After Life (Japan, 1998)
Directed and written by Hirokazu Kore-eda
People from all walks of life make their eternity from the memory of the most loving moment they can recall. They allow the knowledge of their death to bring them life, showing the power of cinema to stir us to the same.
I envy anyone watching this movie for the first time. It’s a quiet film, but it is best for the viewer to remain alert and not be lulled by the film’s gentle pace or intriguing characters into thinking that you fully understand what’s going on. We see people arriving, one by one, at a decrepit schoolhouse, and as a bell rings in the fog we wonder, who are these people, and what has brought them together? They are elderly and young and in between, and would seem to have little in common, yet they converse enthusiastically until a woman with a clipboard enters the room and apologizes for keeping them waiting. Then, as she calls each person by name, she explains that she is assigning them a room and a counselor.
We then see a young man sitting at a desk greet an elderly woman as she enters a classroom. Smiling, she sits in a chair opposite him, and he tells her that he must follow protocol and make sure she understands why she is there. “You died yesterday,” he says, adding, “I’m sorry for your loss.” The woman nods, still smiling, and says calmly, “I’m so sorry.” We sense that wherever she finds herself, her instinct is to establish good relationships, to cooperate and not cause difficulty for others.
And with that, we are off and running into the afterlife. This woman’s pleasant demeanor is one key to appreciating the film. It is not about death or even an imagined afterlife so much as it is about the lives we have lived and how we might come to view them after they have ended. In an interview, director Hirokazu Kore-eda explains that in Japanese, the title of the film means “wonderful life.” He is no doubt aware of the 1946 American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart plays a despairing man who is allowed to see what his family and town would have been like had he never lived. In an odd way, both films look more into the future than the past. But After Life is not in any sense a remake of the older movie. We see no flashbacks; instead, we hear people tell stories about the lives they have lived.
The counselors explain to the newcomers that their job is to help them choose the one memory they will take with them into eternity. They have three days for this task. The counselors will act as guides, and once the newcomers have made their choice the staff will attempt to create the memory on film. Immediately after they have viewed it, they will enter the afterlife. The counselors’ conversations with the people as they choose a memory offer the film’s most delightful moments.
This film has enchanted me ever since I first saw it, not only because this assignment caused me to reflect on what memory I would select but also because of the great privilege offered these recently deceased people. Wouldn’t any of us, in this life or the next, welcome being encouraged by sympathetic people to talk about our lives in a way that helps us put them into perspective?
We begin to recognize ourselves in some of these people and feel sorry for those who claim that they have nothing worth remembering. But other memories are inspiring. A veteran of World War II talks of being surrounded by American troops when he and his fellow soldiers were starving and suffering terribly from a lack of salt. He figured he was going to be shot anyway, so he asked for a cigarette and was surprised when a GI gave him one. He doesn’t want to ever forget the kindness of the American soldiers who fed their prisoners rice laced with life-giving salt.
One of my favorite people in the film is a sweet-faced elderly woman who does not answer her counselor’s questions. She may have dementia, but her wise expression and self-contained demeanor suggest otherwise. She simply chooses not to talk, except when she goes to the window and asks if the cherry trees outside will ever blossom. That question gives us a key to her personality and the memory she will eventually choose.
The counselors may joke about a client who speaks incessantly about all the sex he had in his life—and he provides the most preposterous memories in the film—but when a person is sitting in front of them, the counselors do not judge. They listen. One man talks about a suicide attempt he almost made when he was in his twenties, then describes the ordinary but beautiful thing that stopped him. A flirtatious middle-aged woman, the veteran of many affairs, says that she was a romantic at heart, but true love eluded her. The memory she selects is one of the most poignant in the film, but I missed its significance the first time I saw After Life. I wondered why anyone would choose the memory of simply waiting in a hotel room for a lover to arrive. While this woman sometimes lies, if you have been listening to her carefully, her choice is unutterably sad, but it makes sense.
It’s easy to get lost in these characters and their stories, but as the film reveals itself slowly, it is important to keep asking questions. Who are the counselors, and why are they working here? This becomes significant as the staff, rather than those they serve, become the movie’s focus. One scene in particular merits close attention. A young counselor, Mochizuki, has been struggling to help a man who died in his seventies select a memory. In their discussion of Japanese social attitudes toward marriage, Mochizuki refers to “our generation.” That “our” is essential in understanding the rest of the film.
After Life rewards repeated viewings. Much of its deceptive simplicity comes from its matter-of-fact narrative style. Kore-eda chose as his cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki, an experienced documentarian who insisted on using a handheld camera, which makes us feel that we’re not watching fiction but real life. It also frees Kore-eda from the cliched clouds, dreamy soft-focus, and mawkish, sentimental overkill that we find in many films about life after death, such as Ghost or What Dreams Will Come. No glitz or glamour here: the waystation on the road to eternity in After Life is a dingy schoolhouse with peeling paint.
