Okuribito: A Dignified Portrayal of the Beautiful Dead
St. George’s Court—the British sure left their mark.
A six-story building with two flats per floor was a rare sight among Hong Kong’s sardined skyscrapers and micro-housing in the early 2000s. When I was 12, my family moved into a flat in St. George’s Court shortly after my father’s stroke. From the balcony, we had an unobstructed view of an unorganized grid of town houses, with the occasional apartment building poking out amid sparse greenery. A younger me expected more mystery from a district named Kowloon Tong (“the Lake of the Nine Dragons” in Cantonese), but all I got were Toyota Alphards filled with moms taking their kids to after-school celebrity tutors.
Not that I had much time to enjoy the view anyway. My days after school were inundated with sports training, tutorial classes, and one-on-one mentorships. But during the rare moments when I had nothing scheduled, I spent time with my grandmother.
“Apple,” as we used to call her, had lived with my family ever since my brother was born. She took care of us while our parents often worked late nights. I was the youngest son and ascribed to all the stereotypes of getting my way while my brother endured the brunt of her frustration—usually in the form of projectile massage flip-flops or a chicken feather duster.
A year after we moved to St. George’s Court, my brother moved to the U.S. to attend boarding school, so my grandmother switched from throwing shoes to flipping channels. She especially loved daytime cooking shows, and on the days I was at home, she had me write down recipes as the TV show TV show hosts exaggerated their love for the chef’s stir-fried broccoli.. To my grandmother, I was the perfect kitchen’s assistant (read: I devoured everything she cooked). After the show of the day finished, she would wander off to the wet market to pick up the groceries for her culinary experiments, leaving me to my own devices.
My parents didn’t allow us to turn on the TV without them around. But I never broke the rule—after all, the TV was always on and my grandmother conveniently gone. Regardless of her intentions for never turning off the TV (since she could be very absentminded at times), what my grandmother gave me was freedom to explore shows and films at my own leisure. I remember watching Keanu Reeves as Constantine, a performance that inspired my love for tattoos. I’ve watched Troy more times than I can remember (and more times than I’d like to admit).
But I loved one particular film above the rest, so much so that I bought the DVD and its accompanying soundtrack after watching it the first time. I had been playing the classical piano for years, and even though my grandmother adored my amateur rendition of Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” I had struggled to find a purpose for the endless lines of sheet music. I hated the practice, hated the scales, hated the stage fright.
But listening to this film's soundtrack revealed a soft underbelly to music that I had never considered: that music could make you feel.
The film’s Chinese dub had an unwieldy name: “The Symphony of He Who Performs Ceremonies.” But it was the only name I knew it by, and the name I held in my heart until I was asked to talk about my favorite film in English for class.
*
Departures (Okuribito おくりびと in Japanese, meaning “One Who Sends Off”) was directed by Yōjirō Takita. This 2008 film is a departure from Takita’s previous works (Only once, I promise.)
The story revolves around Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), an unemployed cellist. After his orchestra disbands, he moves from Tokyo back to his hometown in Yamagata. Unbeknownst to his wife Mika (Ryōko Hirosue), Daigo becomes a nōkanshi, a person who prepares dead bodies for cremation in a ceremony known as “encoffinment.” Daigo wrestles with the taboo of death and its inevitability, inviting the audience to empathize with him.
Takita established his career in the pink film genre with works such as the Molester’s Train series (1982) and its subsequent films, No More Comic Magazines! (1986) and Sharam Q no Enka no Hanamichi (1997). Takita’s comedic style led to his critical success in Japan, allowing him to branch out into various genres of filmmaking. His aesthetic eventually settled into more realistic dramas such as Departures, which won Best Foreign Language Film at the 2009 Academy Awards.
When I first went to boarding school at the age of 16, I brought a bag of what I had been led to think were essentials. One of those was a hard drive with films I had torrented—I was under the impression that it would win favors with the other students.
It did not.
But there was a silver lining: I re-watched Departures and listened to its soundtrack repeatedly. In many ways, the music—composed by Joe Hisaishi of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli fame and legend—scored the many successes and failures of high school. To that, I must do Takita's work justice and give both the actual film and its soundtrack a voice in this essay.
Major spoilers below. Please do yourself a favor and watch this film.
*
The experience of death is a complicated knot of fragile emotions, especially for those in witness of a loved one’s passing. Departures is a dignified hand, untying its story with extreme care directed towards its audience and the departed in the film.
In modern Japan, the encoffinment ceremony is rarely practiced in full, as demonstrated in the film And even then, it only occurs in rural places. Nowadays, the preparation of the bodies is done primarily by hospital staff; as such, the bereaved cannot see their loved ones’ bodies until the funeral.
