In this blog post, I will revisit the meaning of communication and longing after death through Japan’s ghost fantasy film ‘Love Letter’.

What is the meaning of death in Japanese society?

All humans die. Socrates is a human. Therefore, Socrates dies. This is a classic example of deductive reasoning that anyone might recognize. Why choose death as the subject for this example? It’s because death is so intimately connected to humanity. Haruki Murakami stated in ‘The Age of Loss’ that “death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.” And that is an undeniable truth. Death is the grand finale of life, never its antithesis. If one lived without regret, death could be a truly splendid thing.
Japan is a rather unique country in its culture of death. The culture of seppuku (ritual suicide) and kamikaze. The Japanese have customs surrounding embracing death themselves. And these were even seen as virtues. Furthermore, horrific murder cases also frequently occur. Perhaps because of this, Japanese cinema particularly often touches upon death. Of course, other countries also have works dealing with death. A prime example is Nanni Moretti’s ‘The Son’s Room’. But while works from other countries primarily focus on the struggle to escape the shock brought by someone’s death, Japanese ghost fantasy films actually bring them back to life. The forms vary widely, from simple memories to possession, or even outright resurrection. While this too stems from a desire to move beyond longing for the deceased, unlike in ‘The Son’s Room’, which focuses solely on the suffering of the living, these films depict communication with the dead that ultimately leads to forgetting them. Now, let’s analyze Japanese fantasy films that even resurrect the dead.

Defining the Dead Fantasy Film Genre

Films like ‘Love Letter’, ‘Rainbow Goddess’, ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’, ‘Shouting Love from the Center of the World’, ‘Reincarnation’, and ‘Secret’, produced since the mid-90s, are well-known and familiar to us. So, let’s find the common rules that bind these works into a single genre. First, I want to explain why I’ve labeled these films as ‘deceased fantasy’ films. I specifically added ‘fantasy’ because these films strictly follow the classic fantasy film plot structure: ‘Departure → Initiation → Return’. The beginning of these works is the ‘departure of the deceased’. Their death or state of being dead marks the start of these films. If they are already dead, the starting point is the image of someone living on, unable to forget them. The dead set out toward the place where someone longs for them. The second stage is ‘entering the living world’. The already dead come back to life. However, this ‘coming back to life’ simultaneously includes being revived within the memories of the living. After all, the dead are beings who live on in memory. Is one not dead, even if alive, if no one remembers them? The third stage is ‘Return to the Afterlife’. The dead return. Those who were revived return to the world of the dead. Those who were remembered fade from the minds of those who remembered them. This is the consideration the dead can offer the living.

The Fantasy of the Departed, as Seen in ‘Love Letter’

