Howl's Moving Castle Characters

Sophie Hatter is our heroine, the daughter of a well-to-do hat shop owner in the village of Market Chipping in the fantasy land of Ingary. As the eldest of three sisters, Sophie is sure that she is...

The one big, strange fact about Howl is that almost every young woman who reads about him wants to marry him […]. Yesterday I was doing a question-and-answer session in a London theatre and a tee...

We know from the first chapter of Howl's Moving Castle that the Witch of the Waste is going to be the Big Bad of this novel. We only get about seven paragraphs in when the narrator announces that,...

In our analysis of the Witch of the Waste elsewhere in this section, we said that the Witch is the showy villain of this novel. We know that she's a baddie from the outset, and she remains one of o...

When you think of the word demon, what usually comes to mind? Chances are decent if you've ever watched anything like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Last Exorcism, it's nothing good. In a lot of w...

Michael is Howl's trusty apprentice, a nice fifteen-year-old kid who seems well-meaning and eager to learn. He's also secretly engaged to Sophie's youngest sister Martha, whom he visits regularly a...

Lettie Hatter is Sophie's middle sister. She's super-smart and very beautiful, and unlike Sophie, she's not willing to lie down and just admit that she's doomed to failure because she isn't the you...

Martha is Sophie's youngest sister, and she's at least as opinionated as Lettie. However, unlike Lettie, her ambition is not to become rich and powerful—instead she wants to marry, settle down, a...

Fanny is Mr. Hatter's second wife. She is stepmother to Sophie and Lettie, and she gives birth to Martha. When Mr. Hatter dies suddenly, leaving the shop in debt, Fanny does her best to place her t...

We don't actually find out much about Mr. Hatter since he passes away ten paragraphs into the novel, except that he is deeply proud of his three daughters and sending them to an expensive school le...

Mrs. Pentstemmon is Howl's old tutor. Our main impression of her is that she is grand. Her home is incredibly rich looking, and she lives in the wealthy capital town of Kingsbury. She is tall and e...

Megan is Howl's older sister. She lives in our regular old world (where castles don't move), in Wales. She clearly thinks that Howl is a no-good rotten loser who mainly exists to embarrass her and...

Megan's husband, whom we never actually meet—but if Megan's anything to go by, he's probably very serious and very judgmental.

Mari is Howl's little niece. Unlike her mother, Mari seems to adore Howl—as soon as she sees him, she throws herself at him. And Howl in turn seems to love her a lot; the two of them speak Welsh...

Neil is Howl's teenage nephew. Like his little sister, Mari, he seems to share a bond with Howl, though he is initially pretty rude and unpleasant when Howl stops by to ask him about his English te...

We don't really see much of the Wizard Suliman since he disappears long before the novel starts. He's the Royal Magician before Howl gets stuck with the job, and by the time the book begins he has...

When Howl finally notices that Sophie's dog is actually a dog-man under a curse, he insists on attempting to remove the enchantment. Unfortunately the enchantment is in layers though, and Howl and...

When the man we later know as Percival accompanies the Witch into Sophie's shop the day that she gets cursed with old age, the Witch calls him Gaston.

Prince Justin appears in Howl's Moving Castle even less than the Wizard Suliman does. Even before Sophie's enchantment, the narrator reports "a new piece of gossip [that] came into the shop. The Ki...

These characters appear so briefly that they're barely even characters, but we're throwing in a summary of their situation here because their story is pretty charming. When Sophie is still working...

Mrs. Fairfax is the extremely talkative witch friend of Fanny's with whom Lettie studies witchcraft. Of course Martha was originally supposed to apprentice with her, but when Lettie and Martha swit...

The very young daughter of the King of Ingary.