I watched the movie Okuribito last night. Look it up on wikipedia, it’s an award-winning film about a former professional cello player who is forced to take a job as an undertaker to make ends meet, and is faced with the supposedly unjust scorn of his family and community. It tugged at all the appropriate heartstrings when it was about his own deceased parents, except whenever the wife was onscreen, when it tugged at the fightorflightstrings. I don’t know if someone raised exposed to this kind of husband-wife dynamic would react the same way, but I was unable to see her as anything other than an annoying cluster of Japanese feminine stereotypes (simple-minded, genki, cheerfully obedient household servant, voice like a detuned oboe), made more annoying by the her being the ostensible symbol of the protagonist’s fraying connection to decent, normal society. If that is what normalcy brings, then bring on the deviance.
But what moves me to write tonight is that all the people who supposedly unjustly scorned the hero were actually mostly correct to do so. The job that he does, as portrayed in the movie, is performed as an essentially mandatory social rite, part of a funeral, which people would be made to feel guilty about or shamed for if they left undone. Basically, it’s the ornamentally performed dressing of the body of a deceased person in ceremonial clothes and makeup before the person’s family, in their home. In the movie he masters this task sufficiently to be able to do it solo within a few months. It’s unclear how long it’s supposed to take to perform a single job, or how often jobs come in, but it seems unlikely to be very heavy on hours. He’s also compensated well enough ($5,000 a month, in a very rural community) to make it clear that the service they provide is quite expensive. The scenes of him and his boss performing this service naturally feature plenty of tearfully remorseful (to the deceased), regretful (to themselves) and thankful (to the undertakers, although probably just because there are no other appropriate outlets for thankfulness available) family members, none of whom seem to be the one paying the bill.
The ostracism he suffers from the community and his wife stems from the “filthiness” of the job, which of course IS irrational and prejudiced. I think they’d find more sturdy ground on which to shun him if they instead focused on the fact that he performs an apparently simple job that people are more or less forced to hire him for at a time they’re most vulnerable to emotional blackmail. He deserves resentment for that, and the family members at those services have the right to feel taken advantage of and disdainful of someone who would earn a handsome living that way.
