Title: おくりびと (Okuribito) English Title: Departures Release Date: September 13th, 2008 (Japan) Although I had seen and greatly enjoyed this movie when it came out, I decided that it wasn’t necessary to write my essay because the movie had already garnered enough attention. After all, I wanted to focus on Japanese movies which might be lesser known in the U.S. and a movie which had won the 2009 Oscar Award for Best Foreign Language Film I had previously deemed as outside of the scope of my movie reviews. However, I’m now of the impression that far too few of us have yet to see this movie. Thus I hope to give just one more reminder to go out and rent Okuribito. You definitely won’t regret it. The story follows a Daigo Kobayashi and his wife Mika as he quits his job as a cellist and moves back to his recently deceased parent’s house in the country. He takes work with what he assumes to be a travel company only to find out later that it is actually a service for preparing dead bodies for funerals. While at first not thrilled about the new job he has taken, he strangely finds himself unable to quit. Eventually, the job, called a Nokanshi in Japanese, starts to grow on Daigo. Also, the closeness to death, and making a new connection with his hometown, forces him to think about his own life. As he starts to open up to and accept his past, he begins to feel a new sense of completeness as things start to come full circle. The audience as well is, along with Daigo, compelled to think about their own pasts, as well as the memory of and duty to family and loved ones. We are also unable to escape having to reflect on our own mortality, something which might make this movie a struggle to watch for some, but which ultimately strives to pull us back toward something we all too often find ourselves trying to escape from. A very memorable scene is when Mika discovers what Daigo’s new job is – something he had, up to a point, been successfully keeping hidden from her. She is unable to control her feelings of disbelief, her disgust for the job, and her contempt toward Daigo. As Daigo reaches out to touch her, she recoils in fright calling him kegarawashii, a word which one doesn’t often hear in Japanese, and which might be translated as “unclean” or “filthy” in English. Other than being just a fantastic movie, one of the things that really was interesting for me about the movie, was the opportunity to see an example of a Japanese ceremony which many foreigners might never have the opportunity to see in person. While only a prelude to the funeral itself, there is great ceremony that goes into preparing a recently deceased body in Japan, and the whole family gathers around the loved and watches the Nokanshi as they work.
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