Departures: How an 'Ill-Omened' Job Teaches Us to Live in the Face of Death

This is a film of extraordinary tenderness, one that has moved countless viewers. Yet when it first appeared, Departures was mired in controversy. Because its subject was considered too sensitive, several film companies and distributors refused to release it. Before its premiere, the film was so cold-shouldered that it nearly died in the cradle — until it unexpectedly won the grand prize at the Montreal World Film Festival, regained the industry’s attention, and went on to become the year’s box-office champion. In 2009, Departures also earned Japan its first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming a monument in Japanese film history.

So what story does Departures actually tell? Why did it provoke such enormous controversy, and yet move so many viewers?

The protagonist is Daigo Kobayashi, a man of about thirty, pale-faced and melancholy. Like so many young people struggling in Tokyo, he wants nothing more than a stable life in that costly city. Daigo asks for little: as the cellist of an orchestra, he is of modest talent but diligent and utterly devoted to classical music, bent on securing a foothold in a Tokyo orchestra. That way he could both fulfill his childhood musical dream and barely support himself and his wife, Mika.

A few months into playing with the orchestra, Daigo wants a professional cello of his own, but the price — eighteen million yen — is far beyond his means. So, hiding it from Mika, he takes out a huge loan and buys the instrument. Just as he is about to put this grand plan to work, thunderbolt news arrives: the Tokyo orchestra announces it is dissolving.

No warning, no explanation — the director dismisses them all with a single sentence.

Dissolved, just like that? Where is he to make a living now? A newcomer of unremarkable credentials, Daigo can find no other orchestra for the time being, and he is saddled with debt from the cello. In one blow he loses not only the prop of his career and livelihood, but also the musical ideal that had been his spiritual anchor, which shatters along with everything else.

That does sound tragic. But let me stress: Departures is not a film that “sells misery.” On the contrary, none of life’s upheavals — the secret loan for the cello, the overnight unemployment — are turned into melodramatic conflict. What makes Departures moving is not only the depth of its theme but its balanced, gradual storytelling: warm yet not without humor, heavy yet shot through with hope. If many films rely on dramatic conflict to heighten emotion, Departures instead inherits the gentle, finely textured aesthetic tradition of Japanese cinema.

From Cellist to Nōkanshi

After the blow falls, Daigo and Mika sit in their cramped Tokyo apartment, the air heavy. Faced with the sudden upheaval, a trace of sorrow crosses Mika’s face, but she quickly collects herself, turns away, and says she will go prepare dinner. Yet the octopus she has brought home turns out to be still alive, writhing its tentacles madly on the floor, making Mika scream in fright. The couple stare helplessly at the living octopus and finally decide to take it to the river and release it. Standing on the bank, the two watch it slowly swim back into the water, and in that moment both are inwardly stirred.

After releasing the octopus, Daigo makes a momentous decision: to give up his career as a cellist and take Mika back to his hometown in Yamagata. To his surprise, when Mika hears the proposal she agrees without a moment’s hesitation, a long-absent smile spreading across her face.

And so Daigo sells the precious cello and returns with Mika to his old hometown.

There they have a house his mother left behind, so rent is no worry, and the cost of living is low — daily expenses far less than in Tokyo. But if neither of them works, life will be tight, even to the point of having nothing to put on the table. So Daigo must find a job to keep the household going. Then one day he happens upon a want ad with an eye-catching headline: “NK Agent — assisting travelers. Short hours, high pay, no age limit, no experience required.”

Strange — what job asks nothing about age, pays well, is easy and stable, sounds like a travel-agency guide, and yet mentions something to do with beauty and makeup? You may have guessed from the film’s title: yes, this “cushy job” advertised in the paper is that of a nōkanshi, one who lays the dead into their coffins. The “NK” in NK Agent stands for the Japanese word nōkan, “encoffining.” And “assisting travelers” means seeing the dead off on their journey.

