Title: Departures aka Okuribito
Genre: Drama
Director: Takita YōjirŁE

Okuribito (Departures) follows the story of failed orchestra cellist Kobayashi Daigo who is forced to give up his 18-million JPY cello and move back to his hometown in Yamagata-ken. His wife Mika moves with him to the countryside to start their lives anew. While searching for a new job, he spots a newspaper ad from a “NK Agency” that says “Assisting Departures”. Mistaking this for a travel agency, Daigo goes for the job interview and finds out that the job is not really for a tour-guide type but instead is for assisting the “departed” (a.k.a. dead, gone, deceased, someone who will be pushing up daisies in the next collective amount of time). This is where the title of the film comes in — okuribito is roughly translated as the “departed’s assistant”.

Anyhoo, everyone around him, including his wife, hates this new job and the idea of handling corpses all day. Okay, we all get the Ick Factor there. But somehow, each and every death that Daigo handles for his job helps him discover how important life really and why people do what they do even if they will end up dead anyway.

What I liked about this movie

— Drama and humor seamlessly integrated in the movie. Each and every sequence is wonderfully transitioned into the next one. Awesome.

— Ironies of 運命 (fate) and destiny and all that jazz. Lots of symbolism here and there. I particularly like the part where it came full circle — from Daigo taking care of several dead people in front of those dead people’s families, he ends up taking care of his newly-deceased estranged father.

— Awesome pacing. I didn’t get bored. Must help, though, that I can sort of understand what they were saying and was not entirely reliant on the subs.

— Great soundtrack. Tsk

— It’s a soul-cleansing experience. ‘Nuff said.