WHY OKURIBITO?
First time l heard about ‘Departures’ (Okuribito) l was in Japan and my poor knowledge of Japanese made me wait until the movie could be shown in Hong Kong or Mexico City. I was excited to see it because some friends, whose opinion l respect very much, had been enthralled by it; when they mentioned the theme and some aspects of the plot l imagined ‘Okuribito’ as the Japanese version of ‘Six Feet Under’, the HBO series about a family who runs a funeral home in LA.
Then came the Oscars Ceremony Awards, ‘Departures’ was awarded the Best Foreign Film and l was glad, both for the film industry in Japan and for me, knowing this would make easy now to find my way to see it; so l hurried up to the Broadway Cinemateque as soon as l arrived in Hong Kong where ‘Departures’ was being shown.
The first sequence showing Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) performing the ritual of a nokanshi (since then l acquired some more words in Japanese) lets clear that ‘Okuribito’ has little to do with the American series or with any kind of Western approach to death. Daigo performing those hypnotic elegant movements, the sudden contrast of humour and sexual life reference of the deceased in front of the family create an amalgam of beauty and sadness, so particular to the Japanese culture.
THE GENRE
No doubt ‘Okuribito’ is a ‘tearjerker’ as some film critics have described it, it is clear that the director and the producers appeal to a sentimental involvement on the part of their audience, but the emotional frame of loss and regret they impose on the spectator is counterbalanced by the black humour of the situations, the beauty of the proceedings and the change of perspective within the family of the deceased during the ceremony. Thus, Daigo’s gradual understanding of the real job he has undertaken, his predicaments to keep the nature of this new job secret to his wife, are misunderstandings typical of a sitcom. The ceremonial aspect of the procedure, both mesmerizing and instructing the audience in an art not commonly appreciated in
THEATRE AND MEANING
Most valuable of these three counterbalancing aspects is, from my point of view, the change of attitude in the families watching their loved ones prepared for the coffin. Every ritual performed on any of the dead is a short drama in itself, a drama composed more in a Western than in a Japanese way; the Aristotelian three acts can be easily distinguished. Take, for example, the case of the stern man complaining harshly to the nokanshi for arriving late, this could be our first act; this man is obviously angry for the loss of his wife, and as we witness the transformation of a dead body into an actual portrait of love and inner wisdom, the second act takes place; the third would be the ‘catharsis’ of the whole family, especially of the father and husband letting go his anger and openly expressing his pain and therefore being able to show his gratitude to the Daigo and his boss.
The director clearly assumes the theatrical aspect of these rituals putting the camera in the position of the spectator, sometimes abstracting in black the surroundings of the nokanshi to make both the audience and the family concentrate on the ritual as well as experiencing the sensation of a theatre.
Certainly, the ceremony as a whole, the precision of the movements, the expectancy of whereto these will lead, imposes theatre as technique as wel as metaphor, but here the metaphor is a serious one: in order to let go the beloved person, we have to see he or she come back to life and then depart us with the smile of someone who has found the key of an enigma; and this is such a play were the dead body becomes the main character, the nokanshi the director, a sort of bunraku master animating the puppet (ningyo), or as in the case of Daigo, the instrument the artist is playing.
DAIGO AND THE QUEST OF THE FATHER
Well, here we spoil the contents of the film letting the reader know the end, but since our purpose is not recommending it but digging into its meaning we have to go further.
Daigo will eventually perform the whole drama for himself, his wife will be present but the ritual will not be performed for her, she will only be the witness of her husband’s own catharsis. Seen from this perspective, this scene, criticized for its melodramatic contents and for relying too much on easy coincidences makes ‘Departures’ a most serious film.
It all happens as if every accident of Daigo’s life, the dismissal from the orchestra, the return to the native land, the discovering of his real vocation as a nokanshi, had led to reencountering his father. There was only one way he could meet again the father who had forsaken him, and this is as a cadaver; the psychoanalytic reason would obviously be because the father had already been dead in his unconscious since the moment the man had abandoned the six year old boy, this is why Daigo could not remember his face. The picture of the father only becomes distinct when the son performs the whole ritual as a nokanshi, he brings his father back to life for an instant, then he sees him clearly and thus expresses his pain, for the abandonment and for the death of the father, a separation repeated twice at the same moment, and then the son lets the father go, he can mourn him now.
