Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Ikiru was one of Akiri Kurosawa’s earlier films, being produced in 1952. Though Kurosawa was just forty-two at the time, he was already an accomplished director, having the fine film Rashômon already to his credit. It is nevertheless amazing that Kurosawa chose what might be called an “old man’s theme” for this project in 1952. It is more the kind of subject matter that one might expect to be explored by a great director approaching the end of a career.
The Story: The story centers on a rather ordinary Japanese man coming to grips with impending death. Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) has worked for the Tokyo City Hall for thirty years and has worked his way up to chief of his section. Like many bureaucracies, his group does little more than rubber stamp documents and push paper. Mr. Watanabe sits at a desk that has piles of paper on either side. In front of his desk is a long table where his assistants shuffle papers back and forth. This unit is responsible for handling citizen complaints but their main function appears to be to make sure that any such complaints get buried in inertia and run-arounds. At that, they are very effective. The narrator informs us that Mr. Watanabe (and his colleagues) “just drift through life” and are “barely alive.”
Mr. Watanabe, however, soon discovers that he has stomach cancer – despite the doctor studiously avoiding telling him the truth. As Mr. Watanabe is in the waiting room in the doctor’s office, another patient warns him, “If they say you can eat anything you want, that means you have less than a year.” If the problem were merely an ulcer, he would have to carefully watch his diet, but if it’s cancer, food choice will not slow or hasten the ultimate endpoint. When the doctor repeats the dreaded words, “eat whatever you want”, Watanabe realizes that his end is near. Yet, it isn’t death that Watanabe fears but the fact that he has never truly lived. He has nothing to show for his life.
Watanabe begins a desperate search for meaning to his existence. His first effort takes the form of a decadent fling. He withdraws money from his savings and goes out for a night on the town. He encounters a stranger (Yonosuke Ito), a novelist, and confesses to him that he doesn’t know how to have a good time. The novelist offers to show him a night on the town. They drink, go clubbing, stop at a house of prostitution, and go ice-skating, but none of this raises Watanabe’s spirits. In fact, at one club, the piano player is taking requests. Watanabe asks him to play a song called “Life is Short – Fall in Love, Dear Maiden.” By the time the song is done, Watanabe’s blue mood has cast a pall over everyone else at the club!
Watanabe stops showing up for work. One young woman from his section, Toyo (Miki Odagiri), comes looking for Watanabe because she wants to resign her job and needs Watanabe’s signature on a form. She is a spirited young woman and Watanabe envies her joie de vie. He asks to spend the day with her. She takes pity on him and decides to try to help him out. She entertains him with the nicknames that she has for all of Watanabe’s associates at the Town Hall as well as himself (“The Mummy”). Watanabe also attempts to have a heart to heart talk with his unappreciative son Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko), who Watanabe has raised since his wife’s untimely death, and his daughter-in-law Kazue (Kyoko Seki). He can’t get a word in edgewise, however. Their only concern is that he might fritter away some of their “rightful” inheritance.
The turning point comes when Watanabe returns to work and encounters a group of folks from a lower-class neighborhood petitioning the city to drain a dangerous area where stagnant, contaminated water has accumulated and to turn the area into a children’s park. Watanabe decides he will use the time that he has left to try to get this one good project realized.
The narrator now informs us that Watanabe did indeed die from stomach cancer. The rest of the film is told through flashbacks triggered by the conversation among the somewhat drunken politicians, bureaucrats, and relatives in attendance at Watanabe’s funeral reception. Through these flashbacks, we observe Watanabe’s single-minded determination to walk the request of the woman through each step in the process, not allowing any of the various parties to evade their responsibility or to bury the request by shuffling it among departments. Watanabe uses any and all tactics to get the job done, from humiliating himself to utterly dogged persistence that forces the bureaucrats to take action simply to rid themselves of the nuisance he is causing them. In the end, however, the park gets built. In a touching final shot, Watanabe is seen sitting by himself on a children’s swing in the new park as snow gently falls – symbolic of the descent into the cold slumber of death. Watanabe has accomplished his final mission and thereby proves himself the victor over death.