Hong Kong’s funeral ceremonies are more frequently practiced than those of Japan, and having witnessed several ceremonies, I can say with certainty that watching, or even partaking, in the cleansing of your loved one’s body gives you a sense of peace. Under the morgue’s cold fluorescent lights, their locked jaws are agape, tongues blackened. Yet as you work to clean the body, massage their stiff claws into fingers, and watch the mortician apply blush on their frozen cheeks, you witness the return of their humanity. Right before your eyes, an unrecognizable corpse becomes the cherished memory of a loved one. It is this memory you hold onto as you grieve their loss and celebrate their life.
Takita understands the importance of this final moment of remembrance, the essence of grieving. During pre-production, he spent time with Motoki (who also served as producer for the film) observing encoffinment ceremonies and even trained with a mortician to understand the delicate movements of the ceremony.
Death in film and media often focuses on the dying rather than the dead—cue the countless medical dramas and cop thrillers with characters who caress their loved ones as they utter their dying wishes with a bloodied last breath. Departures bypasses the portrayal of dying and centers on the final presentation of the deceased. Every corpse in the film is shown with respectable makeup, and in the scene where a woman is found decaying for two weeks, the audience is spared from the sight.
The emphasis on the portrayal of the dead outlines the core philosophy of the film: the dead should be honored with dignity and grace, regardless of the circumstances of their death. The intimacy during the encoffinment scenes faithfully represents the life that is restored to the body of the departed.
Takita’s endgame for Departures was to foster a sense of connection and reconciliation with our own notions of dying. Rather than creating a piece which solely confronts death, Takita and screenwriter Kundō Koyama developed a script that slides the notion of death into the conversation. The film doesn’t dwell on the technicalities of the encoffinment ceremony; in fact, the single exposition of the ceremony is a scene of physical comedy in which Daigo is forced to act as a dead person for a corporate instructional DVD on how to prepare a body. Throughout the film, Takita allows the audience to breathe by sneaking in comedic sensibilities, especially in the dynamic between the clueless Daigo and his deadpan boss Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a relationship that many critics saw as a high point of the film.
In many ways, this film about death isn’t about the dead as much as it is about the people around the dead. The central source of tension throughout the film is how Daigo’s childhood friend Yamashita (Tetta Sugimoto) views Daigo’s job as an encoffiner. But after Yamashita’s mother passes away, he witnesses Daigo cleansing her body, and their relationship soon changes. The tangibility of Yamashita and Daigo’s relationship is rooted in a realistic portrayal of both the characters and their environment. In an article by Hideyuki Tanabe for Japanese newspaper “Mainichi Shimbun,” critic Saburō Kawamoto applauded Takita’s care in showing a Japan that the Japanese could “relate to.” From enjoying fried chicken during Christmas to the old man playing Go at a bathhouse, Takita constructs a cinematic universe that feels realistic to domestic and international audiences alike. The hyper-realism of these contextual details allow the highly ornate process of encoffinment to ground itself in a believable manner.
Nonetheless, the practice of encoffinment can still feel inaccessible even for Japanese audiences. Takita manifests our trepidation in Daigo, who serves as a conduit for how we, the audience members, experience the film. As a newcomer into the practice of encoffinment, we find Daigo a relatable protagonist—he approaches this industry with the same hesitation that we may have had about Takita’s film. We witness Daigo’s initial reluctance to touch the two-week-old body and feel his revulsion as he retches from the stench and the maggot-covered food remains.
Daigo’s growing comfort at performing the ceremonies develops hand in hand with his —and our—newfound respect for the encoffinment ceremony. The film celebrates his character’s transformation through a dreamy montage of him assisting with encoffinment at various religious ceremonies, intercut with a fantastical shot of him playing the cello in the countryside.
Takeshi Hamada’s cinematography grounds Daigo’s evolution from novice to professional as we linger on the encoffinment ceremonies through static wide and close-up shots. This quiet and somber cinematography is offset by Joe Hisaishi’s score, leaving the audience suspended in observation of the “beautiful dead.” (Incidentally, this is the name of the soundtrack that underscores Daigo’s first proper encoffinment ceremony.)
Hamada’s cinematography changes, however, during the film’s climax. Mika calls out after an irate Daigo, who is unwilling to travel and identify his estranged father’s corpse. As he storms off, the handheld camera stays on him—without the use of a dolly or a steadicam—until he comes to a stop.
The film’s cinematography throughout has been static and slow-moving, reflecting Daigo’s inner state of suppressed emotions: frustrations towards his father’s absence, disappointment towards his friends and wife for their ignorance of his job. Narratively, his emotional dam breaks when he snaps at Yuriko (Kimiko Yo), his boss Sasaki’s secretary, for abandoning her child. As he storms out of the office, the cinematography becomes uncomfortably intimate and uncertain as Daigo confronts his newfound identity as a member of the bereaved. When Mika claims proudly to the local funeral workers that “my husband is an encoffiner,” Daigo’s reconciliation arc is complete—he has found catharsis and forgiveness within himself and from his wife after facing the death of a loved one.