At this mysterious, odd little NK firm, Mr. Sasaki, who conducts the interview, merely looks Daigo over a few times and hands him an offer of five hundred thousand yen on the spot. After all, finding anyone willing to take on what most people see as “making a living off the dead” is terribly hard; the company simply cannot recruit. In Japan, the nōkanshi is a specialist who cleanses the bodies of the deceased, composes their features, and sends them off in peace — a singular profession. For all its reverence and ceremony, in Japanese society the nōkanshi is someone in direct contact with death, and therefore deeply discriminated against. In Japanese eyes the nōkanshi is a symbol of impurity. Unlike a street sweeper or a toilet cleaner, the impurity of encoffining carries a superstitious taint: a nōkanshi who daily absorbs such “ill omens” may even bring misfortune upon his family. To take the job means becoming a walking plague in others’ eyes, unable to hold up one’s head before one’s own family.

Given the household finances, Daigo has no choice but to grit his teeth and accept. Just like that, overnight, Daigo goes from being a refined cellist to an “ill-omened” nōkanshi.

Because of the profession’s reputation, Daigo dares not reveal what he does. Anyone who knew would look down on him — and yes, perhaps even his own wife would be no exception. When Mika learns he has found a well-paid job, she is naturally astonished and delighted. But under her further questioning Daigo squirms, and in the end only mumbles vaguely that he still plays the cello, now for a company handling weddings and funerals. Saying this, he cannot even meet Mika’s eyes.

When all is said, Daigo is only an ordinary man. For him, taking on by necessity the most ill-omened job in all Japan means an enormous challenge — from society, from family, and from his own sense of self.

And yet it is precisely this seemingly wretched profession that opens a door to a new world for Daigo. On the road to becoming a nōkanshi, he begins to rethink the meaning of life, worldly prejudice, the wounds of childhood, and the bonds between people.

So how does the profession of nōkanshi turn from a dirty job condemned by all into a singular emotional bond between human beings? To explore that question, let’s start with what makes this profession so special.

Aoki Shinmon and Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician

As we said, the encoffiner is called nōkanshi in Japan. And speaking of that profession, one figure inseparable from this film must be mentioned: Aoki Shinmon.

Aoki Shinmon is a writer and poet, and also a nōkanshi. Born in Japan in 1937, he spent part of his childhood in Northeast China, later entered Waseda University, then dropped out midway, his life sinking to a low point. In 1973, by a twist of chance, Aoki entered the funeral trade. This singular experience, and the semi-autobiographical memoir he later wrote, Nōkan Nikki — published in English as Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician — became a vital source of inspiration for Departures.

The film’s director, Yōjirō Takita, once said: “I have a sincere and heartfelt fascination with the world of the nōkanshi’s life and with those rituals. I wanted to find the truth that most people hide beneath a veneer of lies, the truth buried deepest behind life and death.”

In Coffinman, Aoki records the details of funeral rites at length, and writes many reflections on this singular profession. The nōkanshi’s work falls into two parts: yukan and nōkan. Yukan is wiping the body with alcohol and washing it clean with water; nōkan is composing the deceased’s features, applying light makeup, dressing them in the burial robe, and finally laying them in the coffin. Of these rites, whether yukan or nōkan, the novice Aoki at first felt extreme discomfort. At the start, the mere sight of a corpse was enough to make one want to flee in fear and nausea.

But as time went on, through cleansing and grooming the dead again and again, Aoki came ever more deeply to feel the solemnity of death, and the wordless communion between the living and the deceased that the encoffining rite makes possible. Aoki wrote: “To let the departed, with one’s own hands, bid farewell to their family with the most peaceful, most true, most beautiful countenance is the duty and obligation of the nōkanshi — and an expression of compassion and love.” This conviction sustained Aoki through a forty-year career as a nōkanshi.

So how is this communion between encoffiner and corpse embodied in the film?

The Encoffining Rite: Serene, Beautiful — and a Catharsis

At the beginning, although Daigo has joined NK Agent, psychologically he has not accepted the fact at all. To make matters worse, his first job with the boss, Mr. Sasaki, is to handle a body that has been dead for two weeks. The nauseating smell, the rotting flesh, the wriggling maggots make Daigo vomit on the spot. Though he only helps lift the corpse’s feet, when the rite is over he looks as though he has just returned from the gates of hell. The violent physical and emotional shock the corpse provokes plunges him into deeper depression and self-loathing.

