To Leave a Trace: Cinematic Depictions of Ghosts, Death, and Preservation
In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car, all the main character, Yūsuke Kafuku, has left of his deceased wife is a tape recording of her voice reciting lines from a play. Well, that and all of the questions her death left behind: Kafuku had once caught her cheating on him with a young actor, but he never brought it up with her before her death. In her final conversation with Kafuku, his wife told him she had to discuss something important with him later, but Kafuku instead returns to her dead body after having spent the day avoiding the conversation. In life, she would tell cryptic stories in the night that even she wouldn’t remember by morning, as if they’d been plucked straight from her subconscious mind. With everything that is unknown, there’s almost the sense that Kafuku turns to this tape recording as if it could reveal any answers, simply because it’s the most tangible continuation of his wife’s existence.
Kafuku feels an immense guilt over his wife’s death, because he spent his day deliberately wasting time when his presence at home might have saved her. When his driver, Misaki Watari, opens up to him about her mother’s death, in which she failed to save her in a similar manner, Kafuku says, “You killed your mother. And I killed my wife.” But he hasn’t killed the idea of his wife, nor has Watari killed the idea of her mother. The deceased both live on in some way or another, as everyone who dies does. They live on as ghosts embedded into daily life, Oto Kafuku through a loop of her voice reading Uncle Vanya, Watari’s mother through a scar on Watari’s face that serves as a constant reminder of the events that led to her death. These are the most cruel sort of ghosts, though, because they’re the kind that can never offer the answers these characters seek. No matter how many times Kafuku listens to that tape, he’ll never know the sides of his wife he was never exposed to. He’ll never know why she cheated on him, what she would have said to him that day she died, what meaning her allegory-tinged stories could have truly held. Towards the end of the film, Kafuku tells Watari, “Those who survive keep thinking about the dead. In one way or another, that will continue.” When the living drift through life, forever haunted by those who have moved on, who are the real ghosts?
Of course, that tape recording isn’t literally a ghost, nor is Watari’s scar. For a movie based on a collection of Murakami stories and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car is curiously devoid of fantasy beyond feeling a bit surreal in its realism. Another film of his, though, imagines a scenario where the ghost in question is literal. That film, Heaven Is Still Far Away, plays like a sort of riff on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, in that it follows a character who, by some anomaly, can see ghosts, but it trades that film’s creepy suspense for Hamaguchi’s signature stretches of conversation. The film follows a man who is inexplicably connected to the ghost of a teenage girl and meets that teenager’s grieving sister. The ghost possesses the man’s body, allowing the sister (who is skeptical) to speak to her through the man.
Hamaguchi likes to explore the dynamics of closure being just out of reach, leading to people seeking answers in those who can’t possibly hold them: In Drive My Car, Watari and Kafuku are bound by disparate grief and search for answers in each other and others around them, only to have to contend with an inherent unknowability that they can’t fix in one another. In another film of his, Asako I & II, a relationship ends with a disappearance that leaves something not dissimilar to grief behind, and answers are searched for in someone who doesn’t hold the truth despite looking exactly the same as the person who does. Heaven Is Still Far Away further complicates this general concept, because even in its version of reality where ghosts are real, not every answer is attainable, and in fact the ghost struggles with many of the same questions and worries.
That itself serves as a sort of comfort: It may not exactly be closure, but it’s something close to it. To this woman, Satsuki, it’s important just to be able to talk to her deceased sister again, and while she expresses some frustration about the unknown, she seems to reach a sort of catharsis. It’s not unlike someone talking to a late loved one at their grave, and in fact features some of the same ambiguity around whether the dead person is actually receiving those words. Someone can have faith that their words are reaching some afterlife, but they cannot know. Satsuki doesn’t know for sure whether she’s talking to her sister or whether this man is making it all up, but she decides, somewhat sheepishly, that she might as well act as if it’s true.
