Departures

Daigo Kobayashi is a young married cellist who played in an orchestra that has just been disbanded. Suddenly on the street without a job and no hope for a career, Daigo decides to move back to his hometown with his wife. There he gets a job as a nokanshi, an "encoffiner", an undertaker, the man who ceremoniously washes and dresses the dead bodies and places them in coffins, sending them onto the next world. He is a bureaucrat, a gatekeeper between life and death. Daigo's work is despised by his wife and all the people around him, but it is through the death that he encounters daily that Daigo finally begins to understand what life is about. Until our own "departure" arrives, we must undertake to "send off" those we have loved. This holds true for the love between married couples, parents and children, and the ties that bind relatives, friends and colleagues.