Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man

An account of Alpert's time at Studio Ghibli, where he was hired to manage overseas sales and distribution, and where he was the only non-Japanese member of staff.

It covers the negotiation of the Disney distribution deal, the international release of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, and a great deal of day-to-day working life.

Fifteen years as the only foreigner in the building, selling the films to people who wanted to cut them.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The negotiation with Disney over international rights is the book's central business narrative, including the famous insistence that no cuts be made to Princess Mononoke.

Alpert was in the room. The account of how that condition was secured and enforced is the most substantial first-hand record available.

The portrait is affectionate, funny and unsparing: demanding, changeable, prone to sudden enthusiasms, and extremely difficult to work for.

Alpert likes him and does not pretend he is easy, which makes the book considerably more informative than an admiring account would be. He is also shown redrawing other people's work without discussion and changing decisions late, which Alpert presents as simply how the studio operated.

Producer Toshio Suzuki emerges as the studio's actual operating intelligence, managing Miyazaki, the finances and the press with considerable skill.

The book is among the few English sources that gives Suzuki his due, and his handling of situations that appear impossible is a recurring pleasure.

Alpert is candid about his position: the assumptions made about him, the things he was not told, and the specific difficulty of being the person who represents abroad an institution that does not entirely trust abroad.

The material is observant rather than aggrieved, and it is useful about Japanese corporate culture generally.

Distribution agreements, festival strategy, dubbing decisions, and the mechanics of releasing a Japanese animated film into Western markets are covered concretely.

For readers interested in how films actually reach audiences, this is unusually specific material from someone who did the work. He also explains why certain territories were handled differently and why some deals that looked good on paper were refused, which is the kind of reasoning rarely committed to print.

It is consistently funny, frequently at Alpert's own expense, and the comic register does not diminish the seriousness of the business account.

The anecdotes about travel, translation failures and award ceremonies are the most quoted parts of the book. Alpert is also consistently self-deprecating about his own Japanese, his own mistakes and his own status in a company that did not quite know what to do with him.

The account of Spirited Away's Academy Award, including Miyazaki's decision not to attend and the reasons for it, is documented from the inside.

The political context of that decision is explained clearly and is frequently misreported elsewhere. Alpert attended in his place, and the account of what that involved, and of the reaction in Tokyo, is one of the book's better sustained anecdotes.

It is a memoir rather than a history, and Alpert's perspective is necessarily partial and centred on distribution rather than production.

Readers wanting to know how the films were made will find relatively little, since Alpert was not in the animation side of the building.

It is short and reads quickly, organised as loosely connected episodes rather than as a continuous narrative.

The looseness suits the material. Several chapters work as standalone anecdotes, and the book does not pretend to a shape it does not have. Readers can also read individual chapters without the surrounding context, which suits a book likely to be picked up by people interested in one particular episode.

Very little writing exists in English about Ghibli's business operations from someone who was inside them, and this fills a genuine gap.

Its combination of specificity and readability makes it more useful than its modest presentation suggests. It is also written without any apparent obligation to the studio, which is unusual for a memoir by a former employee of a company still operating.

Readers interested in the Ghibli films who want to know how they reached international audiences, and readers curious about working inside a Japanese company as an outsider.

It is light, informative and entirely accessible, and it requires no knowledge beyond having seen a couple of the films.