And that man? He didn’t exactly ask to carry someone else’s grief around with him, as he didn’t choose to be the one who can inexplicably see the dead. When he happened to come across this girl’s ghost (who until then had been bound to her place of death) he allowed her to bind herself to him instead. Satsuki wonders why her sister would go with this man instead of turning to her family, but that’s just the thing: Sometimes, we simply don’t have control over what is preserved and how it’s preserved. We don’t hope for what remains of a loved one to be an inconsequential audio recording, nor do we expect to have to go through a complete stranger to access catharsis. Some things become immortalized, and some aren’t. Somewhere in the intersection of Hamaguchi’s two depictions lives Journey to the Shore, a film by Hamaguchi’s mentor and collaborator Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Journey to the Shore is a departure for a director best known for horrors such as Cure, Pulse, and Creepy (though he has worn many hats throughout his career), as the depictions of ghosts in this film are played not for scares but for a restrained-yet-desperate sadness. In the film, a woman’s husband goes missing, only to return years later as a ghost. He explains that he drowned at sea (a suicide, though this is not consciously dwelled on) and has since spent his days traveling through Japan, meeting ghosts and the living alike along the way, and that he would like for his wife to accompany him on a journey back to the shore.
Despite this dead loved one coming in the form of a physical ghost, he isn’t much different from the tape that Kafuku clings to for answers in Drive My Car: A cyclical being that can’t quite explain itself, yet constantly feels so close to having meaning. He offers some answers, as he confirms his death and its cause, but ultimately what he has come to show and tell his wife isn’t what she wants to know. He guides her along a journey through a kind, compassionate world, yet he himself seems relatively detached from humanity, a grinning simulacrum of someone who once existed, hesitant to create any reminders of his own complexity and flaws.
Still, her husband is a ghost desperate to impart some sort of wisdom, both to help her move forward and to help himself move on to a different realm of existence. He gives lectures to a room of students even in death, and in these lectures we see him grappling with the concept of the end, explaining that “nothingness isn’t the same as meaninglessness” as if to convince himself as much. Journey to the Shore, of course, is not the first or only movie of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s to feature ghosts, and his better-known technological horror film Pulse takes a more sinister, and perhaps even more depressing, approach to the topic.
In the film, ghosts are spilling out into our world, their own realm having reached capacity, and they use the then-young internet as a means to trap the living in their own loneliness. If every film about what is preserved, like Drive My Car, is secretly a ghost story, every ghost story is in turn about preservation. Pulse leans into that push and pull, relaying fears about what is preserved: loneliness and isolation that reverberate through eternal life. In the film, ghosts only exist because they have nowhere else to go, and those who are still living are forced to confront how alone they are even in a crowded world and with a growing level of access to one another. The dead and living are the same, they fear the same fate. A character admits as much: “I couldn’t bear it, that nothing changes after death. Just right now, forever.”
The film’s use of technology adds another layer of meaning, as the internet serves as a tangible means of immortalization. On the internet, nothing really goes away, and a person’s impact on the digital world is bound to long outlive them. It’s difficult to decide which is more disturbing: the idea that we can die without having left any mark of ourselves, or the idea that too much of our ourselves will remain in the mortal realm after we’ve left it. Perhaps the reason “nothing changes after death,” as that character believes, is that people live too much like ghosts to begin with, resigned to watching the world from the outside in, concerning themselves with the imprint they leave behind even while still living. Through the hazy pixels of a computer screen, we are all ghosts.