Just as death is inevitable in life, it is an extremely common theme in film. However, the death explored in the fantasy of the departed is that of people who are no longer in this world. The film begins with a longing for those we can never meet again. Consider director Shunji Iwai’s ‘Love Letter’. The very first scene depicts the third anniversary of the death of Fujii Itsuki. Looking up at the sky and catching the snowflakes, Hiroko Watanabe’s expression reveals she still hasn’t forgotten him. What she sees isn’t the sky, but Itsuki in the sky. The snowflakes she catches are likely the snow Itsuki sent down. The footprints she left on the snow-covered hill are surely memories of Itsuki she hasn’t forgotten. That’s why descending is so difficult. It’s almost like watching the final scene of ‘Through the Olive Trees’. In director Takita Yoichiro’s ‘Secret’, the death scene is shown to the audience for the first time. A bus racing along a wall surrounded by snow on a dark night. In the subtly swaying bus, perceptive viewers will sense the feeling of death. When the dozing bus driver fills the screen, that sense becomes certainty. And when the mother and daughter are shown chatting peacefully, the audience knows they cannot escape death and feels suspense. Just as one doesn’t know when a bomb will explode, one doesn’t know when the bus will plunge off the cliff. Soon, the bus carrying the mother and daughter crashes off the cliff. In the next scene, as the father rushes to the hospital, the shadow of death grows even darker, permeating the entire film.
But they return. The peculiarity of this kind of dead person fantasy film—or rather, since the word ‘fantasy’ is already attached, it seems obvious—is that the dead person returns. The dead cannot return, but because they do, the word ‘fantasy’ is attached. In the previously mentioned ‘Love Letter’ or Isao Yukisada’s ‘Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World’, the deceased are revived within memories. In ‘Love Letter’, it’s through letters; in ‘Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World’, it’s through cassette tapes that forgotten memories are gradually unlocked. Both films use cross-cutting to enter the world of memory. In ‘Love Letter’, a dream sequence where the female Fujii Itsuki dozes off in the hospital features cross-cutting between a door opening scene and the scene where she last saw the male Fujii Itsuki, opening the door for her. In ‘The Place Promised in Our Early Days’, cross-cutting is seen between scenes of the adult Matsumoto Sakutaro running through the night streets and scenes of his younger self running along the breakwater.
While the two films above revive the deceased from memory, in ‘Secret’, only the spirit returns. The wife’s spirit enters her daughter’s body. Yet, unusually for this film, scenes of longing for the deceased daughter are scarcely shown. The main conflict revolves around how the husband should treat his wife, who has reappeared in his daughter’s form. This conflict intensifies through their struggles regarding their sexual relationship. Ultimately, the film ends with the husband, deceived by his wife’s performance, sending his daughter off to be married. Thus, the returned deceased must eventually depart again. This holds true whether in memory or in reality. We will revisit this point later.
The works mentioned from here onward feature the dead returning in the form of living people. In Director Doi Nobuhiro’s ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’, the deceased wife returns “one year later, in the rainy season,” as per her last wish. She returns alive and well, without a single scratch. She doesn’t return as a ghostly presence, but as a perfectly human being, visible to anyone. She even wears clothes. What about director Akihiko Shiotani’s ‘Reincarnation’? In this film, the dead in a specific region come back to life en masse. Without offering a concrete explanation for the cause, the film focuses on depicting the relationships the returned people had in life. And after some time passes, just like Mio, the wife in ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’, the countless revived dead in ‘Reincarnation’ must also return to where they came from.
The “return” motif, a staple of fantasy film conventions that typically concludes the story, applies here too. This return could mean the dead returning to where they belong, or the living returning to a world without the dead. Each film depicts a ritual of parting. Given that most of these dead-person fantasy films take the form of melodrama, this part is where the tear ducts of the audience are most intensely stimulated.
