It is impossible to watch Ikiru (1952) without eventually thinking about your own mortality. Though our deaths are inevitable, we go through our lives either pretending the day will never come or willfully focusing on our jobs, family or other sort of distraction. In Akira Kurosawa’s film, the inimitable Takashi Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a bureaucrat whose biggest achievement is that he hasn’t missed a day of work in nearly 30 years. A widower who shares a house with his adult son and his wife (who only really see him as their eventual retirement cash cow), Watanabe isn’t really living. All he does is push paper. His co-workers nickname him “the mummy.” A stomach cancer diagnosis changes things and puts all those wasted years into focus.
“Ikiru” means “to live” in Japanese, and over the film’s generous 143 minutes, Watanabe must learn to wake up and finally embrace the existence he has been dodging. However, Ikiru is more than an affirmation or a directive on living life to its fullest. Kurosawa is a slyer and more nuanced director than that. Ikiru is a damnation of a culture that is asleep. The proverb “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” definitely applies to the people who surround Watanabe, and Kurosawa makes it clear by breaking the film into two parts. In the first, we watch Watanabe learn of his diagnosis and then understand what he must do in his remaining days. At first he goes on a bender, getting drunk and spending time with a younger woman. But that really isn’t embracing life, is it? It’s more dodging. In the second part, which takes place at his funeral, the guests trace Watanabe’s final days—a postmortem if you will—and try to make sense out of his actions. Even if they come close to gleaning the truth, a cynical epilogue shows us exactly what Kurosawa believes about any lessons learned from a life unexamined.
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The movie begins with a close-up of Watanabe’s X-ray. A narrator explains that although Watanabe does not yet know it, the X-ray shows his stomach cancer and that he has less than a year to live. When we first meet Watanabe, he is just another city worker, giving a group of women the runaround by shuttling them from one department to another. The women want a sewage-ridden section of the city turned into a city park, yet no one is really willing to help them. After grieving for his own eventual death, Watanabe decides that he can truly live by helping these women get their wish. It’s the most selfless act of his entire life, and yet it’s the most fully he has ever lived.
In the extended funeral sequence, Watanabe’s workers seem like they might get it. Before this, Kurosawa portrays them as backbiting and lazy. As they get drunk, they begin to emote, crying and lauding their deceased boss. The deputy-mayor has assumed all credit for the park, but Watanabe’s coworkers jointly realize that he is the one who really pushed to make it happen. In the epilogue, it’s business as usual. They are back to ignoring their work, and when one of the men stands to protest, he is “pounded down” like that proverbial nail that stands up.
When I lived in Japan, my coworkers would invite me to parties where they would get roaring drunk. Suddenly, everyone is your friend, putting their arms around you, chanting and egging you on to drink more. The next day at work, it’s as if nothing ever happened. The rapport is completely gone. There is no advancement in relationships, the closeness has evaporated. Yet, the man who protests may have learned what Watanabe only discovered as his life came to a close. In the final scene of the film, the clerk has left the office and is walking home. He pauses at a bridge, looking over the park that Watanabe willed into existence. Does he really understand, or is he taking the park for granted like everyone else who is passing it by?
Kurosawa may best be remembered for his samurai films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Ran. However, Ikiru is one of the director’s best. Shimura gives a haunted, lived-in performance, never better than in those final moments. Watanabe, just minutes before his death, is at peace, sitting on a swing and enjoying the fruit of his labor as the snow falls around him. He understands what it means to truly live. As should we all.
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