If you weren't told that Sachiko Kashiwaba's 1975 middle-grade novel was the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, you wouldn't know. It's an even less obvious connection than How Do You Live?'s link to The Boy and the Heron, which perhaps says something interesting about how Miyazaki chooses to adapt texts; his films based on western novels (When Marnie Was There, The Secret World of Arrietty, Howl's Moving Castle) hew much closer to their sources than those based on Japanese texts. Perhaps it's a question of his intended audience's familiarity with the works. But whatever the motivation behind his adaptive choices, The Village Beyond the Mist is a beautiful example of late twentieth-century children's fantasy, pulling readers into a strange but familiar world alongside its heroine.

Protagonist Lina is a sixth grader, and her journey to Misty Valley isn't her first solo trip. She's been going to see her grandmother over the summer for some time, but this year her father hands her a clown umbrella and tells her that she's going to stay with an old acquaintance of his in a distant town. Lina loves the umbrella, but she's not so sure about the trip – especially since when she reaches the end of the train line, the people in the small town tell her that they've never heard of “Misty Valley.” They instead give her directions to a rapidly declining town built around a dried-up silver mine, and they tell her that if she gets there and it's a ghost town, she can come back.

It's a fairly classic setup, and one that Kashiwaba uses well. The town of Misty Valley does, in fact, exist, but it can only be reached with an invitation – and that's what the clown umbrella is. When Lina reaches the village, she's struck by how picturesque yet uncanny it is, like an entire European hamlet that has just emerged from the fog and the forest. The person she's been sent to meet, Ms. Picotto, is recognizable as a Yubaba figure, although she's much less frightening. She's stern and she demands that everyone in town earn their keep, especially those living in her boarding house. To that end, the bewildered Lina will spend each week of her vacation working for a different shop in town – the bookstore, the nautical supply shop, the ceramics store, and the toy store. At each shop, she learns something new about herself and her place in the world.

While this could easily have been a preachy book about what good children are supposed to do (although that's more the 1950s' bag), instead it unfolds organically. At the bookstore, Lina learns to sort, organize, and appreciate. At the nautical supply shop, she learns to clean and respect others. At the ceramics store, she learns to help others. And at the toy store, she learns to read between the lines to help people, with all four sets of skills helping her to grow from the scared and mildly sullen girl she was on page one to a person more comfortable in the world and her own skin. Each experience builds on the last, and even Ms. Picotto's acerbic nature becomes something that Lina can understand – at least, a little bit.

One of the major strengths of the book is the way that Kashiwaba describes the mystical village. It's not quite a Brigadoon, but it has a lot of qualities of a world out of time. Although living in the village requires an invitation or magical heritage, people can visit it without that – provided it has something they need. So a sailor looking for his lost lantern can find the village because that's where it ended up, and an exam student drowning in stress can find it because it has a book that will save his sanity. They don't climb the mountain like Lina did, however; they simply see the requisite shops on their own streets and can enter. It echoes story elements found in Howl's Moving Castle (written in 1986), firmly anchoring it in the global children's literature of the time.

The novel is an illustrated one, and in this case, they're provided by Miho Satake, who also illustrated several volumes of Kiki's Delivery Service. They're also very rooted in the children's literature of the time, eschewing an anime aesthetic for a classic pen-and-ink look reminiscent of Jill Bennett's work on Danny the Champion of the World. The book is clearly intended for a younger middle-grade audience, and it would be an excellent choice for a budding fantasy reader, but it's also a good book for an adult audience who can appreciate a well-crafted children's story.

The Village Beyond the Mist may not offer much insight into Spirited Away, but it doesn't need to. It's a good book all on its own, a snapshot of 1970s children's fiction, and a classic in its own right. It's the perfect read-aloud for a rainy day.