The Grief That Sits at the Table: On Hirokazu Kore-eda

There is a kind of film about grief that wants you to cry in the first ten minutes. The music swells, the phone rings, someone falls to their knees in a hallway. Kore-eda does not make those films.

In his work, the death has usually already happened before we arrive. Sometimes years before. And what we are shown is everything that comes after. The cooking. The trains. The relatives who stay slightly too long.

I have watched his films for years and keep returning to them because they understand something that many films about grief do not. That most of it happens around a table. Not at the funeral, but on an ordinary afternoon in the third year, when someone reaches for the wrong number of plates.

In this essay I reflect on three of his films, Maborosi, Still Walking, and After Life, and on what they offer to anyone who is living alongside loss rather than through it.

This essay continues over on Grief in Translation, my Substack publication for reflective writing on grief, loss, and the human experience.

You can read the full piece here: substack.com/@griefintranslation