Much can be said about this unique moment where Daigo possesses his father one hundred per cent, we will not go that far; he had repressed the pain of his progenitor’s absence, the desire he had repressed of meeting him. The message might be that we can only let things go when we apprehend them, ephemeral as they can be, like the tradition of sakura no hanami in Japan.
THE SYMBOLICAL APPROACH
From a short astrological and symbolical approach of ‘Departures’ l would like to use the charts of Motoki Masahiro san and of Takita Yojiro san, respectively the main actor and the director of the movie. I found the data on the internet, the time of birth is missing but many things can be said using the positions of the planets at
What impresses me first is that Takita Yojiro, director of the movie, Motoki Masahiro, leading actor, and Yamazaki Tsutomu, the boss and father image of Daigo, are all Sagittarius. I do not know about the rest of the cast or the producers, a more extensive research would surely bring about amazing discoveries. Knowing the coincidence of sign of three of the most important people in he feature provides us with a lot of material. This, of course, assuming, from the Jungian perspective and from any sort of traditional sciences such as Astrology, that there are not accidents and that any creation of man organizes the world more unconsciously than consciously.
From the perspective of my work, the way l explain it to myself, there are two main opposite tendencies in the world, one leads to disorganization, the other, towards organization. Archetypes and symbols rule this movement.
THE THREE CHARTS
These are the three charts, l hope the data are correct. In any case this would be a good exercise on astrological interpretation.
Takita Yōjirō, born
Tsutomu Yamazaki (山崎 努 Yamazaki Tsutomu) (born December 2, 1936 in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese actor.
Motoki Masahiro
What made these three Sagittarius come together? It is not so easy to find a team composed by this sign, Sagittarius are strong willed people who do not like so easily to be said what they have to do. But here it must have been relatively easy to attune with each other having the three of them their Mercury (the planet of communication) also in Sagittarius; surely, intuition, non verbal communication, functioned better while they were working and jokes and good humour during the production helped a lot.
SATURN, PISCES AND THE
We can lay out three of the main themes in ‘Okuribito’ to study the symbol of Saturn in the movie and in these charts: Death, The Father and Purpose in Life.
The three charts have Saturn in water, an element related to emotions and those of the actors, Yamazaki san and Motoki san have this planet in Pisces, the sign of compassion; as Saturn in water tends to block emotions (Daigo represses the pain of his father’s desertion, the incapacity to remember his face being the effect) the aim is not only to release them but to learn from them. Pisces and Sagittarius belong to the mutable cross, related to teaching and learning.
I have always said that one of the many ways to describe Saturn in Scorpio, where the director of ‘Departures’ has his own Saturn, is a frozen corpse. This would be related to a bereavement that never took place, a radical pain that was never expressed, both Saturn and Scorpio tend to control and obstruct, it takes time and hard work to liberate pain and express forgiveness with this position; a process of transformation is being prevented.
Takita san's Saturn in Scorpio squaring Pluto emphasizes this extreme contraction; ‘Okuribito’ illustrates a wonderful way of developing Pluto in Leo (the Moon in Leo helps) through creative means. Leo is related to theatre and dramatic rendition; Pluto, to death and transformation; therefore, the theatrical aspect in the movie we mentioned above would be deploying this theme graphically; but a Saturn in Pisces was needed to melt the ice, massage the rigidity, convey the message that that corpse deserves respect, love and admiration in order to gain compassion and fulfillment in life.
Saturn in Pisces in the charts of both actors is in conjunction, Motoki san and Yamazaki san are separated in age by a whole cycle of this planet; the relation father and son, boss and employee, is obvious in the film, the Sagittarius ingredient adds the teacher and disciple dyad. In a very deep level they represent an archetypal dynamics of the director’s unconscious; we can only speculate that some kind of issue happened with his father relationship while Saturn was transiting Pisces and squaring his sun (Father image) when Takita san was around 9 or 10 years old; the Saturn in Pisces of both actors square the sun of the director of Okuribito they made him work hard and he made them work hard.
‘Departures’ shows the of process opening and healing deep wounds from the past through art and compassion.
We will develop more about this and the other themes in the film in further comments, l do not want to extent this first post too long, for the moment.
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