Vocation by Death: Film Review of Departures
Blog / Produced by The High Calling
This past Easter, I found myself in a conversation with some friends about death. More specifically, about how our culture views and deals with the grief of losing a loved one. One person suggested that most people are in denial about it: “we put the aged in homes away from ‘real life’”; “we protect children from funerals.”
We also purchase anything that promises to keep us young and beautiful. Even talk of vocation sometimes leaves out the meaning of our work beyond death. It can seem that we just work hard serving family, society, church and self in the here and now.
I think there might be something wrong with this view of life and death. And maybe we should talk about it.
The main character, Daigo, is a talented cellist and young newlywed who is planning to travel the world with his wife, Mika, as he plays in a renowned orchestra. However, the owner of the orchestra decides that it is no longer financially viable and dissolves it. This leaves Daigo out of work and unsure of where his vocation is headed. He suggests to Mika that he quit the cello and that they move back to his hometown where his mother has left him a house. Mika agrees and Daigo begins to look for a job there.
His curiosity is piqued by an ad for an agency specializing in departures; a travel agency, he assumes.
His new boss calls it fate that Daigo has shown up for the interview, and before Daigo even really knows what this company does, he has the job and a sizeable advance. Doing what? Casketing. Preparing bodies to be placed in a casket and eventually sent to the crematorium.
Japanese culture has many rituals and beliefs attached to death. Touching or working with a dead body, for example, is considered bad luck. Culturally dirty, it leaves the person – in this case, Daigo – unclean. Daigo is ashamed and has no choice but to hide his work from his wife and friends, deceptively telling them that he assists with various “ceremonies.”
Departures
I recently finished reading N.T. Wright’s book on heaven and resurrection called Surprised by Hope. Wright argues that we live in a culture that assumes a lot about life after death, and this assumption guides our view of vocation. We often talk and act as though we were made for a different world, and we are. But, Wright points out, that different world is not one absent of time, space, and matter. It is the joining together of heaven and earth. It is “on earth as it is in heaven.” While reflecting on my Easter conversation and Wright’s book, I viewed the Japanese film, Departures. Departures won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009 and it beautifully captures this tension between vocation and our ultimate confrontation with death.