Departures - Okuribito

Departures (Okuribito in Japanese) is the best movie I've seen in ages. It's a 2008 Japanese film by Yōjirō Takita. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2009 Oscars. The movie website is here.

The story (spoiler alert):

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a cellist in an orchestra in Tokyo, loses his job because of the dissolution of the orchestra. After quitting as a professional cellist he decides to sell his cello (which he had recently purchased for 18 million yen) and also to move back to his old hometown, Sakata, Yamagata, with his wife. One day he finds a classified advertisement for "Assisting departures" for an "NK Agency". He goes to the job interview thinking it is for a job at a travel agency but discovers that NK is an abbreviation for "encoffinment" (納棺, nōkan) and that he is instead to assist the "departed" by ceremonially preparing the dead in front of mourners before their bodies are placed in the coffin. The interviewer, the President of the NK Agency, immediately decides to hire Daigo after confirming that he is able to work hard. The salary is 500,000 yen per month with an additional 20,000 yen bonus for the interview. With no other job prospects, Daigo decides to accept the offer. However, when he comes home to his wife he finds himself unable to admit the type of work he will be doing so he dissembles, saying that he is to be employed in the 'ceremonial occasions industry', which his wife misunderstands as a wedding company.

Daigo has a hard time at his first day of work, being made to act as a corpse in a DVD explaining the procedure of encoffinment. More harrowing still is his first assignment which is, in preparation for the wake, to clean, dress and apply cosmetics to the body of an aged woman who has died alone at home remaining undiscovered for two weeks. Beset with nausea at the sight and smell of her collapsed body, but in need of the money that is paid at the end of each day, Daigo sets out in his new career. Daigo completes a number of assignments and experiences the joy and gratitude at his work of those left behind, while enjoying playing his old cello during his time off. He starts to feel a sense of fulfillment in his work when his wife, Mika, (Ryoko Hirosue) finds the training DVD and begs him to give up such a "disgusting profession." Daigo however refuses to quit, so his wife leaves him. Even his old friend, Yamashita (Tetta Sugimoto), learning of his job, tells him to get "a proper job", then avoids him because of his refusal.

Not long later however, Daigo's wife returns announcing that she is pregnant and pleads with him once again to find a different source of income. At this moment the telephone rings with a new assignment. Yamashita's mother, Tsuyako (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), who ran the local bathhouse on her own, has died. In front of Yamashita, his family and Mika, Daigo prepares Tsuyako's body for her wake and earns the respect and understanding of all present. Then one day, a telegram is delivered to Daigo's house, with notification of the death of Daigo's estranged father. Daigo refuses to see his dead father, but Daigo's co-worker convinces him to go and even insists he take one of the business' display model coffins. When Daigo sees his father, he notices that he has left only one cardboard box of belongings, despite the fact that he lived for over 70 years. Funeral workers come to get Daigo's father's corpse, but Daigo decides to personally encoffin his father. As he encoffins him, Daigo finds a "stone-letter" he had given to his father when he was little; the stone-letter was grasped in his father's hands. When Daigo is finished, he recognizes the father he remembered and cries. As his father is carried away in a coffin, Daigo presses the stone-letter to Mika's pregnant belly.

...

Loosely based on Aoki Shinmon's autobiographical book Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician (納棺夫日記, Nōkanfu Nikki), the film was ten years in the making. Motoki studied the art of 'encoffinment' at first hand from a mortician, and how to play a cello for the earlier parts of the movie. The director attended funeral ceremonies in order to understand the feelings of bereaved families. While death is the subject of great ceremony, as portrayed in this movie, it is also a strongly taboo subject in Japan, so the director was worried about the film's reception and did not anticipate commercial success.

In Japan two sets of death pros take care of the corpse. Undertakers do not embalm the bodies because they are all cremated. An encoffiner (nokanshi) washes the corpse, plugs up the holes, dresses it, puts make-up on the face and places it in the coffin. The undertaker then takes it to the crematorium. But the nokanshi is more than a mere technician. He performs his task with elaborate rituals in front of the whole grieving family who then all take turns to say goodbye to their dearly departed.

Every time the nokanshi performs his task in the movie I was moved to tears. It is so very different from our clinical approach to death. The whole family (including the kids) all get to see the corpse before and after it is beautified. It is a loving farewell and a tribute to the departed.

The trailer:



The music by Joe Hisaishi is stunningly beautiful. Here's the musical finale composed for 13 cellos:



The movie reminded me of the only funeral I have ever enjoyed. In South Africa I was friends with a couple of Indian (Gujarati) guys and came to be close to the whole family. When their mother died I was asked to attend to funeral. They lived in an apartment building in Durban. Mom's corpse was brought out into the central courtyard dressed in a clean white sari, face uncovered and placed on a table. All the women in the huge extended family then sang Hindu hymns and danced slowly around the corpse strewing flowers on the dead woman. There was plenty of uninhibited wailing from the women and the men all wept openly. Then the men only took the body to the cemetery where it was placed on a funeral pyre and cremated. Then we all had to go to a public bath-house for a ritual wash. Afterwards there was a huge feast and the feasting, singing of hymns and dancing went on for three whole days. It was a lovely funeral. I felt as if I had really said goodbye and hadn't suppressed up my emotions as we seem to do in modern funerals.