities of post-World War II Japan.

Many of the 50 favorites he selected for a 2010 exhibition honoring publisher Iwanami Shoten‘s “Boy’s Books” series are time-tested Western classics.

Loners and orphans–The Little Prince, The Secret Garden—figure prominently, as do talking animals (The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle).

And while it may be a commonly-held publishing belief that boys won’t read stories about girls, the young Miyazaki seemed to have no such bias, ranking Heidi and Laura Ingalls Wilder right alongside Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island’s pirates.

Several of the titles that made the cut were ones he could only have encountered as a grown up, including 1967’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and When Marnie Was There, the latter eventually serving as source material for a Studio Ghibli movie, as did Miyazaki’s top pick, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.

We invite you to take a nostalgic stroll through Miyazaki’s best-loved children’s books. Readers, how many have you read?

Hayao Miyazaki’s Top 50 Children’s Books

The Borrowers — Mary Norton
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Children of Noisy Village — Astrid Lindgren
When Marnie Was There — Joan G. Robinson
Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome
The Flying Classroom — Erich Kästner
There Were Five of Us — Karel Poláček
What the Neighbours Did, and Other Stories — Ann Philippa Pearce
Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates — Mary Mapes Dodge
The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett
Eagle of The Ninth — Rosemary Sutcliff
The Treasure of the Nibelungs — Gustav Schalk
The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas, père
A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin
Les Princes du Vent — Michel-Aime Baudouy
The Flambards Series — K. M. Peyton
Souvenirs entomologiques — Jean Henri Fabre
The Long Winter — Laura Ingalls Wilder
A Norwegian Farm — Marie Hamsun
Heidi — Johanna Spyri
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain
Little Lord Fauntleroy — Frances Hodgson Burnett
Tistou of the Green Thumbs — Maurice Druon
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler — E. L. Konigsburg
The Otterbury Incident — Cecil Day-Lewis
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
The Little Bookroom — Eleanor Farjeon
The Forest is Alive or Twelve Months — Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak
The Restaurant of Many Orders — Kenji Miyazawa
Winnie-the-Pooh — A. A. Milne
Nihon Ryōiki — Kyokai
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio — Pu Songling
Nine Fairy Tales: And One More Thrown in For Good Measure — Karel Čapek
The Man Who Has Planted Welsh Onions — Kim So-un
Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
The Hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien
Journey to the West — Wu Cheng’en
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne
The Adventures of the Little Onion — Gianni Rodari
Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ship that Flew — Hilda Winifred Lewis
The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame
The Little Humpbacked Horse — Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov (Ershoff)
The Little White Horse — Elizabeth Goudge
The Rose and the Ring — William Makepeace Thackeray
The Radium Woman — Eleanor Doorly
City Neighbor, The Story of Jane Addams — Clara Ingram Judson
Ivan the Fool — Leo Tolstoy
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle — Hugh Lofting

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.