A Very Kurosawa Christmas: Ikiru (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 2h23m, 1952).

Ikiru Poster (1952)

Mortality, and the figure of Death, stalk cinema. Bernhard Goetzke's Death recurs across tales of doomed love in Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921), whilst Bengt Ekerot's iconic hooded incarnation seeks to claim the soul of Max Von Sydow's knight in plague-ridden Europe in The Seventh Seal (1957). Even where Death doesn't make a physical appearance, films as far apart as Agnes Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7, in which a young woman awaits the results of a cancer diagnosis-her later film, Jacquot de Nantes, (1991) is an attempt to come to term with her husband's death- to Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which may be the best of the duo's films, and certainly the one that captures their themes of mortality and ageing with sensitivity and warmth. So we come to Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa's masterful drama on human mortality, where, confronted with his own death from cancer, a bureaucrat struggles with what to do with his remaining life, before being galvanised by an unexpected source.

We are introduced, via an x-ray that reveals the illness that will eventually kill him, to Kanji Watanabe (Kurosawa's recurring lead, Takashi Shimura), a career civil servant whose life has become joyless and  rote, the film's narrator stating "He's not even alive". His position is monotonous. The paperwork that fills the office, meaningless piles that enclose him like the walls of a cell, and dominate shots and hem in the human occupants of the room, the bureaucracy of the Public Affairs department incarnate, and it becomes clear that he has little else in his life. His wife, whose courtship and later funeral we are shown in flashback, has been dead for a number of years, and his son (Mitsuo, played by Nobuo Kaneko) and daughter-in-law are distant, concerned largely with Watanabe's pension, and Mitsuo's inheritance. His life is empty. Worse, he understands his replaceability as a tiny cog in the great machine that is the Japanese civil service.

 

Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura)

Against this emptiness of self, this man without purpose-we briefly see him tear off the front of a report on improving the city, the work of a younger and more passionate Watanabe, the film, made in 1952, critiques the bureaucracy of Post-War, and more notably, post-US occupation Japan. This we begin to see as the film introduces what will eventually bring back meaning to Watanabe's life once his terminal diagnosis has been revealed, as a group of women arrive at the government offices to try to petition, and make headway with, the construction of a playground for children in suburban Tokyo. Over a dizzying sequence of myriad characters representing the departments of the Japanese civil service, they are sent this way and that, introduced to everyone from the Deputy Mayor (Nobuo Nakamura, who becomes a recurring figure later in the film), to the Departments of Education, Sewers, Road Maintenance and a dozen in between, but are merely onward and onward to the next department.

In short, so Kurosawa shows us, the work of Watanabe and his peers are useless, and meaningless because it cannot help the very people who are now trapped within it. Here, and indeed throughout the film, Kurosawa considers this most abstract of villains. Watanabe soon finds himself confronting another, in the form of the Japanese healthcare system, in which benevolent, but largely unhelpful doctors attempt to hide his true diagnosis from him, and overcome by the realisation of his own mortality, we see him practically beg for it. 

 As with Drunken Angel (1948), Kurosawa addresses the sickness at the centre of Japanese society, and, as Watanabe's stomach cancer worsens, so Kurosawa considers the carcinoma at the centre of Japan. First, the generational divide-Watanabe's relationship with Mitsuo is that of many Japanese of this period, as Ozu's epoch defining Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) would depict with unerring precision-the older generation still trying to help, to connect with an ever-more westernised, and materialistic, younger one.

Over dinner, and the rest of the evening, Watanabe tries to explain to his son his illness, only to find his son distant, and uninterested, Watanabe and the film dropping into nostalgia of the boy's childhood, and early adulthood, before, in the film's most moving sequence, he desperately starts up the stairs-Shimura's physical acting, his hangdog expression, his slumped, resigned posture all adding to a moment of utter vulnerability as he repeats his son's name, to be answered only by Mitsuo asking him to lock up. It is this broken bond, of fathers trying to do their best for distant, disinterested sons, that haunts Kurosawa's later work, culminating in Ran (1985), where Lear and his desperate attempts to hold together his disintegrating family is juxtaposed into Sengoku (Warring States) Japan.
 