Until one day, when Mr. Sasaki takes Daigo out on another job, he experiences for the first time the grave and sacred character of the encoffining rite.

The deceased is a woman whose features are serene. Daigo watches Mr. Sasaki, with slow and gentle movements, methodically dress the departed in a plain burial robe, his hands gliding softly yet reverently across her face. Then Mr. Sasaki deliberately asks the family beside him for the lipstick she used in life, and with a fine lip brush applies it stroke by stroke to her cold lips. At last the deathly pale face regains color — and in the absolute stillness, that color radiates an eternal beauty.

Suddenly Daigo understands the meaning of the encoffining rite: it can make the deceased look more peaceful, as if the cold corpse has regained its warmth. This quiet, sacred atmosphere also lets the family send off their loved one with more love and respect. The nōkanshi can make death less frightening, less cold and merciless. It is a comfort to the deceased, and a solace to the living.

Daigo realizes that in cleansing and making up the dead, a nōkanshi must not only remain calm and precise, but must treat the body throughout with tenderness and respect. Look — every movement Mr. Sasaki makes over the body thereby appears extraordinarily beautiful. Encoffining, it turns out, is far from a dirty, inauspicious job; it is a self-consistent aesthetics.

The final step of the rite is Mr. Sasaki respectfully sending the deceased into the coffin, while the family gathers around, weeping from the bottom of their hearts. Seen this way, the encoffining rite is also a rite that aids catharsis. As in the catharsis theory of ancient Greek drama, “catharsis” itself means cleansing and purification; encoffining the dead is, one might say, itself a catharsis for the passing of a life.

Interestingly, the rite is not only a bond between nōkanshi and deceased; it also changes relations among the living. For with its solemn atmosphere, its aesthetics of mourning, and its reverence for life and death, the rite binds all the living present closely together in a shared emotional experience. At first the deceased’s family are rude to Sasaki and Daigo — two jinxes who live off the dead, how dare they arrive late? But once the coffining is done, the family comes hurrying after them with a gift of money, apologetic, eyes brimming, and bows: “Thank you, thank you! Today she looked the most beautiful she has ever been.”

This apprenticeship, one might say, utterly changed Daigo’s view of the nōkanshi.

Afterward he gradually adapts to the work, and even comes to love it; even on cold nights of falling snow he is willing to go alone to some hotel to perform the rite for someone who has died in despair by suicide. Daigo finds that once he performs the work himself, the process is not only serene, beautiful, cathartic, and unifying — it also carries a kind of revelation.

Death as a Mirror: Knots and Reconciliation Among the Living

How so? Some of the unspeakable things between people often come to the surface at the funeral rites of the departed. The great Soviet director Tarkovsky once said that the most precious thing for human beings — the simplest, the thing everyone can have — is ordinary human relationship, the starting point of mankind’s endless journey. Departures not only reveals the relation between life and death, but also, in a delicate and sincere way, explores the relations between people. The film asks us this question: what, in the end, is the most essential feeling between human beings?

The encoffining rite provides a singular occasion on which many unresolved conflicts and knots between people can be released. Sometimes that release takes the form of conflict intensifying.

Once, for instance, Daigo takes on a young woman named Miyuki who has died in a traffic accident. At the rite he carefully applies her makeup and arranges her appearance. But her mother suddenly shakes her head, crying and scolding him: “No, my daughter isn’t like this — you’ve done it wrong. Do it over!” It turns out the mother wants the rebellious Miyuki, with her head of pink-dyed hair, restored to the obedient black-haired girl she once was.

At that, another relative, grief-stricken and furious, jumps in to accuse the mother: wasn’t it because you failed to raise Miyuki properly that she became like that? And so, like dominoes, the relatives present begin blaming one another in turn — as if everyone bore a share of responsibility for Miyuki’s death, yet no one could truly “atone” for it.

On the other hand, death can also dissolve unnecessary prejudice between people, allowing the essence of feeling between the living and the dead to emerge.