There is another reason for the film’s realistic tone. Kore-eda has said that he was inspired to make it after he and his assistants had conducted interviews with more than five hundred elderly people about their views of death and the afterlife. He found their stories so moving that he asked a number of those interviewed if they’d be willing to be in his film. After Life has excellent professional actors in its cast, but there are also eleven ordinary people who said yes to Kore-eda’s invitation.
The elements of Japanese culture that appear in the film are mostly self-explanatory, and we can determine from the context what they mean. When a woman offers a childhood memory of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, she had been too young to be aware of the terrible devastation it caused. (The quake and subsequent fires killed 140,000 people.) Her memory is a happy one of playing with other children in the bamboo forest where her family had fled and of her mother making rice balls over a fire.
One woman speaks of praying before the shrine of her deceased brother, a common practice in the Shinto faith. Several characters mention having celebrated their “Adult Day” when they reached the age of eighteen. One of the counselors, Satoru, feels that he’s doing his duty as a father by working at the waystation until his daughter, who was just three when he died, can celebrate her coming of age. Until then he is content to visit her on what he calls the Day of the Dead, or the Japanese Obon festival. It takes place every summer, when people welcome the spirits of their beloved deceased, honoring them with songs and dances. The one truly nasty remark in the film comes from a trainee counselor, Shiori, a wary and cynical teenager who does not seem to mind having died young as much as having had a difficult life with no father. When Satoru becomes exasperated with her, she warns him that she is what you get when a girl grows up without a father.
As the counselors and a crew (who were the actual crew of After Life) prepare to film the memories that the people have chosen, the movie’s charm intensifies. The crew cuts cherry blossoms out of paper and, standing on ladders, shakes them out of baskets. They gently and rhythmically push against the side of an old bus for a man whose best memory is of riding a trolley as a young student. They make clouds out of cotton for a man who savors his memory of soloing in a Cessna. It is all delightfully homespun, a feeling that is reinforced as we hear the out-of-tune amateur band playing a march as they lead the group to the auditorium where they will watch the reenactments.
But through it all, a new and significant story is emerging. Shiori questions her colleagues, “What’s the point of all our work?” She has grown more anxious as she’s grown closer to Mochizuki and now senses that he will soon be leaving for the afterlife. During this week, one of the recently deceased has revealed something critically important to Mochizuki about his own life and a woman he had once loved. Kore-eda has said that he identifies with this character, who had felt that his memories were locked inside himself but has now learned that other people’s memories are also a part of him. Mochizuki had long felt aimless and lost but can now say, “I was part of someone else’s happiness; what a wonderful discovery.” When Shiori responds by saying, “I can’t bear to be forgotten by anyone else,” Mochizuki offers her a convincing reassurance. At last, he is ready to have his memory filmed, a scene that as often as I see this film will always make me weep.
In interviews Kore-eda has said that he feels that sensing the presence of the dead is necessary for us to understand our life, and he often thinks about the way that pieces of our lives are held in the memories of others. In his love of ordinary people and of life itself he reminds me of Agnès Varda, another humanist whose work encourages us to reflect on who we are and what we need to make us happy and fulfilled. This beautiful film is not so much about death as time and human memory. It affirms that our lives, while fragile and transient, are a treasure so great that we are to take good care with ourselves and with everyone we meet.
After Life offers us an irresistible invitation to consider the one memory we would like to live with forever. I would want to be with my family, sitting at a table in our big house in Honolulu, where three generations of the clan lived for many years. My parents, who brought me into this world, would be there, along with my two sisters, my brother, and their spouses, and my three nieces and a nephew. We would all be enjoying each other’s company and complimenting my husband on the magnificent Christmas dinner he had prepared. I could live forever on our conversation and our laughter.
A retired archbishop once told me that if he had to do it all over again he would invite his clergy “to get out of their pulpits” and live “among the people.” He was speaking of a place in which clericalism and patriarchy were taking a long time to loosen their grip. I think he overstated his earlier failures, but I knew why he felt able to say these things at that stage of his life. Variations on the theme often come from anyone nearing the end: people regret not living more freely, not speaking from the heart, not saying “I love you” more often, not figuring out what they really want and learning how to ask for it, not treasuring the little things, not caring for others, not slowing down, not doing what they know is right more than what is expedient or self-serving. Of course, sometimes people also rage against the dying of the light, wanting to hold on to what they cannot keep or to achieve something they cannot control; but regret for the past or denial about the future is a waste of spirit. After Life, a movie about death that loves life, shows the way beyond both.
Hirokazu Kore-eda was in his midthirties when he made After Life, and I was in my early twenties when I first saw it. I had recently had a confrontation with death, curled up on the floor of a concert hall in Australia, while punk violin played and I flash-forwarded to the future loss of my parents. The screeching strings seemed to tear open a curtain that had provided some protection, but now I was overcome with feeling alone and with dread that the people who had brought me into being would someday not be there. I think my psyche interpreted it as a signal that I would also not be “there.” It was terrifying and lasted for months. But it eventually integrated itself, or at least settled enough to feel like detachment, not collapse. I needed a tender guide like Kore-eda to help me discern the difference between taking death seriously and taking myself too seriously. After Life helped me begin to embrace the life-giving properties of death awareness.
