Breakdown: what happens and what it means

Earlier, out of pity, Sen let a lonely spirit into the bathhouse, a figure in a black cloak with a white mask for a face — No-Face (Kaonashi in Japanese, “faceless”). He has no voice and no “self” of his own: he only echoes the sounds and desires of those around him, and he desperately wants to be noticed and loved. Once inside, No-Face sees what everyone here wants — gold. He starts making gold out of nothing and handing it out generously to the workers. The greedy bathhouse workers rush to wait on him, hauling in mountains of food. No-Face eats greedily and literally GROWS, swelling into a monster, and starts swallowing workers whole. The key to the scene: No-Face is a mirror of other people's greed. On his own he is empty; the greed of those around him is what inflates him. Only Sen stays indifferent to his gold: when he holds out handfuls of it, she refuses — that's not what she needs; she needs to save Haku and her parents. Precisely because Sen asks him for nothing, she turns out to be the only one who can stop him.