The famous snowy mountain scene in ‘Love Letter’ is known even to those who haven’t seen the film. Hiroko Watanabe cries out to the snowy mountain where her lover, Itsuki Fujii, died. “How are you? I’m doing well.” These words are both the greeting from her first letter to him and, soon, her final farewell. She bids him farewell beside her new lover, Akiba, who was also Fujii Itsuki’s friend. Uniquely, this scene cross-cuts to show Fujii Itsuki, a woman, lying in a hospital bed. Here, she too repeats the greeting, “How are you? I’m doing well.” Knowing that the male Fujii Itsuki is dead, she wanders through her own memories. She realizes how much he loved her, and that she, too, secretly loved him in return. She accepts him. This scene can be seen as the spirit of the deceased, which had been residing in Watanabe Hiroko, transferring to Fujii Itsuki. In the final scene, she receives the message left by the male Fujii Itsuki on the library card (featuring the image of the female Fujii Itsuki) tucked into Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. She finally holds tangible proof of love in her hands. This stands in stark contrast to the absence of an engagement ring on Watanabe Hiroko’s finger. What about the perspective viewing this final scene? While not quite a bird’s-eye view, it is clearly a high angle. As if the male Fujii Itsuki were watching her.
In ‘Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World’, Matsumoto Sakutaro listens to a tape containing the hidden voice of Hirose Aki and lets her go. After finishing the tape, his lover is by his side. In ‘Secret’, the husband lets his wife go by sending their daughter, who embodies his wife’s spirit, off to be married. The complex emotions of a father sending his daughter off to marriage and a husband letting go of his wife combine to evoke profound sadness. In director Naoto Kumazawa’s ‘Rainbow Goddess’, Tomoya reads a letter secretly left by Aoi and sheds tears. Realizing her love he never knew, he simultaneously lets her go.
In contrast, films like ‘I’m Coming to Meet You’ and ‘Reincarnation’, where the deceased return as actual humans, adopt a different approach to farewell. All the returned spirits know exactly when they must leave the world of the living again and quietly prepare for their departure. The process of saying goodbye once more to someone they’ve already parted with is profoundly heart-wrenching. Perhaps that is precisely why they chose to return to life. Like Mio in ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You,’ who leaves after doing everything necessary for her son and husband.
What is the most crucial element in these deceased fantasy films? It is the memories they held while alive. Though confronting death head-on, what this film truly conveys is the power of remembrance. The film tells us that this alone is enough to keep living. Many viewers of ‘Love Letter’ will know how beautiful the middle school days of the female Fujii Itsuki and the male Fujii Itsuki were. Their memories, beginning with a schoolyard filled with falling cherry blossoms, are filled with coincidences upon coincidences, reminiscent of pure romance manga. Crucially, however, they feel plausible in reality. Yet most of these things were absent from our own school days, making us yearn for that era all the more. A classmate of the opposite sex sharing your name, the library with white curtains fluttering in the breeze, the bicycle rack that became a battleground for romance, and so on. Memories only become memories once they’ve passed. They are embellished and packaged, stored in the deepest recesses of the memory box. When such memories unfold, everyone can relate. The school days of Matsumoto Sakutaro and Hirose Aki from ‘Crying Out Love, In the Center of the World’, and the memories of Mio and Takumi in the middle of ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You’ are also quintessentially pure romance manga-like. But if these memories are of someone who is already dead, they cannot be merely beautiful. They are memories of someone unreachable, someone you can never meet again, and that is why they are so wistful. The audience doesn’t understand why the living miss the dead so much. Only after seeing these old memories do they grasp the nature of that longing, and the audience, too, begins to miss them.
What is crucial in these old memories is the mise-en-scène. The screen predominantly features a slightly yellowish tone, more so than reality, and hazy smoke appears throughout. Most of the school hallway scenes in ‘Love Letter’ are shot this way. The light source is also extremely bright, making the view beyond the classroom windows barely visible. And the window beyond the hallway staircase is filled with overly bright sunlight and smoke, maximally stripping away any sense of it being a real space. This also connects to a sense of haziness. The flashbacks in ‘Reincarnation’ feel like black-and-white tones overlaid with yellow. While this black-and-white tone is the most common way to depict flashbacks, it can also become an overly common mise-en-scène. Furthermore, props are also important elements of mise-en-scène. The exam paper, paper envelope, and library card in ‘Love Letter’; the rain, ballpoint pen, and pocket in ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You’; the ring made from banknotes, camera, and cassette player in ‘Rainbow Goddess’; and the cassette player in ‘The World’s End’ all serve as mediators connecting reality and memory.
Finally, most ghost fantasy films contain a twist element. Examples include the wife acting as her daughter in ‘Secret’, Aoi actually being a deceased person in ‘Reincarnation’, and the reason Mio returned alive in ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You’. However, this is less a trend unique to ghost fantasy films and more a current trend in modern cinema. After all, we live in a strange era where films without twists are considered boring.

