First You Disappear, Then You Fade Away: Staring at the Moon in Journey to the Shore
by Ammar Keshodia
Is ten years too long to get over the loss of someone? Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Journey to the Shore (2015) seems to ask a question of this nature. It starts with a young girl who’s struggling to play the piano when her teacher, a soft-spoken woman named Mizuki, tells her to slow down and try again. There’s no rush. The little girl continues but keeps tripping up until her mother finally tells Mizuki that she may be teaching a tempo that’s too slow—a stinging comment as she’s still grappling with the loss of her husband.
There is a sequence somewhere in the final third of the film that perfectly captures the unique mix of melancholy and catharsis that comes with the process of acceptance. I haven’t forgotten it because Yoshihide Otomo and Eto Naoko’s score married the moon with a sound for me. It’s what I think of when people talk about cinema as poetry, because you can understand what it’s about even without the context of the story, even without a word spoken.
Mizuki and her husband Yusuke watch some children playing in a field. They make food together. Yusuke struggles to open a bun wrapped in plastic. She stares at him, staring at the moon. Mizuki. The Moon. And then Yusuke’s trembling hands, as she looks away, and up.
You don’t need to know that Journey to the Shore is a ghost story to understand that she’s watching her husband fade away. He died years ago, and with Mizuki still in a resigned solitude, he reappears in their dim apartment as a spirit, asking her to go on a journey with him to tie up the loose ends of his life. To come back home, all she needs to do is burn the 100 pages of prayers she desperately wrote out after his sudden disappearance, hoping for his safety. They set off together visiting small towns and families that Yusuke had lived with during his life, but we slowly start to ask if this journey is for Mizuki to help Yusuke move on to his next life, or vice versa. Even as a ghost, she desperately wants him to stay, but when he starts to lose his connection to the physical world, is it because it’s finally time for him to move on, or for her?
When Yusuke’s trying to open the plastic wrapping, the camera slowly pulls back, the way we all watch our loved ones fade away—to disease, to depression—from a certain distance. Even when you’re finally forgetting someone you loved, it hurts to know that you can. You go from thinking about them every hour, to maybe once a day, to maybe every few weeks. Just enough so that you can find the gaps between your loss to step through, and as Mizuki begins to do the same, the ghost next to her starts to disappear. Constantly confronted with her pace, she’s finally close to accepting his death. At one point she tells the story of how she hated practicing the piano as a kid, because of how awful it was to listen to. Focus on the sound, she’s told. You may dislike it, but it is yours. It is your tempo.
Every grief is a ghost story and these specters exist in the objects that are left behind, their favorite foods, the movies that they loved to watch—in all the images you associated with them. Anytime I get a chance to stare at the full moon for longer than a moment, I start to hear that slow sound of the trumpet and I think about a good friend I had once who sent me a suicide note. He survived, luckily, and for a while we had him back—but then I watched him fade out of our lives. Whether it was by his own choice, I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him in a decade. I don’t even know if he’s alive. But I still haven’t burned my book of prayers, and when Mizuki stares at the moon, I know what she’s feeling.
Ammar Keshodia is a curator and filmmaker from Karachi, Pakistan. He has worked for a variety of film festivals around the world such as TIFF, SXSW, and Reel Asian, and now leads the programming team for Reelworld, a Canadian festival focused exclusively on presenting work from Black, Indigenous, and Filmmakers of colour. He holds a BA in Political Science and Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.