I watched the Japanese fantasy film “Love Letters” and wrote a reflection on the meaning of death in the movie.

What is the meaning of death in Japanese society?

All humans die. Socrates is a human being. Socrates dies. It’s a classic example of a deductive argument that everyone has seen. Why do we use death as an example? Because death is so closely related to human beings. In The Age of Loss, Haruki Murakami writes that “death is not the opposite of life, but a part of life.” And it’s true. Death is the culmination of life, not its antithesis. Death can be a wonderful thing if you have no regrets.
Japan is quite an unusual country when it comes to death culture. The culture of halbok and kamikaze, where people kill themselves. The Japanese have a custom of taking death into their own hands. And it”s even seen as a virtue. There are also gruesome murders, which is why Japanese movies are particularly good at dealing with death. Of course, there are works from other countries that deal with death. For example, Nanni Moretti’s Son’s Room. However, whereas other countries’ works tend to focus on the struggle to recover from the shock of someone’s death, Japanese fantasy films about the dead tend to bring them back to life, whether in the form of mere memories, possession, or even outright reanimation. Of course, this is also to escape the longing for the dead, but instead of just depicting the suffering of the survivors, as in “Son’s Room,” we actually forget them through communication with the dead. In this article, we’ll analyze Japanese fantasy films that bring the dead back to life.

Rules of the Dead Fantasy Movie

“Love Letter,” “Rainbow Goddess,” “Now, I’m Going to Meet You,” “Shouting for Love from the Center of the World,” “Reincarnation,” “Secret,” and other works made since the mid-90s are familiar to most of us. Let’s look for the regularities that unite them as a genre. The first thing I want to talk about is why these movies are called “dead fantasy” movies. The reason I call them fantasy is because they follow the typical plot of a fantasy movie: departure → initiation → return. They start with the departure of the dead. They start with the characters dying or being dead. In the case of the dead, the starting point is that someone hasn’t forgotten them and is living on. The dead walk to a place where there are people who miss them. The second process is called ‘initiation into the present world’. The dead are brought back to life. However, the meaning of coming back to life here also includes coming back to life in the memories of the living. The dead are alive in memory. Those who are remembered by no one may be dead even though they are alive. The third process is ‘Return to the Hereafter’. The dead return. The living return to the world of the dead. Those who are remembered are forgotten by those who remember, for that is the kindest thing the dead can do for the living.

Fantasy of the dead as seen through ‘Love Letters’

