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Death Trains and Shinigami
I've been on a meta kick lately!
I watched Grave of the Fireflies yesterday, which I kind of regret because that movie is too depressing to watch twice in one’s life (but it is a good reminder of the horrible miniature tragedies that war and instability and poverty create, particularly for the least hardy human beings i.e. young children -- an important reminder in this time of refugee crises and border wall fanatics). One thing I did genuinely enjoy, however, is the use in the opening scenes of the train as a vehicle that conveys people to the afterlife. I looked this up on TV Tropes because I was sure this has to be a larger phenomenon in fiction, and it's called Afterlife Express.
My first memorable encounter of this idea of the train as a soul transport is Final Fantasy VI, which has managed to imprint very strongly in my mind. The characters come across a train in the middle of the mysterious forest and end up boarding it before realizing it’s going to the afterlife. They have to work fast to get the train to turn around and bring them back to the forest before they die for good. When the train does go back, there’s a short heart-breaking scene where one of the characters watches his recently deceased wife and child board the train, and they bid farewell to him as the train departs again. He runs after the departing train until the platform runs out, asking for the train to wait. (Even though this isn’t explicitly in the scene, my child brain distinctly got the impression that the character was tempted to join them, a metaphor for contemplating suicide.)
I think this scene captures why a train (even though such a recent invention) works well as a metaphor for death. There’s a kind of inflexibility and uncontrollability to trains that mirrors the way many parts of death (the timing, the person affected) are out of our control. People have experience seeing people off at train stations and feeling left behind and alone and bereft as the train pulls out, similar to living on after someone has gone. The track of the train suggests that people are all going to the same place (the afterlife) kind of against their will, but the people still at the station have no idea what that destination is; only the people on the train will find out. Running after a train only to encounter the end of the platform is a common train trope, as is people waiting for a train that is late. Both reveal that the power and speed of the train is beyond human control/ability. I think it’s not a coincidence that the Phantom Train In FFVI is one of the few areas you can’t revisit -- you can’t control the timing and appearance of this mysterious train that represents death.
There is also something otherworldly about small train stations. Large train depots in the middle of a city have the hustle and bustle of life, but a train in a small town is often just a tiny one-room building next to a track that comes out of barren wilderness and leads back into barren wilderness. A small train station can feel like you're standing on the edge of civilization or the known world, right up where it touches against the (non-euphemistic) great beyond. In other words, it's a great spot for dead souls to cross over from the world of the living to the world of the dead. As the TV Tropes page mentions, there is also something eerie and otherworldly about the train whistle sound itself. Aside from the train whistle, I think another way in which trains themselves are eerie is that they move by themselves (capable of moving without a driver, even) and have a light in the front. Seeing a train arrive out of the darkness can feel similar to seeing a ghost or will-o-wisp appear in the night: something animated (with its own "soul" even) but inanimate.
In Final Fantasy VII, there’s also a memorable time when a train station is used to indicate the liminal space between life and death. Here, a character waits at the train station for the return of her husband and, by seeing other people reunited with their significant others, comes to suspect that her husband is dead and never coming. Here it’s not the experience of being left behind as the train departs that is describing death but rather the experience of waiting for something that will never happen (a particular train to come in) that describes death. It is at this train station that she meets Aerith and her dying mother. Aerith herself is a girl with mysterious psychopomp-like powers, able to detect when people have died and their soul has returned to the planet.
The Wicked and the Divine is a comic series that plays with the Death Train idea in an insteresting way. It features a pantheon of gods incarnated in modern London as music stars. The gods are (I think) mainly split between Sun / Life / Sky / main gods and death / chthonic gods. Interestingly, the chthonic gods hold concerts underground. One, the Morrigan, literally does hers in the London Underground, the subway stations. From issue #2: "They're pop stars. She's more underground. In a very real, literal and you-have-to-break-into-closed-stations-in-the-middle-of-the-night way." The Morrigan is late to her own concert (again, suggesting an unpredictability about the timing of Death), and can be "summoned" by running into the subway tunnels in front of an approaching train. The mythology / urban myth of there being a mysterious Death Train that only appears at certain stations at certain times is invoked here, but reimagined as a death goddess's concert.
