Some masterpiece films evoke life-affirming lessons by taking us inside the mansion of a media mogul, to the vast Arabian Desert, to the confines of a Vietnam War madman or to the far reaches beyond Jupiter’s moons. Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” does so by introducing us to a sad and lonely old man dying of cancer.
Akira Kurosawa is one of the most famous of all Japanese directors. However, he is so legendary because unlike his colleagues Ozu and Mizoguchi, Kurosawa was considered the most Western of all the Japanese auteurs. Recognizable to the public mostly thanks to his samurai epics and tales that later became spaghetti Westerns, Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” in 1952 was a human drama near the middle of his career. It is radical in the way it speaks so simply and with familiarity and yet so broadly about universal topics.
“Ikiru,” which in English means “to live,” finds a reason to live life when so many others are doing nothing more than trying to survive it. Kurosawa’s catalyst is Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a man who, when we first meet him, is virtually dead, only to discover he will be literally dead very soon. He’s the head bureaucrat in a dead-end office of the public services department, and he’s stayed in that position for 20 years by essentially not doing anything. “I was always busy, but I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done,” he later realizes.
All of City Hall where he works is a pit of ineptitude and inactivity. A group of village women try to get a toxic sewer pit fixed and are put on a futile quest of people avoiding work and pinning the problem on someone else. This way, it’s impossible to make a mistake, everyone survives, but no one actually lives or makes a difference.
The same thing happens to Watanabe at the doctor’s office where the diplomatic power is on the other foot. A man in the waiting room warns him that if they tell him his stomach pain is a mild ulcer, he really has cancer and a month to live. The doctor is employing the same passiveness he’s done his entire life, and it’s only now he realizes that he’s always been plagued by an inability to do more.
This is the quest Kurosawa takes us on: the journey for life even at the price of pain, even when just to die would be the honorable thing to do.
Anyone familiar with any of Kurosawa’s samurai stories knows the themes of honor in death in battle and the significance of the act of seppuku. For Kurosawa to suggest here that Watanabe should continue fighting, to put his own benefit over the honor of others, shows how radical and foreign to an Eastern frame of thought “Ikiru” is.
Yet nothing about “Ikiru” seems foreign or uncomfortable. The vigor, variety and energy Kurosawa directs some scenes with, like Watanabe’s courtship with a young, former employee of his, are lovely in their celebration of life. And yet others, like a very famous moment inside a piano bar where Watanabe sings an old love ballad, are patient and delicate, evoking life’s true elegance.
And this is just the first half of this two and a half hour film. Before long, Watanabe is dead, and Kurosawa skillfully jumbles the narrative in a way similar to how he did for “Rashomon.”
He takes us to Watanabe’s funeral, and fellow bureaucrats discuss whether his last acts in life were all they were made out to be. His goal before death was to build a park on the sewer pit where the townswomen were complaining earlier.
And in a glowing display by the government, it gets completed, with Watanabe soon found dead rocking in the park’s swing.
For this movie, it is not enough to feel as though you made a difference to have lived. Kurosawa’s story telling style forces us to observe the way a person is remembered in order to gauge whether he actually lived. And we learn others are not always as generous in fear that they too may overstep their bounds or overshadow their own existence.
Numerous politicians claim “We would’ve done it too,” or that the park got done based on technicalities in the system, hardly because of Watanabe’s doing. And even the rest of the flashbacks are viewed from their perspective. Whenever we see Watanabe, we find him gazing down on us in a high angle shot as though he’s peering into our soul from beyond the grave asking how we are judging him. And he’s detached from the red tape and political bickering that consumed him in life as though he were already gone. One of the film’s most memorable quotes is when a fellow coworker asks him how he can stand meeting all these dead ends in the process. He responds, “I can’t afford to hate people. I haven’t got that kind of time.”
Does anyone have that kind of time? “Ikiru” has aged so brilliantly because now more than ever we are a cynical society, searching for flaws in others and things to complain about. We aim to survive by bringing down others than actually fighting to live. Watanabe’s struggle is universal as he tries to overcome the lazy apathy in his life, the meaningless of it all, and strive to make a genuine impact.
Today, the theme of “carpe diem” is parroted in children’s films and melodramas. But “Ikiru” shared a pivotal message well before its time either at home or abroad. It came from a director known for making films of a much different genre, and it starred one of the best and most famous Japanese actors of all time, Takashi Shimura. Shimura was in his 40s when he played the elderly Watanabe, and he even appeared in just short of a dozen films that same year. He’s also featured prominently in a number of Kurosawa’s other masterpieces, including “Seven Samurai,” “Throne of Blood” and the aforementioned “Rashomon.”
And what’s more, “Ikiru” is not as simple or as one-dimensional as its message makes it out to be. Watanabe’s relationship with his young girl co-worker and his touchy son and daughter-in-law are complex moments in this man’s life that don’t fit the theme predictably or easily. It’s further directed with such elegant tact and pacing, enduring emotion and bold black and white cinematography. For evidence of its beauty, look no further than the shot of Watanabe in the swing that graces the movie’s box art.
Yet nothing about this film is as broad in scope as epics like it. It is memorable in its simplicity and its down-to-Earth authenticity. “Ikiru” is a touching testament to life itself, and that is something to be cherished.