Death is a very common theme in movies, just as we all die in life. However, the deaths in dead fantasy are those of people who are no longer in this world. The movie begins with a longing for the people we will never see again. Take Shuunji Iwai’s “Love Letter”. The first scene shows the third anniversary of the death of Itsuki Fujii. We see Hiroko Watanabe looking up at the sky and making eye contact with him, indicating that she hasn’t forgotten him yet. What she is looking at is not the sky, but Itsuki in the sky. The snow she’s being hit by is the snow Itsuki dropped on her. The footprints she leaves on the snowy hill are memories of Itsuki that she hasn’t forgotten. That’s why she’s struggling so hard down the hill. It’s like watching the final scene of “Through the Olive Trees. In Yochiro Takita’s Secret, the audience sees a death scene for the first time. It’s a dark night, and the bus is traveling through a wall of snow. As the bus subtly sways, observant viewers will detect a sense of death. This soon turns into certainty as the dozing bus driver fills the screen. And when we see a mother and daughter talking in unison, the audience feels the suspense of knowing that they cannot escape death. The next scene, the father rushes to the hospital, and the mother and daughter are seen talking together, and the audience feels suspense because they know they cannot escape death. In the next scene, when the father is rushed to the hospital, the shadow of death becomes even more intense, and it lingers throughout the movie.
But they come back. What’s unusual about a dead fantasy movie like this-or maybe it’s obvious since we’ve already labeled it a fantasy-is that the dead come back. The dead can’t come back, but they do, hence the word fantasy. In the aforementioned Love Letter and Isao Yukisada’s Crying Out for Love from the Center of the World, the dead are brought back to life through memories: in Love Letter, through letters, and in Crying Out for Love from the Center of the World, through cassette tapes. In both films, we enter the world of memory through cross-editing. In “Love Letter,” a dream sequence in which Itsuki Fujii is sleeping in a hospital is intercut with a scene of her opening the door and a scene of her opening the door on the day she last saw him, and in “From the Center of the World…,” a scene of Sakutaro Matsumoto as an adult running through the night is intercut with a scene of him as a child running along a seawall.
If the above two works revive the dead from memory, in “Secret” only the soul returns. His wife’s spirit enters his daughter’s body. However, in this movie, we don’t see much of the husband missing his dead daughter. The main conflict in the movie is how the husband should treat his wife who appears in the form of his daughter. This conflict is maximized in the struggle over their sex life. The movie ends with the husband, fooled by his wife’s performance, giving his daughter away in marriage. In this way, the returning dead eventually die. Whether in memory or in reality. We’ll come back to this later.
The next movie we’re going to talk about is a movie about the dead returning as the living. In Nobuhiro Doi’s Now, I’m Coming to See You, a deceased wife returns “a year later, in the rainy season,” as she left her will. She returns alive, unharmed, and unscathed. She doesn’t come back as a ghost, but as a perfect human being. He’s even wearing clothes. What about Akihiko Shiota’s Reincarnation? The dead in a certain area come back to life in large numbers. With no specific explanation as to why, the movie focuses on depicting the relationships these people had in their previous lives. After a period of time, Miodo, the wife in Now, I’m Going to See You, and the many reanimated dead in Reincarnation must return to the place from which they came.
The “return” at the end of the movie is part of the fantasy movie formula. It can be a return of the dead to where they belong, or it can be a return of the living to where there are no dead again. Each movie depicts a ritual of separation. Given that most of these dead fantasy films take the form of melodramas, this is the part of the movie that tugs at the audience’s heartstrings the hardest.
The famous snowy mountain scene in “Love Letter” is familiar to anyone who hasn’t seen the movie. Hiroko Watanabe calls out to the snowy mountain where her lover Itsuki Fujii died. “How are you, I’m doing well,” is the greeting of her first letter to him, and soon, her last. She leaves him at the side of Akiba, her new lover and Itsuki Fujii’s friend, who, unusually, cuts to show a woman, Itsuki Fujii, lying in a hospital bed. Here, she too is repeating the greeting, “How are you doing? I’m doing well.” After realizing that the man, Itsuki Fujii, is dead, she wanders through her memories, realizing how much he liked her, and that she was secretly fond of him as well. It can be said that the spirit of the dead, which had been inhabiting Hiroko Watanabe, is transferred to Itsuki Fujii. In the final scene, when she receives a message left by the male Fujii Itsuki on a loan card (with the image of the female Fujii Itsuki on it) that is plugged into Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, she finally has a tangible proof of love. In contrast, the engagement ring is no longer on Hiroko Watanabe’s hand. What about the perspective of this final scene? It’s not quite a bird’s eye view, but it’s definitely a high angle. As if the man, Itsuki Fujii, is looking at her.