Once, for instance, Daigo takes on a young deceased named Tomio — fine-browed, handsome-featured. In the memorial portrait he is dressed as a boy, hair cropped close, smiling happily. But the Tomio lying on the floor looks like a young woman: long hair, two slender brows. We can more or less guess that Tomio was transgender — someone whose gender identity differed from the sex assigned at birth.

At the rite, Daigo respectfully dresses Tomio in a woman’s kimono and meticulously, gently applies exquisite feminine makeup. When the encoffining is done, Tomio’s father breaks down weeping: “After Tomio discovered something was wrong, he was always out getting into fights, and it had been so long since I really looked at him. But seeing his face today — ah, I feel again that he is my child… even dressed as a girl, he is still my child.” It is as if only after this rite is complete that the father truly, fully knows and accepts his singular child. Before the body of the deceased, the family’s prejudices seem automatically to lose their force. The complex relations between the departed, their kin, and even society at large can often thereby be reconciled.

The rite’s power to move also shows in the transformation of Mika.

At first, when Mika discovers her husband is working as a nōkanshi, she is both furious and heartbroken, and demands through tears: “Doing this kind of work — aren’t you ashamed?” Daigo counters: “Why should I be ashamed — because I touch the dead? Everyone dies. I’ll die, you’ll die. Death itself is a perfectly ordinary thing!”

Weeping, Mika begs Daigo to change jobs. She could refrain from asking about his secret loan for the cello; she could willingly follow him back to his country hometown; but she simply cannot accept his continuing as a nōkanshi. Mika cannot fathom why Daigo refuses her plea. Does he mean to do this work for the rest of his life? However deeply she loves Daigo, for the first time Mika feels her husband has become a “filthy” person. In a fit of anger, she leaves home.

But before long, Mika forgives Daigo. By then a new life is growing in her womb. She had thought she could use this to persuade Daigo to quit, so the child would not someday be bullied for having a nōkanshi for a father. As it happens, before the words can be spoken, the old lady from the bathhouse whom they both know passes away, and Daigo takes Mika with him to the scene. It is then that Mika sees for the first time with her own eyes how Daigo works. His encoffining rite is so delicate and sincere, so full of respect and care for the dead. Encoffining, it turns out, is not lowly or shameful work — on the contrary, nothing demands more respect between one human being and another.

At this rite, Mika truly understands Daigo’s choice.

Living Toward Death: Salmon, Food, and Hot Baths

The experience of being a nōkanshi prompts Daigo to rethink the meaning of life.

One allegorical scene shows Daigo standing on a bridge, watching the salmon in the river. The salmon swim upstream, paying with their lives to breed the next generation, while some dead salmon drift back down. Daigo cannot understand it: swimming all the way up just to die — how pitiful. Since death comes either way, couldn’t they take it easier? But then a passerby stops and says with a smile: “It’s the law of nature — they were born this way.”

Indeed, death is terrible and life is mortal; yet life’s very essence and instinct is to strive to keep living, even while living toward death. Like the salmon’s migration, which is not for the sake of death but for the continuation of life.

The film is full of such details that set life and death against each other.

For example, after every job Daigo eats a huge meal. The encoffining rite is not only mentally exhausting; it symbolizes direct contact with corpses and with death. As the saying goes, “not yet knowing life, how can one know death” — this intimate contact with death makes one more reverent, devout, cherishing, and protective toward life. Compared with death, being alive is ardent, beautiful, instinctive, full of craving. Food, which sustains life, is also one of the most primal forms of that craving.

Actually, the habit of feasting began with Mr. Sasaki. Mr. Sasaki’s wife died years ago; he composed her features for the funeral himself, and thus set out on the nōkanshi’s path. Perhaps because of his deep experience of death, Mr. Sasaki especially treasures these small, certain happinesses of being alive. Once he invites Daigo to a barbecue, fugu — pufferfish — sizzling with fat on the grill. Mr. Sasaki says wistfully: “If you’re going to eat, you’d better eat the good stuff.” Indeed — since life is short, seize the day and savor the taste of being alive. The two of them go at the fugu as if it were the last meal of a condemned man, and it tastes extraordinary. It’s good to be alive — as Mr. Sasaki sighs after swallowing: “It’s so good it’s almost a problem!”

