ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter briefly looks at Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2017 film Before We Vanish as an allegory of humanity starting over with a resilience born of compassionate love. Like this film, Makoto Shinkai’s your name., Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life and I Wish respond to the disasters and struggles of the Heisei period. Moreover, these films use diverse evocations of sacred space, ritual, and religious symbolism to depict human and spiritual transcendence through empathy and interdependence. Akira Kurosawa portrays the negative side of this in his revisionist samurai films Throne of Blood and Ran, cautionary tales wherein there are no heroes, only perpetrators and victims, and they all go down together. These films respond to difficult times and trauma with artful, restorative creativity, turning memories of the past, concerns about the present, and hopes for the future into cinematic visions of the process of transcendence.
