Yojiro Takita
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Even Ikiru, arguably the most internationally lauded Japanese film to fixate upon mortality, swaddles its potentially improper subject matter in humanist ideals; its very title, roughly translated as “to live,” aptly emblemizes the manner in which Akira Kurosawa meant partly to meditate on the concept of will, using the imminent finality of physical life as a mere launching pad.
Cellist Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki, 1996's "Shall We Dance?") is in shock after the orchestra he plays for is disbanded.
An Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, this moving 2008 Japanese drama stars Masahiro Motoki (Shall We Dance?) as an unemployed young cellist in Tokyo who inherits from his mother a home in a picturesque northern mountain town.
If Shall We Dance?—in which a shy young bureaucrat liberates his inner foxtrotter on the ballroom dance floor—extended an impish invitation to Japan's tightly wound male corporate culture to unravel a bit, Departures gently nudges Japan's alienated new generation to find meaning in the performance of age-old domestic rituals.
In the presence of death, the old man has a hearty appetite; he hosts a Christmas party, which turns into the drollest chicken-eating scene since Tom Jones.
Director Yojiro Takita uses the changing seasons to echo the characters' moods; the score by Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle) has a suitably majestic sweep.
Director Yojiro Takita uses the changing seasons to echo the characters' moods; the score by Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle) has a suitably majestic sweep.
Yamazaki, never to be forgotten as the John Wayne–like trucker in the 1985 Tampopo, is an actor of absolute gravity and unreal smoothness, and he gives a top movie-star's performance in this role.
Daigo, however, has become the protege of a master in his art, Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki, "Tampopo"), and soon realizes the importance of the ritual of washing and dressing a deceased body for the loved ones left behind.
After moving there with his wife, he stumbles into a career as assistant to an elderly "encoffiner" (Tsutomo Yamazaki of Tampopo), someone who engages in the elegant ritual of dressing a corpse prior to cremation.
His master is Ikuei (Tsutomu Yamazaki, familiar from the Juzo Itami comedies Tampopo and A Taxing Woman), a gruff man who works through his grief by helping others work through theirs.