Reverence for food is part of Japanese culture, and the close-up on the act of eating is a signature of Japanese cinema. But the food close-ups in Departures are a variation on that tradition: the camera lingers on eating not merely to display an everyday aesthetic, but because eating bears on the great matter of life and death. The food needn’t even be refined — Daigo and his colleagues demolishing fried chicken around a little table, or Daigo gnawing sandwiches and hamburgers in the office and the car, enough to make your mouth water through the screen.

Another such life-death detail is the hot bath. After his first contact with a corpse, Daigo is unstrung, suddenly filled with terror of death. He rushes to the public bathhouse and scrubs himself thoroughly in a hot bath. Even as he deeply feels the flesh’s fragility and transience, he realizes that to soak one’s body in a warm bath is a luxurious happiness — a warm, clean, grime-washing spell of beauty, a privilege reserved for the living.

And having touched dead bodies, the living body appears especially precious — and especially fragile. Life is good food, a hot bath — and also love. So that day, coming home, the moment Daigo sees Mika he throws himself at her and holds her tight, frantically pulling off her blouse, just to press truly, nakedly against her skin and feel his beloved’s breathing body.

Reconciliation with Father: The Stone That Rolled from His Palm

Finally, this regaining of life through death’s reminder also appears in Daigo’s reconciliation with his father.

Daigo’s relation with his father is a hidden thread in the film. Daigo’s mother died two years earlier; his father ran off with a waitress when Daigo was six. From then on, father and son had no contact. Perhaps, as others said, his father really was too guilty to face him — but Daigo bitterly hated his father for abandoning his wife and child. So when he learns of his father’s death, he is unwilling even to go see him off. They’ve been struck off each other’s family registers anyway — what necessity is there to go?

Yet beneath Daigo’s anger hides a deep sorrow born of the broken bond between father and son. The news of his father’s death unexpectedly becomes the occasion for him to face the knot in his heart. At the gentle urging of Mika and his colleagues, Daigo finally decides to bid his father’s body a last farewell, so as to untie the knot of so many years.

But when Daigo truly stands before his father’s corpse, he is astonished to find that the anger pent up in him for years has nowhere to vent itself. He remembers many things from childhood. Back then, he truly had felt a father’s love. His father practiced the cello with him, and taught him a game of using stones of different shapes from the riverbank to express feelings. These stones became a secret means of communication between them, and they agreed to keep exchanging stones. Stones could convey moods: a smooth stone meant a calm heart; a bumpy one meant worry. They had agreed to continue this “stone lore” game, and his father promised to give Daigo a stone every year. Then his father left without a word of farewell, and the promise came to nothing.

Daigo has kept this beautiful, sour memory in his heart all along, while resenting his father for breaking faith. But now, more than thirty years later, actually seeing his father’s body, Daigo studies the features and finds he cannot recognize his father’s face at all. Even if they passed on the street, Daigo might not know him. And the owner of this body is gone now too — what meaning is there in the resentment stored up all these years?

The film’s final scene shows Daigo, accompanied by Mika, personally encoffining his father. While arranging the body, he notices one hand clenched in a fist. Carefully Daigo pries the fist open, and a round stone rolls from his father’s palm. Yes — it is the stone game of their secret childhood communication. So at the very last moment of his life, what his father thought of was this promise between them?

What filled his father’s heart at that final moment — regret, remorse, guilt, or longing — Daigo can no longer know. But that stone, with its bumps and tiny holes, is perhaps his father’s wordless expression of how he held his son in his thoughts. The instant the stone falls, life’s regrets seem gradually to dissipate with death; while the love and memory the stone represents, for its very purity, remains vivid and powerful, and seems even more real than death.

Through the journey of a frustrated cellist turned nōkanshi, Departures shows a profound insight into life, death, and the human world. In this story, death is no longer a symbol of gloom and terror, but a process of gentle reconciliation. As Daigo sees the departed off again and again, he gradually grasps the true meaning of cherishing life and living it well. The film’s final shot shows Daigo, having completed his father’s encoffining, laying his hand gently on Mika’s belly, where a new life is growing. In that moment, death and new life interweave between the nōkanshi’s hands, forming a profound metaphor for the cycle of life.