Death is always a heavy topic, but the view of death is very different from that of the East and the West. The biggest proposition of traditional Chinese Confucianism for death is to be cautious and pursue the far away, after all, it is death, and the far is the deceased person. Death is the destination of life, the continuation of life, so to respect the dead is to try to enshrine him as much as possible to symbolize his life. And these concepts are precisely absent in Christianity, because Christianity does not talk about reincarnation, there is no afterlife. In the Christian view, man dies in the arms of God, not as a new birth but as salvation, and repentance is used to eliminate his sins in order to receive God's forgiveness. The Mortician shows us how to return dignity to the dead and the living, and how to part with the dead through this final graceful ceremony. Death, through the hands of the mortician, becomes no longer terrible, it becomes a continuous whole with life.
The story tells the story of Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), who wants to achieve a career, after four months of orchestral performance, but gets the bad news of "the dissolution of the orchestra". Forced to do so, Daigo and his wife Mika (Ryoko Hiromi) move to their hometown in search of a new beginning. One day, Daigo was attracted by NK agency's high-paying short-term job recruitment advertisement and came to NK agency for an interview. Who knows that president Sasaki Iei (Yamazaki Nu) decides to hire Daigo without saying a word, but avoids talking about the content of the work. After repeated questioning by Daigo, President Sasaki finally explained that he was working for Nou Kan (Japanese). Despite his psychological fears, the high salary made Daigo accept the job. But this kind of work is not easy for ordinary people, on the one hand, the discomfort of the body, on the other hand, to hide his work from his wife and friends, And Kobayashi Daigo's extraordinary work began.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > life and death</h1>
There are always two ends to life, one is life and the other is death. People always praise the liveliness and noise of life, but they often escape the solemn sorrow of death. Although it is inevitable that people will eventually die, death is seen by the world as rotten, filthy, and disgusting, and they are often unwilling to touch it, or even to mention or think of death in life. After the first contact with the highly decomposed corpse, Kobayashi Jun kept rubbing his body hard, and saw that the meat was disgusting, and everything showed people's panic about death. Surprisingly, this panic turned into the madness of kissing and touching his wife, and the purity and longing for life spread to every corner of the screen. Perhaps the meaning of life is precisely because it is short. Because this ephemerality forces us to pursue the existence of beauty with all our might, to try to preserve all that is good.
After Kobayashi Jun fully entered the mortician profession, worldly prejudices also followed, and his wife and neighbors began to alienate and avoid him. Although he was very upset, he was still too gentle. When he held the hands of the dead again and again, touched their cheeks and foreheads, wiped their bodies, put on stockings for the grandmother, combed the hair of his son, and lit lipstick on his wife, he knew that they had entrusted him with the last curtain of the person they loved the most. He can only reciprocate with his own tenderness. This is also a good thing to do with the world. This feeling is like a small flower that blooms quietly in the dust, weak, but pure and kind.
The work of entering the mortuary again and again made Kobayashi feel like a violin solo, the cello solo on the country promenade, Hisaishi let nature as the stage, heaven and earth as the audience, the silence of the snowy mountains, the swans flying high, cleverly combining the funeral work with the art of the cello, the piano and the sound, accompanied by the camera echoing each other, people can't help but sigh that this is an art that requires a sense of awe.
We always praise all life. Every new journey, there is always someone patting us on the shoulder, smiling with attachment, which is the blessing and farewell of relatives and friends. Probably every time we have a new experience, we are looking forward to a better world, a better future. Life is the same, clearly opening the door with tears, but everyone next to them is laughing, until everything is over, but no one is willing to face it. We will all say that the unknown life knows death, but the unknown death, how do we know what life depends on? At the end of the film, Kobayashi Jun, with tears, accurately, meticulously, and gently enters his father and sends him to another world. They all conveyed a wordless sorry. I can't help but ask how much love we need in our lives to be enough, and how much love we lack, to make up for it.
Perhaps, as the English poster for The Mortician goes, "The gift of the last memories."