Other movies view death from a different perspective, asking not about what is preserved of those who have left us but instead about how we leave a trace, not just as grievers but as people who will also one day be gone. What is worth preserving? How do we ensure we live on in some way? How do we pass on the memories of those who came before us when we too are mortal? An influential example of this is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, which, true to its title, follows a group of people who have entered the afterlife. Or, rather, they’ve entered some kind of holding area that everyone stops by before the unseen eternity. The recently deceased are given a peculiar task: to identify one memory that they can take with them into the afterlife and hold forever. For some, the answer comes immediately. Others need a little coaxing, whether because they are hesitant to make such a definitive decision or because they’ve already lost so many memories and need help unearthing them. Some never get there: They are unable to identify a memory to keep, or outright refuse to choose one, and instead remain in the office as counselors for the future dead rather than moving on themselves. Fascinatingly, After Life is as much about what isn’t remembered as what is. When it’s explained that all but one of his memories will be lost, a character named Kenji is more interested in the ability to forget his past than about the chance to preserve a memory. “I’ll be able to forget everything else? Well, then that really is heaven!” he says. Memory, as it turns out, is a complicated thing, not a virtue or a curse. Some things we would rather let rot away.
Hirokazu Kore-eda began his career as a documentarian, and After Life is very much influenced by those roots. In preparation for the film, Kore-eda interviewed hundreds of people and asked them the very question that the film asks its characters: What memory would you keep, if only one? In the film itself, interviews of real people talking about their own real lives are interspersed among those with actors, thus mixing elements of documentary with the fiction narrative. While the film is about a mythical afterlife, this concept of preservation relates to the nature of film itself. Those interviews will live on long after the subjects themselves are gone, and their stories are immortalized much like the memories are within the film. It makes sense, then, that the film takes such a tangible approach to the idea of memories being preserved: Rather than waving a wand and saying it is so, the memories are only preserved through the act of recreating them on soundstages and committing them to film. Like the internet in Pulse, film here is symbolic of the eternal, less fleeting than our memories or physical bodies.
Ryutaro Nakagawa’s film One Day, You Will Reach the Sea explores similar concepts, and takes clear influence from After Life despite a rather different premise. Like After Life, the film incorporates real interviews into its narrative, telling the stories of real survivors of a tragedy as the fictional main character navigates a loss. It follows a character named Mana, whose best friend (and apparent romantic interest) Sumire dies in the devastating 2011 earthquake & tsunami in Japan. As we journey through Mana’s memories, we see that Sumire often held a camcorder, recording even the most inconsequential of moments. Mana, searching for answers and hoping to make something of her grief, travels to the site impacted by the earthquake, where a group of the earthquake’s survivors gather to honor their own lives and the lives of those they lost. The woman organizing the group wields, like Sumire did, a camcorder, which she uses to record interviews with the survivors (most of which are interviews with the real life survivors). When Mana asks why, the organizer says, “I ask that myself. On one hand to console us, but also to leave a trace.”
This touches on something so deeply human, the desire to preserve some aspect of ourselves and leave our small mark on the world, especially when we know what it’s like to lose others. Nobody wants to go quietly, leaving nothing for the living to grasp onto. When you view the situation presented in Drive My Car from the perspective of the soon-to-be-dead, it’s easy to understand that nobody intends to leave behind cryptic, useless remains of their own life. Nobody wants to be unknowable, yet everyone is, in some way or another. So, in some sense, the grieving survivors of One Day are trying to prevent doing to others what has been done to them. Their loved ones died suddenly, leaving much unanswered, and the survivors are trying to immortalize their shared stories in an attempt to compensate for the unknown.
When Mana returns home after meeting these survivors, she watches the tapes that Sumire left behind, those camcorder recordings she peppered her life with. By watching them, Mana honors the fact that Sumire, too, wished to leave a trace, and with the playing of these recordings we are launched into Sumire’s perspective, seeing the world through her eyes. At the very end of the film, after previously having politely refused to be recorded at the survivor’s group, Mana sets a camcorder up in her apartment and records herself speaking to the Sumire that isn’t there, an act whose meaning is doubled: She is speaking to the dead, knowing full well that some answers will never come, but she is also choosing to preserve herself and what remains of Sumire’s story. She is consoling herself, and she is leaving a trace.
