Japanese film "After Life" takes a very interesting look at eternity

One of the very best films I ever saw was a Japanese movie called "After Life," which I saw in Pasadena in 1998.

I don't generally enjoy Asian films. I don't speak any language other than English, but I have had enough exposure to French, German, Spanish and even Italian, that I can get enough of the sound and get the rest with subtitles so that I can enjoy the movie.

But with Chinese or Japanese films, I have no idea what people are saying and I have to maintain focus on the subtitles. In addition, the completely different sound of language and the strange cadence often gave me headaches.

But in 1996 I saw "Shall We Dance" at the old Rialto theater in South Pasadena, and I absolutely loved it. Not the Richard Gere/Jennifer Lopez remake, but the original Japanese film.

Seriously, it just blew me away.

It was one of the best movies I had ever seen, and after seeing it, I was willing to give at least one more Japanese film a chance.

Two years later, "After Life" came along.

For about the first 10 years of our marriage, Nicole and I went to the movies pretty much every weekend. She enjoyed foreign films, so my taste got uplifted. "After Life" had a fascinating premise, so I was eager to see it.

The idea was that when you die, and you had lived a good enough life to earn your eternal reward, you went to a way station where for a week, you studied your life and decided what one memory was the most wonderful.

Then you locked that in and moved on. You would spend eternity living that day over and over again, each time as if it were the first time.


So what would you choose?

Some people would pick their wedding day, or the day one of their children was born. Others might pick a wonderful place they had visited or a peak day in their career.

I thought about it a lot, and in the end I decided it wasn't going to be a day from my adult life. There have been many good ones and at least a few wonderful ones, but I really can't imagine picking one over another.

I also decided it was going to be a fairly ordinary day and it was going to be before adolescence. I decided on the summer of 1962. I was 12 that summer, and since I had skipped second grade, I had finished seventh grade that spring.

435 N. Henry St., aka Heaven

We were living in Huber Heights, Ohio, but I spent a couple of weeks each summer visiting my grandparents in Crestline in the northern part of the state. It was the town -- indeed the house -- where my mother had grown up, and the summer days there were completely carefree.

Sometimes I went to the park and got into a baseball game, other times I went to the library and got three or four books to read. A day or two later, I was taking them back and getting more.

My sister Laura was usually there at the same time I was, and we spent hours walking around town looking for pop bottles we could return for 2 cents a bottle. Since candy bars, comic books and baseball cards could all be purchased for 12 cents or less, it was worth the effort.

The other thing -- the one that put the cap on it -- was that I would spend hours at a time throwing a rubber ball against the porch steps and catching it when it came back. I was pitching entire nine-inning games and keeping track in my head.

And of course, two of my favorite people in the world lived there. My grandparents, Paul and Florence Kindinger, have been gone a long time now, but eternity at their house with them would be wonderful.

But I would also pick it because of Laura. She's two years younger than I am, and we were close for pretty much our whole time in Ohio.

Things changed after we moved to Virginia in January 1963. It was a different world for me, and between that and the beginning of adolescence, I changed for the worse. I became a bully and I picked on my younger siblings, Laura worse than the others.

I haven't seen her in years. She went back to Ohio and had her career in the Columbus area. She got her degrees from Ohio State and was a part of our grandparents' lives right up to the end. I admire her so much for that.

I probably feel more guilt about what happened to our relationship than anything else in my life.

I think that's why I would like her to be part of my eternal perfect day. Or maybe it's just that I wish I could have stayed 12 years old forever.

Most likely it's both.