Themes: There are two main themes in this masterful film. The first is basically a profound meditation on impending death and the meaning of life. Ikiru means, appropriately “to live.” To live, attentive viewers discover, is to be an agent for positive change. The subject matter of this film is distinctly reminiscent of that in Bergman’s great film, The Seventh Seal. Both Watanabe and Antonius Block have a death sentence hanging over them and both are desperately searching for meaning before they die. Interestingly, both of these great directors, Kurosawa and Bergman, offer the same answer: meaning is derived from beneficent acts – building a children’s park in place of stagnant, poisonous water or helping a young family escape death.
The second theme (really a strengthening of the first) derives from the failure of Watanabe’s associates to truly understand the change that came over him in his last few months. Viewers understand, but they do not. By adding the perspective of the petty attendants at the funeral reception, Kurosawa has given his theme far more power. Any good lawyer or debater understands that to win an argument you must not only make a strong positive case for your point of view, but also invalidate the principal argument of the opposition. The ultimate defense for film viewers against being changed by the message of a film is to dismiss it as “only a movie”, imagining that the point has no applicability to real life. By including the cynical guests at the funeral reception, Kurosawa is forcing viewers to make a choice: to be like Watanabe or to be like the petty and cynical guests. The viewer must choose either to accept what Watanabe came to understand and incorporate the understanding into their own lives or dismiss it and fail to understand (like the cynical guests). This additional level of “argument” makes Ikiru one of the few films that actually stands a change of influencing how people approach their own lives. Otherwise, we are no better than the petty bureaucrats who, under the influence of alcohol and Watanabe’s example, pledge to be more like Watanabe but who instead, the next day, are right back to their old games.
There is also something of a political message in Ikiru, condemning the pettiness of bureaucracies. Although Kurosawa’s specific target might be seen as post-war Japan, the issue certainly applies to some extent to all places around the world and all times.
Production Values: The script was co-written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Shinobu Hashimoto. It is highly original in its structure. The strength of the approach the writers adopted is the contrast that is provided between Watanabe’s courage and the continuing pettiness and lack of understanding on the part of his fellow bureaucrats. The weakness is that viewers never really get to relate directly to Watanabe when he is at his best and fully alive with the resolve to help the petitioners. We see him in the first half of the film as living but deadened by self-pity and the worthless routine of his life. Then we see him in the second half through flashbacks after he is dead, though alive in a sense in the memories of those who experienced his positive influence. Another structure might have provided more investment in Watanabe as a character, even if the thesis of the film might have been a bit weakened. As it is, Ikiru works betters as a message film than an engrossing drama.
Takashi Shimura was just 47 years of age at the time that he played the part of the old man Watanabe, yet he is fully convincing as a man much older than he really was. His sad tired eyes and hangdog expression are perfect for a man both near death and in a kind of living death for many years. He augments the facial aspects of the role with a shuffling gait, stooped posture, and mannerisms suggestive of defeat and resignation, until, later, when these same physical skills are employed to project single-minded determination. Some viewers may recognize Shimura as Kambei, the great Samurai leader in Kurosawa’s later picture, The Seven Samurai. Shimura’s performance here in Ikiru and his performance in The Seven Samurai are widely considered the greatest performances of his career.
The beautiful monochrome cinematography of Ikiru was the work of Asakazu Nakai. The city of Tokyo is here captured with all the shadowy, dreary blight of the inner city, lower-class neighborhoods.
Bottom-Line: Kurosawa’s Ikiru is a soulful art film that contrasts sharply with his more famous films, Ran and The Seven Samurai. I would call it a masterpiece if it were just a bit more emotionally engaging. As with all Kurosawa films, it is technically brilliant and creatively original. Ikiru is in Japanese with English subtitles and has a running time of 141 minutes. It’s not rated, but I doubt that it would hold much interest for must children. The Criterion DVD version includes a worthwhile commentary by Stephen Price, a documentary on Kurosawa, and a discussion of Ikiru specifically.
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