Preparing a Gateway for the Dead

departures

Film Friday

Two weeks ago our Friday night film group watched Yojiro Takita’s Departures, the Japanese film that won the 2008 Best Foreign Film Oscar.  Given our society’s discomfort with death, it is a film that people must see. (Caution: In the following reflection I’ll be revealing the ending.)

Departures is about a young Japanese man who discovers that he can’t make a living as a cellist and then stumbles into a job of ritually preparing bodies for “departure” ceremonies.  Japanese society looks down on such work, but he is being trained by a master and comes to understand that it is his calling.  In fact, it has affinities with his cello playing, which receives a boost when he understands how both his work and his music usher people into a spiritual space.

The plot is somewhat predictable.  His faithful loving wife leaves him because she can’t stand what he’s doing and doesn’t understand why he stays with the work despite her objections.  Then she sees him presiding over two ceremonies, the first one involving a mutual acquaintance, the second the estranged father who left him as a child.  Her disgust with death gives way to an appreciation of gateway rituals.  She understands that he has a gift that he must share with the world.

What makes the film special is the beautiful way it captures the rituals.  These must be maintained even when death is ugly (at one point Daigo must attend to a rotting body).  They must be maintained when families are dysfunctional (at one funeral a fight breaks out).  In fact, they must be maintained precisely because death can get ugly and families can fall apart. 


Because there is faith in the rituals, moments of grace occur.  In one funeral, there is laughter.  In another, there is reconciliation with a son, a suicide, who was a transvestite.  (This comes as a surprise to Daigo, who discovers it in the midst of the ceremony and must then ask the family whether he should treat the deceased as a man or a woman.) 

Even as he observes the rituals, he must be sensitive to the family and be prepared to make subtle changes.  With a woman that he knows, he realizes that she always wore a certain scarf, which he adds at the last moment.  This touch allows her son to get in touch with his grief.

Facing death makes life all the more precious.  Daigo frantically makes love to his wife following his first encounter with death. (A baby in the result.)  In another scene we see him and his boss sitting in the hearse gnawing on a cake that has been provided them following a funeral.  In a third, in a decorous meal, they are eating a pufferfish, which is poisonous if not prepared correctly.  The symbolism is important: life and death are separated by rituals of preparation.  “The living feed off the dead,” says the old man and then stuffs the fish into his mouth.

Daigo also takes a ritual bath in a traditional public bathing facility after each ceremony.

The rituals, the bathing facility, and other aspects of Japanese life are under attack from modernity.  It comes as a shock when, towards the end of the film, we see a body treated perfunctorily.  Departures has pulled us into its world in the special way that films do so that we feel the fierce urgency of tradition.

The film got me thinking back to the funeral of my oldest son Justin.  The very permanence of the ritual is what made it solid.  I found comfort in the final prayer, which I had heard before but, of course, never like this.  It goes as follows:

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting. You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Because there was a permanence to the ritual, the variations were particularly poignant.  I especially remember the choir singing “Precious Lord.”  And Julia (my wife) standing up and telling each of us to be a lighthouse for the world.  And my friend Gustavo, our college’s guitar teacher, sitting on the steps in front of the altar right before the closing hymn and playing “Brahm’s Lullabye. 

The ceremony kept me from falling apart.  It kept all of us from falling apart.  That’s what’s at stake in Departures.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

One Comment

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.