Transcendental Light or Quotidian Comfort: Reading Koreeda’s Maboroshi along with the Original Novel

In this essay, I examine Koreeda Hirokazu’s Maboroshi (Maboroshi no Hikari 1995) along with the original novel of the film with the same title, Miyamoto Teru’s Maboroshi no Hikari (1979). Maboroshi, Koreeda’s first feature film, is said to anticipate various characteristics of his later films: it thematizes Koreeda’s consistent concern with how people who lost their loving ones could survive the loss; it also features the contemplative and “Ozuesque” aesthetics which is usually attributed to his later films including Still Walking. Koreeda transforms the original novel in two directions, which affects the aesthetic tone as well as the thematic line of the film. First, the film changes the private confession of the first-person narrator in the epistolary novel into a third-person narrative with few point-of-view shots or close-ups. Instead of a sentimental melodrama that draws on the spectator’s identification with the protagonist, Koreeda experiments with a third-person viewpoint in a narrative film of loss and mourning, deviating from the ethical predicament of sympathy where a self could consume the pain of the other to aggrandize his/her narcissistic self. Secondly, Maboroshi the film underscores the transcendental nature of the phantasmal light (the literal meaning of “Maboroshi no Hikari”) in the process of Yumiko’s overcoming of her loss through the impressive and sublime images of the pivotal funeral procession sequence. It suggests that Yumiko finally accepts her former husband’s inexplicable suicide along with her understanding of the incomprehensibility and ubiquity of death, while Miyamoto’s novel hints that her healing from the loss largely depends on the comfort of everyday life that she is gradually creating with her new family.