Elegiac is one modifier that comes easy when a film is about death and undertakers. But the facile, however, can sometimes be a code for the regular, the predictable. The film Okuribito is not your regular, not your predictable film. With all those scenes about the preparation of the corpse for its last temporal journey and the wall of coffins and flowers that arrest the senses of the viewer, there is nothing predictably morbid in the film. Except death perhaps.
Death is also not the core of Okuribito. Let us not be misled by the cast of actors portraying the recently dead. They are there because the story is about how we in life really go on living because that is the only way to live. The film makes us realize that there is no way of dying. There is the way of living. The nihilism that we fondly ascribe to the Japanese and to their culture is nowhere to be found in this grand film about life. What we have is the splendor of looking at the world outside, how it stands still for us, and how it can move us. Somewhere at the end of the long or the short, as the case may be for others, death is almost a natural course that follows the longer, more lived realness of living.
It is this new and different way of viewing death and—by sweet default—life, that the film by Yojiro Takita is able to lead us into a new light. Much has been said already about the so-called unique concept of death in relation to the power and popularity of this film, the title of which has already been contextually translated into Departures. The original title refers to the man who prepares the dead for his departure; the English title is already about what death brings us to.
If one is to gauge really the contribution of the film, it is not in the articulation of a concept of death situated in a particular culture, for that would be redundant. Many books and works have explained already about death as one of the strongest taboos in Japanese culture—and for that matter in many cultures. And yet, the film takes on that taboo and transforms it into a performance. The painful and painstaking details that go into the preparing of a dead body for the last rites, which include the cremation, ceases to be the unnamable and becomes a vista of now soft and tender, now brisk and snappy gestures and acts. The undertaker becomes the caretaker. The pollution of death, while still apparent in the ritual cleansing of the corpse, is now the subject of ceremony that almost partakes of theater, Japanese theater traditions. The man in charge moves with the serenity and stylization of a Noh gakushi or Noh actor; the quick costume/dress change, as when the undertaker pulls the kimono from underneath reminds one of the Kabuki hikinuki, where certain parts of the costume are pulled off to reveal another costume and transform the visage of another person.
The seeming theatricality of the actions is never camp. What it indicates is the utmost respect given to the dead. Death is not the universe of the horror but of the honorifics.
In front of the family, the person from the funeral home basically performs the equivalent of the last rite for the dead. He dresses up the dead in a way that engages sleight of hands. Generally, the service is satisfactory but at times, the bereaved are not happy about the results. Those who are left behind expect the loved dead one be restored to its former living countenance.
The man who performs this task is Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist who loses his job because an orchestra is disbanded by its owner. He goes home to his hometown and takes on the job of the person who prepares the body of dead men and women for the last journey. He prepares them for the departures.
The job pays well but is, according to Mika, his wife, not “normal.” His old friend thinks the same way, too.
Unsaid in the film is the fact that the job has always been given to people who belong to the so-called outcast of Japanese society. Undefined greatly, these people are seen as defiled because they are in contact with the dead. In the syncretism of Buddhism and Shinto, death is always a site of impurities.
The only giveaway in the film about this belief is when Mika screams at Daigo not to touch her after she has discovered the new job of her husband.
As Daigo, Masahiro Motoki is the purest man/boy ever to appear on the Japanese screen. His oblong face with features protruding exemplifies what is handsome in the popular culture of the Japanese. He is, after all, the product of the giant talent agency called Johnny and Associates, where all the so-called male idols in Japan’s show business come from. That origin, with due respect to this group, is lost in a performance that is as sincere and strong, and as clear and as commanding as the landscapes and the snow-capped mountains and rivers where salmons swim upstream to die. It is with Motoki the actor that we journey in our repulsion of corpses to the gradual embracing of our common duty to help our loved ones depart. We take his Daigo Kobayashi when he plays the cello of his boyhood against the blue sky. We are overwhelmed with sadness when first he tries to remember the face of his father and, finally, we are moved and we cry when he starts preparing the body of his father for the departure, touching in fact the face of the father he was seeing again but for the last time.
Takita is not the first director to tackle the taboo topic of death. There was Juzo Itamil, whose promising career was cut short by suicide, who made the film The Funeral. While Itami’s take on the taboo topic was to satirize it and bring taboo out as a grand joke, Takita’s work is to show us the delicate constancy of life.
Interestingly enough, the actor playing the manager of the coffin company, Tsutomu Yamazaki, was also the leading man in The Funeral.
As for Takita, he could be described as, for lack of a better equivalent, a commercial director in Japan. That label, however, is irrelevant, in the light of his works, and in the context also of a Japanese commercial film earning the admiration and getting the awards for its sensibilities that, in other nations, we find only in independent cinema.
When I watched this film in Tokyo during its regular run, Japanese cinema was well into its renaissance. Once more, the local films were being favored over the foreign. There was, in the mind of industry observers, one reason for this change: Japanese films were “good” once more. The shift was aimed not at the international market but for the local.
There are images that we so love in Japanese films that are in Okuribito. The film thus does not disappoint. In this film the images function almost like the kigo or those words used in Japanese haiku that disclose or hint to us the season of the musings. There is the funeral procession with the bereaved bearing koinobori or carp-shaped streamers or windsocks; there is the shot of a dead man with the Hinadan or the Doll Display for the Girl’s Day in March. Then, there is the cherry blossom tree with the petals blown by the early spring wind.
Seasons are not markers for endings but a regular, perpetual return of the signs of life. Very much like the story of deaths out of which many lives are witnessed by Daigo Kobayashi.
Takita’s Okuribito opened this year’s ongoing Eiga Sai at the Shangri-La Plaza, under the auspices of Japan Foundation Manila.