There are also times when a train is used as the main form of transport in a bizarre fantasy world, as is the case in both Final Fantasy Unlimited and World of Final Fantasy. Here, the train is not meant to represent death but rather leaving behind the safety of the real world in order to be transported into an unreal world, similar to the way that the wardrobe functions in the Chronicles of Narnia, or the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. However, because of the similarity between transport-to-another-world and death (see, for example, Pan's Labyrinth), the trains still seem like a metaphor for death. (Outside of Pan's Labyrinth, where transport-to-another-world and death are purposely ambiguous, it is amazing how consistently you can find "dark" readings of children's media where people swear that transport to a fantasy world is meant to represent children dying, from Peter Pan to My Neighbor Totoro.) Like with Death Trains, the use of a train as an otherworldly transport works because their destination is constant but unknown / shrouded in mystery. Oh yeah, I also just remembered that World of Final Fantasy also features a train graveyard -- a place where broken trains are all piled up (same as FFVII). It's another way in which trains are associated with death.
Before the train was invented, the most common metaphor for death was a boat. The experience of someone leaving on a boat (like seeing someone off from the train station) gives the feeling of them going somewhere new where you cannot follow, especially if the boat disappears into mist. It makes sense that people would feel like there needs to be some way for people to be transported from the mortal realm to whatever comes after. Sometimes this is done individually by someone turning and walking into the light, or being escorted by a death god / shinigami / psychopomp, like in Gunnerkrigg Court (1 2 3 4 5 (a combination of boat and shinigami)), or being picked up by a carriage. However, there is something sad about the use of a train. With a personal guide, you get the feeling of personal attention and gently coming to terms with one’s death. A small ferry boat is the same but with a single ferryman acting as your guide across the river. But a train is a vehicle of mass transport. It conveys the feeling that death happens in bursts, you get lost in a crowd of other souls, the process of conveying people to Death is casual and bureaucratic. In fact, the train-as-death metaphor works best in scenarios when people are dying in droves, as is the case in Grave of the Fireflies and Final Fantasy VI, to show the victims of war.
Edit: One of the most interesting forms of transport into death is the one featured in Millennium Actress: a spaceship! This is pretty unique not just because the mode of transportation is futuristic, but also because the woman dying is the one piloting the ship. Whereas death scenes often involve people boarding the transport as if in a trance (it is impossible for those left behind to stop them from boarding), the character in this scene chooses to board the ship and remains conscious throughout. That combined with the futuristic, custom-designed transport results in an amazingly calm, optimistic death scene. It embodies what Dumbledore said in Harry Potter (another work in which the liminal space between life and death is represented by a train station!): "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next adventure." It is interesting that small changes to the mode of transport from an automatic train to a futuristic spaceship create a sense of optimism and human agency.
I watched Grave of the Fireflies yesterday, which I kind of regret because that movie is too depressing to watch twice in one’s life (but it is a good reminder of the horrible miniature tragedies that war and instability and poverty create, particularly for the least hardy human beings i.e. young children -- an important reminder in this time of refugee crises and border wall fanatics). One thing I did genuinely enjoy, however, is the use in the opening scenes of the train as a vehicle that conveys people to the afterlife. I looked this up on TV Tropes because I was sure this has to be a larger phenomenon in fiction, and it's called Afterlife Express.
