What if you could come back after you died and watch over those close to you while possessing a familiar if inanimate object? Her second film this year, Kahori Higashi’s Belonging (とりつくしま, Toritsukushima) adapts a novel by her mother in which the recently deceased are asked to choose a “belonging” to sink into given that they seemingly still have lingering attachments to this world. Yet simply watching can itself by painful while it might not do to linger too long in a place where everything is moving on except you.
That’s a possibility that comes to mind the second story featuring a little boy who asks to inhabit the blue climbing frame at the park. He wistfully watches other kids he used to play with pass by and later meets a little sister for the first time, but all these other children will grow up while he will not even if other children will their place. The kindly woman (Kyoko Koizumi) sitting in the school room that doubles as Belonging’s office doesn’t mention what happens if the object is destroyed or moved as something like a climbing frame might be though we later discover that depleted objects can no longer hold their charges which are then dragged back to the afterlife.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that an object that was precious to you was not so precious to others and may end up being sold or given away as one old woman discovers realising the beloved grandson she hoped to spend eternity with has sold the camera she gave him. The heroine of the first sequence, Koharu, installs herself in a coffee cup featuring a design of a triceratops she and her husband bought on a trip to the museum which he continues to fondle and treasure though Koharu watches him being a tentative relationship with another woman who urges him to buy new mugs as a symbolic moving on from his late wife.
For Wataru, the coffee cup may already in a sense have been possessed by her spirit though he sees her more in a plant he keeps watering unaware that it’s artificial. Objects can have a kind of presence and carry something of their former owners with them even if not literally possessed but being trapped inside an inanimate object is also frustrating and at times painful. They can no longer act or interact but are mere passive observers at the mercy of their loved ones who may be readier to move than they’d assumed or otherwise dispose of or lose the objects the deceased assumed would be precious to them.
The heroine of the final sequence might have this right when she chooses to possess an item she knows will only give her a limited time, not even minding when she’s denied the full resolutions of her anxieties in seeing her teenage son win a baseball game while he continues to call her number and recite pleasantries like some kind of mantra. She acknowledges that it might not be good for her or her son to stay too long, she just wants to see he’ll be alright before moving on to the afterlife. The woman from Belonging seems to approve of her choice though her own backstory remains unclear, present both in this world and in the other.
Making brief detours to introduce us to some strange people in the part such as a female banzai double act and a not-quite-couple, the film is at pains capture both everyday life and the poignancy of loss as the various spirits look for new places to belong while the world around them continues to change and evolve in ways they no longer can. In the park, an old man dances comically much to the dismay of his female companion who is trying to read her book, claiming that he’s going to keep living to the very end which at least expresses a vibrant desire for life in some ways free of the lingering attachments that bind the recently deceased to our world but perhaps also trap them here in solitary museums of past love in which their presence may be felt but also unacknowledged.
Belonging screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 