He bears the gutted look of the grieving, even as he keeps some semblance of routine — visiting the fish market, haunting his favorite sushi bar.

But there’s an absence we feel before it is announced, tipped by the second glass he asks for when he gets a beer. The wife he met at this very diner is no longer with him.

He endures the funeral, partakes in its rituals. And when he reads her note with “my last wish” on it, he doggedly sets out to fulfill it.

“Please scatter my ashes on Lake Windermere,” his wife of many decades asked. They lived all their lives in Tokyo, but never got to take a trip as a family reprising a treasured visit of her childhood. Now, he must travel to Britain and make his way to the lake country, popularized and preserved by the books and bequest of Beatrix Potter.

“Cottontail” could have been a simple sentimental journey, a fish-out-of-water quest by a widower to a faraway place meeting eccetric locals who aid him on his journey to the most special place in his late wife’s heart. But writer-director Patrick Dickinson’s film transcends those nostalgic trappings to make sublime, understated points about the way grief empties you out and doesn’t always bring surviving families close together.

Sometimes, bitterness and guilt get in the way.

Lily Franky, star of the Oscar-nominated “Shoplifters,” is Kenzaburo, our solemn, morose tour guide through the Japanese way of death. A struggling novelist, he finds plenty of reasons to flash back to memories of how he met his beloved Akiko (Tae Kimura), treasuring the shy allure that drew him in, regretting the ways he let her down and not wanting to share this last request from the son (Ryô Nishikido) and daughter-in-law (Rin Takanashi) he kept at arm’s length during Akiko’s long decline.

He smokes and he drinks and he recalls their first meeting and courtship — Yuri Tsunematsu and Kosei Kudo play them as young lovers. And then he drinks some more.

Son Toshi brings his wife and child to fulfill the “trip we never got to make together as a family” part of his mother’s wish. But that doesn’t go well.

Kenzaburo is hellbent on undertaking this on his own. He speaks just enough English to understand the rowdy, trainride bridesmaid’s party’s “Oh luv, you’re on the wrong train/going the wrong way.” And swiping a bike and trekking on foot will only get him so far.

But “the kindness of strangers” includes meeting an aged farmer (the great Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter (Aoife Hinds), people who, it turns out, have a special understanding of this quest.

Dickinson, a British documentarian who made a short film some years ago about an expat Japanese couple facing terminal illness (“Mr. Rabbit”), shows Western audiences Japanese funeral and cremation rituals, but also gets at a cultural fear of “being a burden” to others, the embarassment that comes with end-of-life’s many indignitites and humiliations.

The road trip part of “Cottontail” carries its charm, its romance and its “closure.” The flashbacks convey the bitterness of regret as we see reasons for the chain-smoking Kenzaburo’s standoffishness. He’d rather ask strangers for help than face his son.

And the entire sweet and sober enterprise — a British filmmaker writing and directing a very Japanese film about loss, much of it in Japanese with English subtitles — captures not just the differences in cultural approaches to death and dying, but the universal nature of grief, the essense of a great absence and our helplessness in grappling with it, no matter where we are or how we grew up.

Rating: unrated, end of life subject matter, smoking

Cast: Lily Franky, Tae Kimura, Ryô Nishikido, Rin Takanashi, Kosei Kudo, Aoife Hinds and Ciarán Hinds.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Patrick Dickinson. A Level 33 release (June 7).

Running time:1:34