A song-and a man-out of time with the Japan of the 50s

Kurosawa, though, plumbs this generational schism deeper. Struggling to make sense of his mortality, so, armed with much of his savings, Watanabe attempts to find happiness to fill his remaining days. Here he unexpectedly comes across a novelist (the Japanese character-actor, Yūnosuke Itō), and the film follows their sojourn into Tokyo's-decidedly modern, and utterly un-Japanese-red light district, the duo getting drunker and drunker as they go, until they arrive at a bar, and spurred on by the pianist, so Watanabe begins to sing "Gondola no Uta" ("The Gondola Song"), a sentimental ballad from 1915. 

Once again, as the pianist strikes up a tune (that required Kurosawa and his writing team to find the oldest member of staff at Toho to have a full set of lyrics to the song) so Watanabe becomes beholden to his past, to the song's now decidedly bitter-sweet lyrics of "life is brief/fall in love, maidens/before the crimson bloom/fades from your lips" as he slowly begins to cry. This is an old man, singing an old song, about the slow fade of age, and is, largely down to Shimura's performance, deeply moving. It is also here that Shimura realises that the hedonism of the novelist is not for him.

Neither, despite a long sequence of meetings with his former colleague, Toyo (Miki Odagiri), is the energy of youth, and it is here, again, that Kurosawa considers both the young of Japan, and-largely missing from critical considerations of Ikiru, and indeed from the otherwise sterling adaption that is 2021's Bill Nighy-starring Living, the question of class in mid 20th Century Japan. Toyo, and many of the younger generation, and more crucially, the women who lobby for the playground, are working class-Toyo's family have to pack into a small dwelling, there are holes in her stockings, and whilst the job that she quits the civil service for is rewarding to her, it is undeniably a menial one. Against this, Watanabe, his relatives, and his peers in the Civil Service are undeniably middle class: his family arriving to his funeral, which takes up the last third of the film in traditional dress, whilst his colleagues are dressed almost to a man in Western suits.

Watanabe seeks solace from Toyo (Miki Odagiri)

Once again, though, things are more complex than merely the collision of class and generation -Watanabe finds himself eventually rebuffed by Toyo, who he admires and seeks out for her vibrancy, who begins to grow suspicious, whilst his family fear a scandal. In the background, a group of teen girls set up for a party, as the elderly man cajoles Toyo into giving up the secret of, well, youth, before he sinks, despondent into a chair, convinced by her at last that there is no secret, before, with another Shimura masterclass, he realises that it is not too late to make a difference, leaping up, and down the stairs, as the youth break into "Happy Birthday"-the allusion is clear-Watanabe has been reborn to live rather than simply exist. Here, in the final act, against the background of Watanabe's funeral, so Kurosawa does something unexpected-rather than focus on the mortality of his protagonist, he suddenly pivots to the legacy of Watanabe, as his colleagues, friends, family, and those whom his actions have benefited, in the form of the playground, attempt to understand why-and indeed how-he managed it.

Thus, the film arrives at its final meditation-on how to live a life. We see the renewed joy of Watanabe for life in flashback, as the park takes shape, to the puzzlement of his colleagues after his death, we see him become almost fearless, even when confronted by yakuza, determined to try and scare him off pursuing the project, or increasingly frail, falling on the building site, only to rise again. We see him bridge this divide between class and generation, dedicate his remaining life to the construction of the playground, and in the film's final, elagic scene, so we return, in falling snow, to Watanabe, and in a very different context, to "Gondola no Uta", as a celebration of life, rather than a fear of ageing and death.

Kurosawa (left), directs Shimura in the film's most famous sequence

There are few films like Ikiru. It is a film critiquing Japan, Japanese society, the rot, and generational divide and Americanisation of Japanese youth, and the uncaring blank bureaucracy of the Japanese civil service, and a film that is staggeringly human and vital, despite focusing on its protagonist's mortality, all of this culminating in a piece of cinema that, alongside Tokyo Story, is perhaps the single most important film of Japanese cinema, a depiction of a man coming to terms with his own mortality and resolving to use his remaining time to help his community.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Ikiru is available to watch online in the UK via The BFI, and on DVD from The BFI and Criterion. It is also currently available to stream via Criterion, and on DVD from Criterion in the USA.

Next week, we're on a well deserved break, but will return in January with a selection of the best films 2023 had to offer, beginning with Christopher Nolan's towering portrait of the father of the Atomic Bomb in Oppenheimer.

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