Japanese Depatures

Departures (2008) is a bit of a departure for us - not a comedy, action, or any genre, just a gentle Japanese drama. Ms. Spenser saw it on an airplane, and asked me to get it out of the library to watch together. 

Cellist Masahiro Motoki plays with a Tokyo symphony, which folds. Out of work, he decides to move with his wife back to his home town of Yamagata prefecture, so he could move into the house his parents left him. His father ran a bar out of the ground floor until he ran away with a waitress. Then his mother ran it as a coffeeshop until she died. 

As he is looking for work, he finds a sort of vague ad offering good pay and no experience required. The job is "assisting departures". He goes to the location, and slowly discovers that it is an encoffining firm - they prepare bodies to be placed in the coffin before they are cremated. The ad should have read "assisting the departed."

He goes out with his boss, Tsutomo Yamazaki (the owner and only other worker, except the receptionist) on a job. The ceremony is beautiful. The body is cleaned, has makeup applied, then dressed in a kimono, all with the greatest respect and with the family watching. The boss gives Motoki his pay in cash, and sends him home. He doesn't tell his wife what the job is.

The next job, they have to perform this ritual on a woman who died unnoticed for days. This is very hard on Motoki. After work, he feels defiled, and people notice a smell. So he goes to the sento public bath he used to go to. The old lady there recognizes him, and asks about his cello job. He doesn't tell her what he's doing now.

Eventually, his wife finds out what he's doing, and puts her foot down. She happily went to Yamagata with him, but doesn't want to live with someone who handles corpses. But after leaving him alone for several months, she sees him perform an encoffinment, and is moved by the tenderness and respect of the ritual. 

But he still has unresolved issues with his father.

This is a slow, quiet movie. It includes several scenes that just show the seasons changing, birds migrating, the snow coming, then going. A few scenes show Motoki out by the river embankment, playing his childhood cello. Even the scenes of the town in Yamagata, a small provincial city, are beautiful - the bath house, the old coffee shop where Motoki and wife live, the river, the rice fields, and the mountains. The people are prejudiced against people who work with the dead, but are mostly warm and friendly. The actual ritual of encoffinment is interesting and meditative. This is a very sweet movie.

For a while I was annoyed that Motoki didn't tell anyone what he really did, not even his wife. But I think this is somewhat cultural. Husbands tend to compartmentalize their work and family lives, and don't share a lot of their true selves in public.

My only complaint is that it is a bit too sweet, in some ways a typical Japanese family drama. But the quirky characters, like the boss and the receptionist, and the people we meet at the funerals, put it a few notches above that.