After Life: In Memoriam

Some memories are best left alone, but one doesn’t know that until one tries to relive them, sometimes to great disappointment. A book or movie that occupies a hallowed place in the mind from when it was first encountered in childhood or young adulthood may not be as wonderful when reencountered decades later. The times have changed, as has oneself. I have deliberately not rewatched Il postino for this reason, preferring to remember it as I saw it with the young woman who would become my wife, when it was a romantic and political touchstone that helped bring us together. Perhaps the movie would be as wonderful now as then, but why risk it?

It was a gamble, then, to rewatch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), which I first saw when it came out in theaters. I remembered the plot well enough, about a way station through which the newly dead transit on their way to eternity. A small staff oversees the operation, which appears to be a bit underfunded, judging by the spartan rooms, the aging infrastructure, and the lack of heat, evidenced by how everyone is bundled up inside as the weather turns to winter. The dead are told that they have a few days to choose one brief memory from their lives, which the staff will recreate on film, to serve as the infinite loop that they will see in perpetuity.

I loved the movie back then for its melancholy and its measured descent into an emotional revelation, the profundity of which lingered, and the welcome news is that I still do. If anything, the movie feels more insightful to me now, two decades later and after the passing of my mother, than it did at a time when I did not yet know death. Part of the magic of the movie comes from its balancing of philosophical questions about death, memory, and film with a story and style that are understated in tone and design. The Hollywood version would probably involve a soaring orchestral score, exaggerated emotions, and an explanation of the mechanics of the premise. After Life—Kore-eda’s second fiction feature, which brought him international acclaim and helped pave the way for later masterpieces such as Shoplifters (2018)—is resolutely not that film. It has little music beyond that provided by an off-tune house band composed of the way station’s workers; just one emotional outburst, which involves only some kicking of snow, alone, by Shiori (Erika Oda), an upset eighteen-year-old member of the staff; and no attempt to justify the world presented.

A lot is at stake, then, for the twenty-two souls who enter the dilapidated offices of this mnemonic gateway to eternity. About half of them are played by nonactors culled from five hundred people interviewed in preparation for the film, asked what memory they would choose. “I was quite surprised,” Kore-eda has said. “I hadn’t imagined that people would be willing to speak so elegantly about their memories. Many older men talked about their experiences in war, many older women talked about their experiences as students. There were a lot of references to food and sex, and specific tastes that lingered in people’s memories. I felt the film would be much richer if I just cast those people as they were.”

These stories in After Life are shot in a documentary-interview style, reflecting Kore-eda’s experience making four documentaries prior to After Life, as well as the nonfiction background of cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki, who would go on to collaborate with Kore-eda on most of his subsequent films. In these interviews, a sex worker recalls a client whom she loved; a World War II veteran remembers surrendering to American soldiers, who feed him when he is starving; a teenage girl chooses a trip to Disneyland, until Shiori pulls her aside and tells her that thirty other girls have chosen the same memory; an old woman remembers the 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo and mentions the “Korean riots” that followed. “The Koreans had gathered to run away, but people thought they were going to attack,” she says. Her memory may call up for the viewer other memories or questions or research that points to the fact that it wasn’t the Koreans who rioted so much as it was some of the Japanese targeting Koreans, massacring thousands.

The brief mention of the marginalized Korean minority in Japan, present because of the Japanese colonization of Korea, reminds us that the obverse of remembering is forgetting. Nations would rather forget their own contradictions or the events that might make citizens uneasy. As one unhappy man who has only unhappy memories realizes in After Life, if he can just pick one thing to remember, he can forget all the rest. “That really is heaven,” he says. He chooses a childhood memory of a summer’s day on a tram, which the staff must then recreate on the facility’s soundstage. There, a crew handles the lighting, sound, camera, set decoration, costumes, and casting.

Only one of the newly dead isn’t able to choose a memory. I won’t tell you who, or whom on the staff this person replaces, because the slow revelation of this part of the story is deeply moving. But I did wonder whether some of those unable to choose might in fact be refusing to choose, because as overworked as the staff are, they have, in effect, become immortal. They can still eat, drink, play shogi, get into arguments, fall in love, and venture outside into the rest of the world—as Shiori does, wandering the streets of Tokyo to scout locations. Meanwhile, the work must be as rewarding as it is taxing, since the stories of the dead are endless and endlessly unique, while the creative challenge of making movies to approximate their memories is constant. This is a liminal existence that is at once disturbing and, perhaps, hopeful.

Kore-eda himself seems ambivalent about the work and the choice he portrays. Asked in interviews what his own last memory would be, the director has given different answers. In one, he chose a memory from his nineteenth year, when he watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, about a dying bureaucrat named Watanabe, to whom he probably alludes in After Life:

At the end of this film, everybody in the theater stood up and clapped. There were no actors, no directors—nobody was there to be clapped for. I understand that you’d clap at the end of a play or a live show, but for a film, this was a really new experience for me. Everybody there, they really weren’t expecting this. They were just looking for a place to leave their responsibilities. I think they really enjoyed this movie from the bottom of their hearts. That was the moment when I realized that film is really powerful . . . I think that experience strongly influenced my decision to not become a novelist but to make films.

But in another answer, related to the first, he says he would become one of the staff. “I would choose to polish my directorial skills,” he responds. What better way to spend eternity for a filmmaker but to make and watch films?

Watching this movie inevitably makes one think about what memory one would choose for oneself, if one could. Like Kore-eda, I waver between the sweet torment of being an artist within a bureaucracy and choosing. Perhaps I would choose being in a library, where I spent the most wonderful hours of my childhood (the Japanese title of After Life translates as Wonderful Life). Perhaps I would choose a memory I cannot actually remember, captured in a photo of my mother in the prime of her life and me when I was three years old, walking between the towering trees of a rubber plantation in Vietnam. Or perhaps I would choose the memory I created after watching After Life for the second time, when I went to lie down with my sleeping sixteen-month-old daughter. I looked at her for a long time, knowing she would never remember this part of her life, and then I looked up at the camera of the baby monitor staring down on us, and pressed the record button.

After Life: In Memoriam

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