Think about this: you are dead and stuck in a place between heaven and earth. For you to be able to reach heaven, you need to choose one significant memory from your life on earth. Just one. This memory is your heaven and you will be stuck with this memory for all eternity. This is the theme of the Japanese movie “After Life” I watched yesterday. Dead souls are brought to this facility which looks very much like an old government building or an old university and they have three days to tell the staff at this facility what this single special memory is. The staff then recreate this memory on film (!) and when the dead watch this film they can move to heaven or someplace out of the limbo, at least. There are all kinds of memories ranging from the feeling of being in a mother’s lap to flying a Cessna over fluffy, white clouds. There are some who find it very hard to pinpoint any one memory. They’ve either had a very ordinary, mundane life or one so fulfilling that they cannot do justice to it by choosing any single memory. And there’s one character, a young boy of 21, who refuses to choose, saying he takes responsibility of his whole life and cannot choose one special memory to keep with him. Interestingly, those who fail to choose, end up working in the facility as they cannot move to heaven.

Though my synopsis sounds heavy, the movie is quite a light-hearted treatment of the subject. It’s about life and its little joys and moments of happiness and sadness. It’s funny in parts like when this middle-aged Japanese man reminisces about his triumphs with women, mostly prostitutes, and discusses at length how lovely and fulfilling his sexual experiences have been but when it comes the time to choose, he chooses the memory of his daughter’s wedding! Or an old, senile spinster with a mind of a nine-year old who only collects different leaves and flowers from the compound of the facility and brings them to the staff and cannot, for the life of her, recollect anything memorable, anything significant. The staff member finally zeroes in on her fascination for cherry blossoms and that’s the memory she leaves with.

Do watch the movie when you get a chance and think about what single memory of your entire life would you choose, if you had to!