The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, January 12, 2025

9:00 AM | Life Lessons from a Ghost

I have been watching a lot of Japanese movies lately. It is, after all, “Japanuary,” a kind of cinephilic trend which calls for devoting the month of January to screening Japanese films. Of late, I have turned to the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa simply because this is also film awards season, and his latest film, Cloud, was the Japanese official entry to the International Feature category of the Oscar Awards. [Last year, he also gifted us with a truly horrifying short film, Chime.]

I do not ordinarily get my life lessons from the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The Japanese auteur, who burst to international fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s with his uncanny contributions to what we now call as “J-Horror,” is known for exploring in his films themes of existential dread, isolation and the fraught relationship between individuals and society, the dour impact of technology in our lives, and the fragility of memory—often giving his stories a supernatural bent involving ghosts, which are often malevolent and vengeful.

In his seminal Cure [1997], we follow a police procedural involving a series of grisly murders which seem to be connected—because all the victims have the mark “X” carved into their necks. But as the story unfolds, we learn that the murders are being committed by disparate individuals who have no memory of what they have done, nor have any motives for doing them. The clues soon lead to a mysterious figure named Mamiya whose presence evoke a profound sense of alienation that he causes otherwise ordinary people to succumb to their violent impulses, challenging the idea that identity and morality are stable constructs. In Pulse [2001], we gradually learn that the dead have begun infiltrating the living world through the Internet, causing people to succumb to despair and vanish, leaving behind only dark, shadowy marks.

Not exactly films to take away endearing life lessons from.

In 2015, Kurosawa released Journey to the Shore, which from the get-go already presents itself as a ghost story. We meet Mizuki, a piano teacher for children, whose melancholy is evident from the way she goes about her daily routines. She has reasons to be sad: her husband Yusuke has been missing for three years, and presumed dead. She misses him, and still grieves. One day, after her piano lessons, she comes home to find the ghost of her husband in her living room. But the ghost of Yusuke also inhabits a corporeal reality the movie never questions—he is truly a ghost, but he can also be touched, and he can be seen by other people. He even eats and sleeps. Sometimes, however, he disappears into thin air.

Yusuke informs Mizuki that he drowned at sea—and his body has already been eaten by crabs. But somehow he found himself entering the living world, interacting with people, some of them living and some dead—ghosts who are exactly like him. He has been traveling and meeting people since passing away, and now, to finally say goodbye, he wants to take Mizuki with him to meet all the individuals who have been part of his life these past three years, so that she, too, can see, touch, and feel what Yusuki did while he was gone. She packs her bag without question, and goes on this journey with her ghost husband, sometimes taking the train, sometimes the bus. The movie proceeds on an episodic structure, with each visit becoming Kurosawa’s way of instructing us about the relationships between people and their ghosts, about remembering and forgetting, about forgiving and longing.

In the penultimate “episode,” Yusuke, with Mizuki in tow, returns to a farm he worked in, where the community of farmers has learned to gravitate towards him as a kind of philosopher and storyteller. He was known to give the farm folk the occasional capsule lectures about varied things, like Physics, in their small community hall, and sometimes strings these educational talks with poignant observations about life. One such talk begins soon after Yusuke’s return to town. He begins to discuss the matter of light as both a particle and as a wave:

“Light is both a wave and a particle,” Yusuke begins. “A light particle has zero mass. Light, as its name implies, travels at the speed of light. If you apply Einstein’s equation, anything traveling at the speed of light should have infinite mass. But a tiny particle of light couldn’t possibly have infinite mass. The only solution is for it to have zero mass. A particle of light must have zero mass. But can you say that something of zero mass even exists? What is this particle which is like a lot of nothing? And remember, light is also a wave. It has a wavelength, which is like the wave’s width. But if you keep reducing this wavelength, is there a point where it becomes zero? If it’s a zero, that’s not a wave. However tiny it is, a wave has a wavelength. So the smallest wavelength of a wave of light also has a quantity of zero.”

He continues: “The thing is, in the world of the very small, zero does have a width. In other words, zero isn’t zero. The whole universe is filled with an infinite number of zeroes. Zero is the basis of everything. So nothingness isn’t the same as meaninglessness. Nothingness is the foundation of everything. Mountains and rivers, the earth and human beings. Everything is composed of combinations of this nothingness. This would seem to be a true representation of the world.”

Truly, this whole monologue does not seem to come from a typical Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie.

And I’m glad.

Yusuke made me think. What does it mean to live a life that matters? Perhaps the answer lies not in grand proclamations but in the tension between light and shadow, between the tangible and the ineffable. Yusuke makes a point that the universe itself—both vast and microscopic—offers us a metaphor for this paradox, to consider light—a force that is both particle and wave, both zero and infinite. It is something and nothing all at once, the very essence of the contradictory truths that define existence.

This duality of light captures the enigmatic foundation of reality.

We wake each morning with an unspoken hope: to find clarity, joy, or purpose in the hours ahead. Yet life often undercuts these expectations. The coffee spills; the news disappoints. But even in the mundane—in the routine of commuting, working, returning—there lies an unspoken wonder. The banality of the everyday is not meaningless; it is an intricate dance of forces seen and unseen, much like light itself. Fleeting and fragile, life compels us to create, to love, to leave a mark. It is as if we are each a beam of light, our trajectory immeasurable yet undeniable.

Take, for example, the quiet courage of a mother waking early to prepare her child for school. Or the rhythmic precision of a farmer tending his crops under the rising sun. Or the solitary writer chasing words that might outlast time. These acts, so ordinary they often escape notice, are like photons scattering through space. They are small, yet they illuminate. They are fleeting, yet they shape the world.

Perhaps meaning is not found in answers but in the act of seeking. Meaning is a mosaic of personal truths: the way sunlight pools on a wooden floor, the laughter shared among friends, the feeling of holding a book that feels like an old companion. It is in the particulars that we discover the infinite—the zero that is not zero.

But life is not only light. It is shadow. Loss, grief, and suffering carve through our days with an unrelenting hand. Yet these shadows sharpen our perception of what truly matters. Consider those who have endured unimaginable loss and emerged with a greater capacity for love, for connection. In their lives, we see a profound truth: that even in the void, there is creation; even in absence, there is presence.

And so, we circle back to the question: what is the meaning of life? It is perhaps a flawed question, for it assumes meaning to be a fixed point, a destination. But what if meaning is found in the journey? What if it is the striving, the questioning, the living that gives life its shape?

This reminds me of a story about a fisherman who spent his days casting nets into the ocean, watching the tides. One day, a scholar asked him, “What do you see out there?” The fisherman, gazing at the horizon, replied, “Possibility.” The scholar pressed on. “But what does it mean to you?” The fisherman laughed. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said. “It just is.”

There is wisdom in the fisherman’s humility, an acceptance of the universe’s enigmatic nature. To search for meaning is not to find a definitive answer but to grow through the seeking. It is to recognize that we are participants in an infinite dance, a constellation of lives intertwined by joys and sorrows, by light and shadow.

Perhaps the meaning of life is not a puzzle to solve but a question to live. It is as vast and unknowable as the ocean the fisherman watched, as fundamental and paradoxical as the light that travels through it. And when the end comes—as it must—the measure of a meaningful life will not be the monuments we’ve built or the accolades we’ve received. It will be the ripples we leave in the hearts of others, the moments of light we shared in their shadows, the quiet assurance that, for a while, we were here. We loved, we wondered, we lived. And in that fragile, infinite dance, perhaps we were enough.

Labels: film, life, physics