Departures

When the orchestra cellist Daigo Kobayashi plays in is suddenly disbanded, he loses his job and has no choice but to leave Tokyo with his wife Mika and return to his hometown in Yamagata Prefecture. With no special skills to speak of, he meets one rejection after another while job-hunting in the countryside—until he happens upon an enticing help-wanted ad: no age limit, high pay, very short actual working hours, a "travel assistant" urgently needed. He hurries off to apply at the NK Agency, only to learn that "travel assistant" is a euphemism for encoffiner—someone who cleanses, dresses, and applies makeup to the deceased before laying them in the coffin. Impressed by Daigo's delicate hands, agency owner Sasaki presses him to take the job. After much hesitation Daigo accepts, but he lacks the courage to tell his wife the truth and says vaguely that he is working as a "ceremonial assistant," letting Mika assume it has something to do with weddings. In the days that follow he attends to one departed soul after another: a young man of unusual identity, a mother who dies leaving behind a small daughter, an old man who passes away peacefully covered in lipstick marks. Through these partings between life and death, his initial fear, nausea, and self-doubt gradually give way to an understanding of the weight and dignity of this profession. Yet when Mika learns the truth, she finds him "unclean" and refuses to come near him, and they even have a fierce quarrel. Meanwhile, word arrives of the death of his father, who abandoned wife and child thirty years ago and vanished without a trace. As Daigo travels to bid others farewell, he too must confront the unhealed rift between himself and his father. This book is the novelization of the film of the same name. In plain, understated prose it records the daily life of those who work in the funeral trade, confronts the taboo surrounding death in East Asian culture, and, between cold bodies and warm hands, writes out the simplest and most profound understanding of life, family, and farewell. About 110,000 characters in length, the book is short, its emotion restrained yet lingering.