In “Crying out for Love from the Center of the World,” Sakutaro Matsumoto listens to a hidden tape of Aki Hirose’s upbringing and leaves her. When he finishes listening to the tape, he finds his lover by his side. In “Secret,” a husband sends his wife’s spirit daughter away by giving her away in marriage. The father’s feelings of giving his daughter away in marriage and the husband’s feelings of leaving his wife are combined to create a very sad emotion. In Naoto Kumazawa’s Rainbow Goddess, Tomoya is moved to tears when he reads a letter that Aoi secretly left behind. He realizes the love he never knew she had for him, but at the same time, he lets her go.
In contrast, “Now, I’m Going to Meet You” and “Reincarnation,” in which the dead return as real humans, take a different approach to parting. The returning dead all know when they will leave the world of the living again, and they quietly prepare for their departure. The process of saying goodbye to someone you’ve already said goodbye to once is deeply emotional, which may be why they came back to life in the first place. Like Mio in Now, I’m Going to See You, who leaves her son and husband with a list of things they need to do.
What is the most important element of these dead fantasy movies? It’s the memories of when they were alive. Although it deals with death head-on, perhaps what the movie is really saying is the power of memories. It’s saying that you can live on that alone. Many viewers of “Love Letter” will be familiar with how beautiful the junior high school years of Itsuki Fujii and Itsuki Fujii are. Their memories, which begin with a cherry blossom blowing schoolyard, are full of coincidences and coincidences that are reminiscent of a pure manga. But, crucially, they also happen in real life. But most of them didn’t happen in our school days, and that’s what makes us long for them even more. A classmate of the opposite sex with the same name as you, a library with white curtains swaying in the breeze, a bike rack that served as a romantic arena, and so on. Memories aren’t memories until they’re gone. It’s glorified, packaged, and placed in the deepest recesses of the memory box, and when it unfolds, we can all relate. Sakutaro Matsumoto and Aki Hirose’s school days in “Shouting Love from the Center of the World” and Takumi Miowa’s memories in the middle of “Now, I’m Going to Meet You” couldn’t be more innocent. But when these memories are with someone who is already dead, they can’t just be beautiful. They’re unreachable, they’re with someone you’ll never see again, and that’s why they’re bittersweet. The audience doesn’t understand why the living miss the dead so much. Only after seeing these old memories do they realize the nature of the longing, and the audience begins to miss them too.
An important aspect of these memories is the mise-en-scene. The screen is always a little more yellowish than reality, and there is a lot of acting. The school hallway scene in “Love Letter” is mostly shot this way. The light is so harsh that it’s hard to see beyond the classroom windows. And the windows in the stairwell beyond the hallway are filled with so much bright sunlight and smoke that it takes away from the sense of the space being real. And it’s connected to a sense of nostalgia. The flashbacks in “Reincarnation” feel like black and white tones with a touch of yellow, which is probably the most common way to do flashbacks, but it can also be a very common mise-en-scene. In addition, props are an important part of the mise-en-scene. Test papers, paper envelopes, and library cards in Love Letter, rain, ballpoint pens, and pockets in Now, I’m Going to See You, rings made of banknotes in Rainbow Goddess, a camera, and a cassette player in Shouting Love from the Center of the World are all mediums that bridge the gap between reality and memory.
Finally, most of the dead fantasy films have an element of reversal. In The Secret, the wife is pretending to be her daughter; in Reincarnation, Aoi is actually dead; and in Now, I’m Coming to See You, Mio is brought back to life. However, this is more of a trend in modern cinema than it is unique to dead fantasy films. It’s a strange time when a movie is considered boring if it doesn’t have a twist.

