How to Live and Die as a Hero: Kurosawa Akira’s "Ikiru"

Perhaps he himself had not been aware of it at the time, but Japanese director Kurosawa Akira (黒澤 明,1910-98) delivered the film of his life in 1952, a triumphant statement on the human condition that would immortalise him as director extraordinaire. The film was Ikiru (生きる, "To Live"), starring the director’s favourite actor, Shimura Takashi (志村 喬), who would later appear in the crowd-pleasing The Seven Samurai and The Bad Sleep Well. Unlike these later films, Ikiru is an unfussy, quietly introspective journey about a middle-aged widower who has just discovered he only has six months to live because of stomach cancer. Having worked all his life as a civil servant with an impeccable record (he has never been taken ill in thirty years), he has never known the joy of living. After the early decease of his wife, he has chosen to work hard to sustain his only son, who later turns out to be an ingrate, and forego all the pleasures in life. But now he is at a crossroads, the very final one before death comes for him. How is he to spend the next six months? Kurosawa’s hero (Watanabe) first does the impulsive: He absents himself from work for the first time in thirty years. He befriends a stranger, and together they haunt the night-clubs of post-war Tokyo, throwing themselves into the arms of young girls and drinking to the point of oblivion. When that does not seem enough, he solicits the friendship of a young apprentice at his office who has decided to leave. He clings on to her as if she were the meaning of life itself. Then comes the dropping of the other shoe: Watanabe realises that he needs to get a long-neglected local project – the construction of a playground – completed, even if it is to cost him his life.

Ikiru is an uncomfortable film to watch. It confronts the viewer with a slew of soul-searching questions that he would rather not entertain: What have you done to make your life worthwhile? What would you do if you were to have six months to live? Have you really lived life to the fullest, or have you been a “mummie” (as Watanabe is described) all these years? The film does not offer to answer these questions for you. Only you know the answers, if you care to look inside your heart long enough.

A little more than half-way through the film, Kurosawa leaps forward in time and shows us Watanabe’s wake. His family and former colleagues, all civil servants like him, have gathered to pay their last respects. This is where the film flips from a personal quest to find the meaning of life to a sharp-edged, confrontational social commentary that leaves no civil servants and politicians unscathed. Kurosawa’s petition is spelt out by each of the players: Civil service is a place rife with suffocating bureaucracy, shameless favouritism and inane political games. Watanabe’s role in the realisation of the playground, for which the locals are infinitely thankful, is downplayed by his superiors so they themselves can bask in undeserved glory. In a series of brief flashbacks, the viewer gets to witness the hardships Watanabe has had to bear to get the project approved and financed, and simultaneously – this is where Kurosawa’s genius lies – he is shown HYPOCRISY, in fact, is the lubricant that keeps the cogs of Japanese civil service turning smoothly.

When the film ends, the viewer is shown a playground alive with playing children. This is the place where Watanabe drew his last breath. Up on a bridge we see one of his former colleagues, his staunch supporter, looking down at the playground in resignation. The viewer, too, is made to resign – to the fact that the crooked ways of the world can never be straightened, and that heroes, contrary to what popular culture tells us, only exist in anonymity.