I saw many grieving families day in and day out when my family visited my father at the intensive care unit. The facets of death I had observed and internalized at the age of 12 had always been about the loved ones rather than the dying itself, and Takita’s careful rendition of the process of grief from the eyes of an observer allowed a curious child to delve deeper into the emotional nuance of bereavement.
*
In an interview from the 2008 DVD release of Departures, composer Joe Hisaishi confessed that this soundtrack was one of the most difficult he had worked on, given that he had to prominently feature the cello in its composition to parallel Daigo’s instrument. The challenge most certainly paid off, however, because the result is one of the most robust soundtracks on Joe Hisaishi’s discography. 19 orchestral, cello-driven tracks ducking and weaving from emotional to comedy beats, Hisaishi’s score offers a lush backdrop to the main theme of the inescapability of death.
As the film opens, we see a raging snowstorm. The first track, “shine of snow I,” plays beneath the howling winds. The audience has no idea what to expect, and Hisaishi intends to keep the tone of the film a mystery, opting for chords that do not translate an emotional response as clearly as a triad (three-note chord) might. The result is a conflicted nest of minor harmonic clusters, shifting from the nostalgic sighs of a minor 9th to the eerie clash of the tritone (also known as the devil’s interval), all sitting atop a shared bass note of E. This serves as a droning presence that hints at the permanence of the film’s theme despite constant changes in emotions and story.
Hisaishi establishes a new shared bass note for the theme song “おくりびと ~memory~,” which serves a similar thematic function as the one in “shine of snow I,” but has a clear tone of optimism and hope. The E bass note for “shine of snow I” does not belong in most of the chords through the sequence (with the exception of Cmaj7b5, which includes the tension of the tritone), nor does the sequence eventually resolve to an E major chord, instead opting for a C# major chord (of which the E note doesn’t belong). This dissonance lays the sonic groundwork for our uncertainty: the theme of death looms over our viewing experience without any clarity on how it may resolve.
In contrast, the fundamental chord progression in “おくりびと ~memory~” circles around the bass note. The theme begins with a four-chord progression (G-C-G-G/D) while sharing the same bass note of G; each of these chords either has G as its tonic (first note of the scale) or its dominant (5th note of the scale). These intervals are the basic building blocks of classical and traditional music, and they offer the listener great comfort because of their complimentary harmonic relationship. The overbearing drone of “shine of snow I” is now the soothing center of Daigo’s emotional core; this is the music that plays over the dreamy montage sequence as Daigo understands the importance of his job. It is also the same track that grounds the story as the song Daigo would play to his father when he was a child. Daigo’s profession has allowed clarity on both his future and his family, and we hear his peace in the music as the constant bass note to return to.
Beyond Hisaishi’s score, Takita’s deliberate musical choices add depth to the cinematic experience. During the Christmas party scene, Daigo plays a song at the behest of Sasaki and Yuriko, who request something “Christmas-y.” Daigo’s choice is Ave Maria, the famous musical adaptation of the Latin Christian prayer by French composer Charles Gounod, who wrote a melody on top of a slightly altered Prelude by J. S. Bach. Among the litany of Christmas music to play with Daigo’s dexterity, the choice for Ave Maria is deliberate since it is an oft-performed piece at weddings and funerals. Takita goes to great lengths to introduce interplay between playfulness and sadness, between humor and tragedy; thus, the choice of Ave Maria gives the celebratory scene emotional weight.
*
Death is a taboo topic in many Asian countries, but the farewell ceremony—when done right—offers the dead a dignity that the living will remember.
I completed writing this essay on November 22, 2020.
Exactly one year ago, I lost my grandmother.
Of the many moments of sadness and loss I experienced throughout my journey, I will always thank my lucky stars that I was there as she lay peacefully, surrounded by her favorite dress and scarves. I was there to walk around the coffin to bid her farewell. I was there, back turned towards the coffin as custom dictated, while the encoffiners pulled the lid over my grandmother.
I was there as our family went to the roof of the funeral parlor and burnt paper money and bamboo fixtures of a mansion to her, shouting her name so she would recognize our voices in the underworld and receive what we were sending her. And I was there when the coffin was wheeled into the fire, as we shouted for her to have a peaceful journey onwards.
When I bought the soundtrack and the DVD for Departures all those years ago, I did so because I loved the music and the performance. Recently, I rewatched it to see whether the film would hit me as hard as it had when I was a child.
It did.
Apple was the most important person in my life. And since losing her, I have struggled to write anything that properly honors her. But watching Departures made me think that maybe I don’t have to.
I was there, an okuribito. One who sends off. And I know she died a beautiful death.
Artwork: Quim Paredes