My first memorable encounter of this idea of the train as a soul transport is Final Fantasy VI, which has managed to imprint very strongly in my mind. The characters come across a train in the middle of the mysterious forest and end up boarding it before realizing it’s going to the afterlife. They have to work fast to get the train to turn around and bring them back to the forest before they die for good. When the train does go back, there’s a short heart-breaking scene where one of the characters watches his recently deceased wife and child board the train, and they bid farewell to him as the train departs again. He runs after the departing train until the platform runs out, asking for the train to wait. (Even though this isn’t explicitly in the scene, my child brain distinctly got the impression that the character was tempted to join them, a metaphor for contemplating suicide.)
I think this scene captures why a train (even though such a recent invention) works well as a metaphor for death. There’s a kind of inflexibility and uncontrollability to trains that mirrors the way many parts of death (the timing, the person affected) are out of our control. People have experience seeing people off at train stations and feeling left behind and alone and bereft as the train pulls out, similar to living on after someone has gone. The track of the train suggests that people are all going to the same place (the afterlife) kind of against their will, but the people still at the station have no idea what that destination is; only the people on the train will find out. Running after a train only to encounter the end of the platform is a common train trope, as is people waiting for a train that is late. Both reveal that the power and speed of the train is beyond human control/ability. I think it’s not a coincidence that the Phantom Train In FFVI is one of the few areas you can’t revisit -- you can’t control the timing and appearance of this mysterious train that represents death.
There is also something otherworldly about small train stations. Large train depots in the middle of a city have the hustle and bustle of life, but a train in a small town is often just a tiny one-room building next to a track that comes out of barren wilderness and leads back into barren wilderness. A small train station can feel like you're standing on the edge of civilization or the known world, right up where it touches against the (non-euphemistic) great beyond. In other words, it's a great spot for dead souls to cross over from the world of the living to the world of the dead. As the TV Tropes page mentions, there is also something eerie and otherworldly about the train whistle sound itself. Aside from the train whistle, I think another way in which trains themselves are eerie is that they move by themselves (capable of moving without a driver, even) and have a light in the front. Seeing a train arrive out of the darkness can feel similar to seeing a ghost or will-o-wisp appear in the night: something animated (with its own "soul" even) but inanimate.
In Final Fantasy VII, there’s also a memorable time when a train station is used to indicate the liminal space between life and death. Here, a character waits at the train station for the return of her husband and, by seeing other people reunited with their significant others, comes to suspect that her husband is dead and never coming. Here it’s not the experience of being left behind as the train departs that is describing death but rather the experience of waiting for something that will never happen (a particular train to come in) that describes death. It is at this train station that she meets Aerith and her dying mother. Aerith herself is a girl with mysterious psychopomp-like powers, able to detect when people have died and their soul has returned to the planet.
The Wicked and the Divine is a comic series that plays with the Death Train idea in an insteresting way. It features a pantheon of gods incarnated in modern London as music stars. The gods are (I think) mainly split between Sun / Life / Sky / main gods and death / chthonic gods. Interestingly, the chthonic gods hold concerts underground. One, the Morrigan, literally does hers in the London Underground, the subway stations. From issue #2: "They're pop stars. She's more underground. In a very real, literal and you-have-to-break-into-closed-stations-in-the-middle-of-the-night way." The Morrigan is late to her own concert (again, suggesting an unpredictability about the timing of Death), and can be "summoned" by running into the subway tunnels in front of an approaching train. The mythology / urban myth of there being a mysterious Death Train that only appears at certain stations at certain times is invoked here, but reimagined as a death goddess's concert.
There are also times when a train is used as the main form of transport in a bizarre fantasy world, as is the case in both Final Fantasy Unlimited and World of Final Fantasy. Here, the train is not meant to represent death but rather leaving behind the safety of the real world in order to be transported into an unreal world, similar to the way that the wardrobe functions in the Chronicles of Narnia, or the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. However, because of the similarity between transport-to-another-world and death (see, for example, Pan's Labyrinth), the trains still seem like a metaphor for death. (Outside of Pan's Labyrinth, where transport-to-another-world and death are purposely ambiguous, it is amazing how consistently you can find "dark" readings of children's media where people swear that transport to a fantasy world is meant to represent children dying, from Peter Pan to My Neighbor Totoro.) Like with Death Trains, the use of a train as an otherworldly transport works because their destination is constant but unknown / shrouded in mystery. Oh yeah, I also just remembered that World of Final Fantasy also features a train graveyard -- a place where broken trains are all piled up (same as FFVII). It's another way in which trains are associated with death.