In both After Life and One Day, You Will Reach the Sea, the act of preservation is less a pragmatic strategy and more a reflection of the mundane beauty of every lifetime. In the eyes of these films, everybody is worth remembering, every small moment is a candidate for eternal preservation. The act of recording oneself is a reminder that some things live on even in death, whether viewed by anybody else or not. The last minutes of One Day point to this mentality: We see animated glimpses into Sumire’s life, an apparent depiction of her life flashing before her eyes in her final moments, and we see that the memories that come to mind are the small ones: chopping a vegetable, watching ants march across a garden, clipping her hair back, a sunlit room, watching fireworks, turning the page of a book, taking a bath, seeing herself in the mirror. They aren’t moments that are unique to her except that they were seen through her eyes, and they aren’t the most traditionally important moments, yet they are the small bits of beauty that a dying mind chooses to rest on. It’s no wonder some of the characters of After Life had a hard time choosing just one memory to take with them. There’s so much beauty in a lifetime, so much beauty in the moments you would never think to hold onto when faced with that choice.
That collection of moments is expanded into the broader conceit of another film in After Life’s lineage, that being Kogonada’s After Yang. In a way, After Yang is like the synthesis of the concepts presented in all of the films mentioned thus far. If Drive My Car features a character trying to understand the deceased through recordings left behind and After Life explores the question of what memories are worth preserving, After Yang involves trying to understand the deceased through the memories they thought were worth preserving. Kogonada sees his film as being in dialogue with Kore-eda’s, which was initially an unintentional influence but of course became solidified through the more deliberate reference made with the title, and it’s not hard to understand why he sees parallels between the two works, as they both contend with the essence of memories after death and explore characters through what they wish to remember.
In the science fiction plot of After Yang, an android named Yang malfunctions and “dies,” leaving those who considered him family adrift and confused about the being they never truly understood. When the father of the family takes Yang to be repaired, nobody can find a way to fix him, but they do extract a memory chip that contains Yang’s memories. The father searches through the recordings Yang made, but the more he looks, the less he understands. Yang’s memory didn’t work like a human’s, as rather than the indiscriminate remembering that we have no control over, Yang could only remember brief snippets of life and save them to his memory, making it a more deliberate curation of what he cares about. These snippets seem almost arbitrary, they’re scattered moments of curiosity and awe at the seemingly mundane: tea leaves sinking in water, sunlight dancing on the wall, a friend sleeping, glimpses at the mirror. These are the moments we find beauty in as humans — you can’t say you’ve never been struck in a certain way by the sunlight filtering into your room — but, if given a choice, it’d be harder for us to recognize them as the most important moments, the ones we would save if we had limited memory.
After Yang also explores a corner of this concept that the other aforementioned films don’t touch, that being the question of who these memories are being preserved for. In these other films, the act of preservation relates more to the sheer concept of eternity: the earthquake survivors of One Day just want to be remembered, the dead of After Life are tasked with preserving something that will be seen only by themselves, but will exist forever. In After Yang, though, the main character feels as if he is intruding when he views Yang’s memories, and he sees it as a step too far when a museum wants to display the memories to the public. Yang’s goal, presumably, wasn’t to live on in some way, but to simply capture the things he loved. His memories are in the ambiguity between the intentional preservation depicted in After Life and the purely incidental tape recording of Drive My Car.
In a way, that memory chip is the ghost of Yang, an unintentional artifact of the end of someone’s existence. He doesn’t haunt the present, but the past, existing in the foreground or background of all of these scattered moments of shared history. His presence can only fully be felt after his death, when his actual participation in these memories becomes clear, as if the fact that he remembered these moments is what truly solidifies that he was there at all. And that’s the strange nature of ghosts, after all. They don’t come in white bedsheets but in fragments scattered over a lifetime, through recordings, memories, rooms once stood in. They exist because the person they represent left a trace, because someone found something worth preserving, even if every reminder of what has been preserved causes them pain.
All of these films, regardless of whether they feature actual ghosts, understand as much. When someone dies, they leave something of theirs behind. To remember the dead is to be haunted, and to leave a trace is to become a ghost.
