He sees the way people live, and the way they greet their farewells. A loving and hard-working grandmother has a well-behaved granddaughter to put on stockings for her, a loving and kind father has his wives and daughters leaving lip prints on his face, and a rebellious and willful girl is blamed by her parents and her boyfriend since childhood. After the death of a man raised by a girl, the mother still decides the sex.
He treats everyone with the same tenderness, whether he or she was humble or domineering, good or evil. He followed the same procedures with the same meticulousness as before: cleaning the body of the deceased with alcohol, wearing spiritual clothes, posing peaceful postures for the deceased, wiping his face, putting on makeup...to leave the world with a beautiful face, while staying with his loved ones. forever in memory.
He is the undertaker. The talent is mediocre, and the fortune is bad. Once a cellist in the symphony orchestra, just after buying an expensive piano, the orchestra announced its dissolution. When I returned to my hometown in the countryside to make a living, I unexpectedly encountered this special occupation.
When friends heard that he had chosen such a career, most of them could not accept it, and even refused to talk to him; the soft wife was also furious when she found out the fact that was concealed, and said that she went back to her parents' home, was pregnant, and other women's only things. Magic asked him to resign.
But he refused. They don't know how depressed and gloomy he was when he stumbled into this profession at first; when he first helped his boss dispose of a corpse, he couldn't help but vomit with the smell of death; he threw helplessly at his wife's soft He looked at the birds in the sky and the fish in the water, and he didn't understand that since a short life could never escape death, why did he need to work so hard?
Dealing with coldness, sadness, and despair day after day, he thought he would escape sooner or later, but every job became a shock to his heart. The job of the mortuary is to take care of the remains of the deceased, but this stylized work brings out the respect for life, which is awe-inspiring.
He saw his relatives thank him and cry countless times. On the face of the deceased who had regained his face in life, the living recalled the laughter and regrets they had, and everything was relieved in front of this calm face. The father said to the disguised son, "Even if I pretend to be a woman, it is still me. My child", the husband cried bitterly to his young wife, "This is your most beautiful moment."
Everyone hopes that the last step will be perfect, and they have no way of grasping it, so they can only hope for someone who can help realize their dreams. Nothing strange. The crematorium worker, who has been bathing in the same bathhouse for fifty years, said: "Death may be a door. Passing away is not the end, but the transcendence, the next step, like a door. As a gatekeeper, I am here to send A lot of people walked away, saying: Be careful on the road, we will see you again."
"The Undertaker" reminds me of that Japan, which is full of sadness and death. It may not be appropriate to say that he died. Haruki Murakami said in "Norwegian Forest": "Death is not the opposite of life, it exists forever as a part of life" - in Japan, death is a part of life, not alien, not the opposite of life; facing death, Accepting death is one of life's lessons.
When the cherry blossoms are most prosperous, a gust of wind blows, and the trees and flowers float into the void; this is the most beautiful moment: the climax of life, and the feast of death.
Many of Yasujiro Ozu's films look at life from the perspective of the dead. Japanese art tends to show a deeper candor than other cultures when it comes to death. This candor enables them to pay attention to the subtle emotional ups and downs between people, and to deal with simple emotions in a delicate and long-lasting manner. Life shows its calm normality, with a thankful steadfastness and warmth. This is the philosophy of living to the death.
Indeed, the pain, parting, and suffering that you thought were unbearable, when you think about it in your entire life, will be relieved a lot. The mortuary master naturally resolved his knot. His father, who abandoned his family when he was a child, passed away alone in a foreign land. He rushed to send him away in his own way. The unfamiliar face became familiar little by little under his meticulous care. In an instant, his face was clear, reality and memory overlapped, and everything was relieved.
The mortuary was crying, his wife was crying, and the music was like weeping. He held his father's gift tightly and placed it on his wife's pregnant belly. "Death is not the opposite of life, it is eternal as a part of life", indeed.
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