Before the train was invented, the most common metaphor for death was a boat. The experience of someone leaving on a boat (like seeing someone off from the train station) gives the feeling of them going somewhere new where you cannot follow, especially if the boat disappears into mist. It makes sense that people would feel like there needs to be some way for people to be transported from the mortal realm to whatever comes after. Sometimes this is done individually by someone turning and walking into the light, or being escorted by a death god / shinigami / psychopomp, like in Gunnerkrigg Court (1 2 3 4 5 (a combination of boat and shinigami)), or being picked up by a carriage. However, there is something sad about the use of a train. With a personal guide, you get the feeling of personal attention and gently coming to terms with one’s death. A small ferry boat is the same but with a single ferryman acting as your guide across the river. But a train is a vehicle of mass transport. It conveys the feeling that death happens in bursts, you get lost in a crowd of other souls, the process of conveying people to Death is casual and bureaucratic. In fact, the train-as-death metaphor works best in scenarios when people are dying in droves, as is the case in Grave of the Fireflies and Final Fantasy VI, to show the victims of war.
Edit: One of the most interesting forms of transport into death is the one featured in Millennium Actress: a spaceship! This is pretty unique not just because the mode of transportation is futuristic, but also because the woman dying is the one piloting the ship. Whereas death scenes often involve people boarding the transport as if in a trance (it is impossible for those left behind to stop them from boarding), the character in this scene chooses to board the ship and remains conscious throughout. That combined with the futuristic, custom-designed transport results in an amazingly calm, optimistic death scene. It embodies what Dumbledore said in Harry Potter (another work in which the liminal space between life and death is represented by a train station!): "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next adventure." It is interesting that small changes to the mode of transport from an automatic train to a futuristic spaceship create a sense of optimism and human agency.
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Years ago, trying to get between from Yamaguchi to Tsuwano in Japan I didn't pick the right train (for me and my mother) and we got left to await another train that would come later. The sun seems to go down earlier in Japan (and rise earlier on the other end), so it started getting a bit creepier than I was ready to deal with...
On one side of the train lines were a few farm houses and on the other was a tiny parking lot for the station. We've since traveled back through that area, but I wasn't even sure I wanted to know what tiny station we'd stopped at those years ago.
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~I never really thought about trains and boats and spaceships as symbols for death in fiction before (or at least to symbolize pretty big changes in someone's existence), but after reading your post I went back and thought about other examples and was surprised by how I really just overlooked them in my media viewing. I definitely remember some of the ones you talked about, like the FF ones. The Millennium Actress spaceship example seems like such an interesting symbolic take, and what you wrote reminded me about how in the X-Men: Phoenix comic storyline they did that Jean died piloting a spaceship (being "reborn" as the Phoenix after it crashed). I wonder if that was symbolism for the "death as transportation" trope too since they kind of really played up the tropes in that story.
Large train depots in the middle of a city have the hustle and bustle of life, but a train in a small town is often just a tiny one-room building next to a track that comes out of barren wilderness and leads back into barren wilderness. A small train station can feel like you're standing on the edge of civilization or the known world, right up where it touches against the (non-euphemistic) great beyond.
~This is so true! Some of the trains I went on while in Japan definitely had rural stops like that, and it was such a strange feeling compared to the busier/more urban ones I often went to for my work commutes. I can also definitely see how trains schedules and the sounds associated with them could easily become metaphors for death. This was a really impressive trope think piece! ♥
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And thank you! I'm glad you liked the think piece! (Also, that's a really pretty icon. Your icon-making skills have gotten really good!)