‘Bring Him Down to a Portable Size‘ (2025 – in Japanese the title is ‘Ani wo mochihakoberu saizu ni‘) by Ryôta Nakano reminded me of another Japanese film that deals with funeral details – ‘Departures’ (2008 – in Japanese the title was ‘Okuribito’) by director Yōjurō Takita. If that film explored the beauty and dignity of funeral rituals in Japan despite the associated stigmas, Ryôta Nakano‘s film deals less with the ceremonial parts (although they are not completely absent) and more with the separation of the family from the deceased from an unusual angle – with a combination of humor, empathy and a thrill of fantasy that could be characterized as Japanese magical realism, by association and with all the differences from Latin American magical realism. It is a very original film and I think that the feeling of novelty comes not only from the cultural differences between Europe and Japan. I dare say that many Japanese viewers may also have been surprised by the approach. I hope they were as delighted as I was.
Riko Murai, the film’s main heroine, is a writer. She lives a comfortable and fairly happy life with her husband and two boys in their early teens. In the scene that opens the film, Riko receives a phone call from the police in a remote prefecture in eastern Japan informing her, with typical Japanese politeness, that her older brother has died and that she is asked to come and deal with the cremation ceremony, receiving the cremated remains (‘at a portable size’) as the ‘chief mourner’. Her brother had been divorced and was one of his two children – a boy in the 4th grade – was under his care, while the older girl lived with his ex-wife. Riko’s relations with her brother had not been good. There had been a childhood rivalry between the two siblings, and the departed brother had had a disorderly lifestyle, without a stable job, living off their mother and then the better-off sister. Funerals are usually a ceremony of separation, but the separation between the departed and his sister, wife and children will be different than the characters and the audience expected.
Sometimes we know the missing better after their death than during life. This could be one of the film’s mottos. The way this story is told is very special. We are dealing with fantasy combined with humor and everything wrapped in that Japanese politeness that to us, Europeans, seems excessively ritualistic. That is precisely why the humanity of the characters appears all the more profound and surprising. The film also has a literary aspect – the main heroine is a writer and this story will generate a book that is practically written before the eyes of the viewers. The actress who plays the main role is called Kô Shibasaki and she plays with sensitivity and without ostentation, as does the entire team of actors. I think this film added to my understanding not only of the culture but also of the Japanese soul.