Comparing with an Exceptional Ghost Fantasy Film – ‘The Illusionist’

1994 is remembered as an exceptionally significant year in Japanese film history. It was the year two directors who would later become pillars of Japanese cinema made their debuts. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Maboroshi’ and Shunji Iwai’s ‘Love Letter’ were released that very same year. Moreover, both films share the common theme of a woman unable to forget a deceased man. Yet, the two films possess clear differences. While ‘Love Letter’ is a popular film with a pure romance manga-like sensibility, ‘Maboroshi no Hikari’ unfolds with an art-house film-like static screen throughout its runtime. It also doesn’t have much dialogue.
After this, director Hirokazu Koreeda grew into an internationally recognized director, making films like ‘Distance’, ‘Wonderful Life’, ‘Nobody Knows’, and ‘Hana’. What’s noteworthy here is that all these works are connected to death. ‘Distance’ is a film about people mourning those killed in a cult incident; ‘Wonderful Life’ is a work that outright depicts the afterlife; and ‘Nobody Knows’ is a story of children heading towards death. The recently released ‘Hana’ in Korea is also connected to ‘death’ as it tells the story of a samurai dreaming of avenging his deceased father. However, all these films diverge from the trajectory of the ‘fantasy films about the deceased’ defined earlier. Among them, I will compare ‘The Illusionist’, a story about the deceased released the same year as ‘Love Letter’.
‘The Phantom Light’ is a film about Yumiko, who lives carrying the memory of her husband who suddenly committed suicide while they were building a harmonious family. Most of the film follows Yumiko’s actions. The ‘departure – initiation – return’ structure typical of ghost fantasy films does not apply here. Yumiko remarries and adapts to her new life. However, just as the audience becomes accustomed to her new existence, she hears the story of the night her husband took his own life. While ‘Love Letter’ also features a high proportion of flashbacks, the past memories only emerge around the one-hour mark. Yet, the preceding runtime was entirely composed of devices leading up to these recollections. ‘The Light of Illusion’ instead portrays the survivor living calmly, much like Nanni Moretti’s ‘The Son’s Room’. Even after hearing about her husband’s suicide midway through, Yumiko remains composed. In fact, the audience may find themselves worrying more about Yumiko. Neither the audience nor Yumiko knows the reason for her husband’s suicide; Yumiko simply accepts the situation. There are no flashbacks either. What matters here is not the story itself, but rather Yumiko’s psychological state as she hears it. The film predominantly uses extreme long shots and close-ups. This may be to show the empty space left by her husband’s departure, or to speak to the impermanence of human existence. Furthermore, the predominantly blue-tinted screen conveys a sense of coldness. One senses Yumiko’s strength, seemingly uninterested in eliciting sympathy from the audience. Unlike ‘Love Letter’, which drives the film through the power of its visuals, ‘The Illusionist’ propels the narrative through the emotional flow created by the arrangement of events. This effectively highlights the distinct characteristics of its directors: Iwai Shunji, a former music video director, and Koreeda Hirokazu, a documentary filmmaker. If Iwai Shunji is an omniscient author, Kore-eda Hirokazu is a third-person author.
Even in ‘Wonderful Life’, which directly depicts the afterlife, what matters is not the single memory they recall, but the emotions felt by the person after death. The film that best reveals this characteristic of director Kore-eda Hirokazu is ‘Nobody Knows’. The camera, consistently remaining an observer, builds emotions gradually. An observer-director cannot engage in flashbacks. Even the flashbacks in ‘Distance’ appear abruptly, merely arranged in the order of the characters. The difference in perspective between these two young directors (though now established) dealing with death is stark.

How should humans accept death?

Within director Shunji Iwai’s filmography, ‘Love Letter’ is a rather unique film. While it’s often cited as his representative work domestically, his true masterpieces might be considered ‘All About Lily Chou-Chou’ or ‘Swallowtail Butterfly’. The stance taken in these films, which contemplate life and death with a very dark gaze, cannot be equated with the stance of ‘Love Letter’. But one thing is clear: ‘Love Letter’ is an exceptionally well-crafted work. This is evident simply by observing the significant and subtle influence it has exerted on films made since. After all, the works produced by those who later collaborated with him predominantly feature the dead as central characters.
Everyone is born, and everyone dies. The 7 billion people on Earth will all die someday. Death is part of life, yet it’s often understood as its antithesis. What is the primary reason for this? It’s not merely because death is painful. The deaths humans accept are mostly, almost always, not their own. When one accepts their own death, they are already dead. Therefore, we understand the concept of death by projecting the deaths of others onto ourselves. The death of another is the loss of something we can never meet again. There are good memories and bad memories, but no new memories will ever be added. Therefore, the best the living can do is desperately cling to the memories of the dead. But the dead do not return. Our memories also fade over time; the memories we once held tightly in both hands are soon left in only one, and eventually slip away from both.
In fantasy films about the deceased, those who return from death invariably say, ‘Forget us.’ They return because the living miss them, yet it is the dead who worry about the living. They return precisely to say this: forget us and live happily.
Watanabe Hiroko will likely marry Akiba. And she will gradually forget Fujii Itsuki. Watanabe Hiroko returns all of Fujii Itsuki’s letters to her. Now, the burden of his memory falls on the woman Fujii Itsuki. Whether she can forget him remains unknown, but since the dead live on in memory, Fujii Itsuki will have moved into her and live on there. In ‘Reincarnation’, which could be seen as the ultimate in the fantasy film genre about the dead, the condition for the dead to return to life is that someone must remember them. Perhaps Fujii Itsuki, who spent three whole years of middle school in unrequited love, and who ultimately made her fall in love with a woman who resembled her, will also return to life seeking his first love.