One of those properties is that if we accept that nothing lasts forever (at least in its current form), then the universal spiritual teaching to not worry about tomorrow is more easily practiced. If one of my tomorrows will inevitably be the last tomorrow, then what I concern myself with today may look very different.
After Life is about the newly deceased choosing a memory to live in for eternity, but it’s equally about the ongoing journeys of the bureaucrats who serve them. They get to do for a living what Marina Abramović did in her performance piece titled The Artist Is Present: they sit in front of strangers, looking and listening deeply—perhaps the first time those strangers have felt heard and seen. The revelation that these officials are themselves in a waiting room, having not yet claimed a memory, is both moving and hopeful. Just as it may never be too early to start thinking meaningfully about death, our mentor Kore-eda, clearly an old and new soul at once, shows us the other side. It’s never too late to find a path to more life, even if you think you’re already dead.
I don’t want to diminish the pain that many of us have witnessed or experienced in the deaths of people we love, especially not the suffering that often accompanies a long journey of profound illness. But I have also experienced how catastrophe calls forth love, how people run into burning buildings to protect the vulnerable, how some of us with little have shared it with others rather than hoarding it and have discovered in that sharing that the little we had somehow multiplies, how weeping in someone’s arms provides a comfort that a happy hug never can.
And there are stories of people whose own deaths have helped them become the person they always wanted to be—or that their loved ones hoped they would be. “Let’s not panic”—the last words spoken by a friend who had just encouraged his spouse to pursue a path of liberation and love after his death—“because you have your journey, and I have mine.” After Life asks us not to panic. It knows of wars and rumors of war, of broken relationships and of letters sent but not received. It knows that sometimes it can take decades to learn to look up from our lives and consider the light—and the needs—in the face of another.
It knows most of all that there are essential moments—literally moments in which the essence of life is revealed: a quiet hour on a park bench with a heart about to burst, a hand held by a person who helped us feel safe, the way the first time in an airplane might feel like being united with spirit. Of course I have pondered what memory I might take into the afterlife, every time I’ve watched the movie, for over half my life now.
My maternal grandparents died on the same day, an hour apart. My paternal grandmother passed when my dad was two, my paternal grandfather when I was thirteen. I’m alive partly because my Jewish great-grandmother escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe more than eighty years or so before I was born. I grew up in a society where people were killing each other, fueled by political prejudice and aspirations. The story of death was part of the backdrop of my life.
Your story may be more or less dramatic. But we all came through a lot to get here, and a day will come when no one remembers us.
We spend so much time trying to fend off death, but if fears overcome our capacity to experience our souls, we risk never living at all. The best antidote is gratitude—not a feeling but a principle you claim—for the things for which you can authentically be thankful.
Living too close to an unhealthy story of death traumatizes some of us to the point of constant low-level fear. Many don’t find the nurture they need or know how to ask for it. Some respond with misguided and destructive attempts to overcome death through asserting rage and dominance over others. But the path of creative acceptance and life-giving attention to the things that matter most is available to anyone who asks. We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid death when embracing it would be better. That is what will expand your horizons, not close them off.
I understand why Kathleen says After Life is not really a film about death, though I see it differently. For me it’s about life lived in the light of a more whole appreciation of death, so perhaps it’s best to say that it’s about life and death together. As our perception of death is one of the most important influences on our perception of life, there’s a way in which thinking about death can be the most life-giving thing. After Life is a movie about transforming disappointment with events by making an appointment with life. If we don’t wake ourselves up from the nightmare imposed by unnecessary busyness, ego, careerism, the myth of redemptive violence, and zero-sum competition with our neighbors and enemies alike, our lives will be, at best, dominated by trivia (the enemy of experience) or, at worst, we’ll get all the things we think we want but discover in the end we have nothing that matters.
The challenge, and the invitation, is to take steps to move past the sense of time slipping away, to be in the moment you’re in—then, even a day of terrible weather can be a glorious one.
It seems so clear to me. The essence of life is love, and the way to experience this essence is to—simply and impossibly—do everything I can to notice and claim and fall into love. That means things that enable me to breathe more slowly and move toward union with self, others, and the beauty of the ecosystem. Maybe that sounds pretentious, so I’ll put it another way: the way to truly experience love is to slow down, be with others, and look up from your life toward anything that brings light.
Reflecting on the welcoming light in After Life, the experience of watching and being healed by movies and by the conversation I have with them and others makes my path clear. Perhaps the memory I’d want to take into eternity, and inhabit forever, is of being in a cinema with spacious seating and—more importantly—gracious friends, watching this movie.