Departures

Departures (おくりびと/Okuribito), or here, is a 2009 Japanese movie dealing with death. :) It won several awards. It stars Motoki Masahiro, Yamazaki Tsutomu, and Hirosue Ryoko. The summary is as follows:

A story of love, of discovery, of revelation and of the transcending human spirit, "Departures" will linger in your heart and mind long after viewing.

I first heard about this movie when I was taking Japanese about a month ago. A classmate had watched it and during a break, we watched the trailer. It seemed to be pretty interesting since there was still some humor going on, even though the subject may be a bit on the serious side. O_o What that short little summary doesn't say (the longer, more detailed plot can be found on the official English website as well as on wikipedia) is that the main character is an ex-celloist turned encoffinator/mortician (I'm sure that's not a word, but it sure does sound cool - he basically tidies up corpses and puts them in a coffin; there's a great deal of ceremony that goes with it). Frankly, I'm interested in this kind of stuff, seeing as I've taken two classes before that dealt with death and I signed up for a senior seminar in it, but it's always interesting to see how people regularly react to the dead.

At the beginning of the movie, he needed a job and once he realised that the misleading ad (something about helping people on a journey) really meant helping them into the afterlife. It was pretty amusing since his first job consisted of an elderly woman who was found dead in her house that was in the second week of decomposition. Well, as the movie progressed, he began to show more respect towards life, as well as a more profound understand of death. Towards the end, an old childhood friend of his who has once ignored him because of his chosen profession also realised this, as well as his wife, who has left him for a period of time because of it (calling him "filthy").

It's not one of those movies that have intense twists and turns, though there are obstacles that pop up, but it's generally a human drama about love, life, and death and how it's adviseable to just accept it all.

You can watch it at MySoju (for now) - the movie is copyrighted and will be available in the US shortly. It used to be up on DramaCrazy until it was copyrighted.

Picture taken from here.