Comparison with an exceptional dead man’s fantasy movie – ‘Phantom Light’

The year 1994 is remembered as a very important year in the history of Japanese cinema. It was the debut of two directors who would go on to dominate Japanese cinema. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Illusory Light and Shuunji Iwai’s Love Letter were released on the same day. They also share a common thread: they’re both about a woman who can’t get over a dead man. However, there are obvious differences between the two films. Whereas “Love Letter” is a popular, cartoonish movie, “Illusory Light” is an art film, with static shots throughout the movie. There are also not many dialogues.
Hirokazu Kore-eda has since gone on to become an internationally recognized director with films like Distance, It’s a Wonderful Life, Nobody Knows, and Hana. It’s noteworthy that all of these films deal with death. Distance is a movie about people memorializing the dead in a cult case, It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie about the afterlife altogether, and Nobody Knows is a story about children facing death. The recent Korean release of “Hana” is also related to death, as it tells the story of a samurai who dreams of avenging his late father. However, all of them have a different trajectory from the previously defined dead fantasy films. Let’s make a comparison between ‘Love Letter’ and ‘Phantom Light,’ a story about the dead released the same year.
Phantom Light is a movie about Yumiko, a woman who lives with the memory of her husband, who suddenly commits suicide while leading a harmonious family. Most of the movie follows Yumiko’s life. The “departure, initiation, and return” of the dead fantasy film does not apply to this movie. Yumiko remarries and adjusts to that life. But just as the audience is getting used to her new life, Yumiko is told the story of the night her husband committed suicide. “Love Letter” also has a high proportion of flashbacks, but they don’t appear until about an hour into the movie. However, the previous running time is all a device to connect to these memories. ‘Illusory Light’, like Nanni Moretti’s ‘Son’s Room’, shows the remnants of the family living in a calm manner. Even after hearing the story of her husband’s suicide in the middle of the movie, Yumiko remains calm. In fact, the audience is more concerned about her. Neither the audience nor Yumiko knows why her husband committed suicide, but she simply accepts the situation. There are no flashbacks either. Perhaps this is because it is not the story that is important here, but Yumiko’s psychology as she listens to it. The movie is dominated by extreme long shots and close-ups. This may be to show the empty space left behind by her husband, or it may be to convey the impermanence of human existence. In addition, the blue color of the screen gives the film a sobering effect. Yumiko’s strength is evident as she does not ask for sympathy from the audience. Unlike “Love Letter,” which is driven by the power of the visuals, “Illusory Light” is driven by the flow of emotions caused by the sequence of events. This is a characteristic of Shuunji Iwai, a former music video director, and Hirokazu Kore-eda, a documentary filmmaker. If Shuunji Iwai is an omniscient writer, Hirokazu Kore-eda is a third-person writer.
Even in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is a direct depiction of the afterlife, it’s not the single memory they remember that matters, but the feelings of the characters after they die. This is perhaps the most characteristic of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films. The camera, which stays as an observer the whole time, builds up emotions layer by layer. As an observer, the director cannot reminisce about the past. Even the flashbacks in “Distance” are really just a sequence of characters. This is the difference between the two points of view of a young director (now a mid-career director) dealing with death.

How should humans deal with death?

In the filmography of director Shuunji Iwai, “Love Letter” is quite an unusual movie. In Japan, it is considered his masterpiece, but his masterpieces are more like All About Lily Shu Shu or Swallowtail Butterfly. It’s hard to equate the stance of “Love Letter” with the stance of those films, which examine life and death from a very dark perspective. But there is one thing that is clear, and that is that Love Letter is a very well-made film. Its influence on subsequent films, both large and small, is evident. It’s not hard to see how it influenced the movies that came after it, both in small and large ways.
Everyone is born, everyone dies. All 7 billion people on the planet will die at some point. Death is a part of life, but it’s often understood as the antithesis of life. Most likely, it’s not just because death is painful. Most, if not all, deaths that humans accept are not their own. When we accept our own death, we are already dead. That’s why we understand the concept of death by applying it to ourselves. The death of another person is something you will never see again. There are good memories and bad memories, but they will never be added again. It is then best for the living to desperately hold on to the memories of the dead. But the dead don’t come back. Our memories fade, and the memories we hold with both hands are left in only one hand, and eventually both hands are gone.
In dead fantasy movies, the characters who return from the dead consistently say, “Forget about me.” They return because the living miss them, but it’s the dead who worry about them. They come back because they want to say that. Forget about them and live happily ever after.
Hiroko Watanabe will probably end up marrying Akiba. And she will gradually forget Itsuki Fujii. Hiroko Watanabe sends back all of Itsuki Fujii’s letters to her. Now it is she who must bear his memory. She may be able to forget him, but since the dead live in their memories, Itsuki Fujii will live on in her. In “Reincarnation,” the ultimate in dead man’s fantasy movies, the condition for the dead to come back to life is that they must have someone who draws them. Maybe Itsuki Fujii will come back to life to find his first love, the girl he had a crush on for three years in middle school, and who eventually made him fall in love with a girl who looked like her.