On the Sustained Emotional Strength of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru

Not long after I watched Akira Kurosawa’s great film “Ikiru” for the first time (around 20 years ago), I read a review written by one anonymous but prominent South Korean critic who argued that “Ikiru” is the funniest film ever made by Kurosawa. This argument felt truer to me as I revisited the movie around the beginning and then the end of last year. It is quite painfully funny especially during its first act, but then it surprises us, generating a lot more pathos and poignancy than expected, while never losing its biting sense of black humor.

At the beginning, the movie does not pull any punch at all in its satiric viewpoint on how the whole life of its ordinary public servant hero Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) has been inconsequential to say the least. For nearly 30 years, he has just worked and worked as the head of one of the many departments of city hall, while monotonously occupying his desk just like others working under him. At his house, he resides with his only son and the son’s wife, but he is not particularly close to either of them.

Then comes devastating news for Watanabe. When he is waiting at a local clinic along with several other patients, one of these patients cynically explains in detail to him about the main symptoms of stomach cancer, and what the doctor will say if his patient happens to be dying because of that. It goes without saying that Watanabe has all the symptoms described by that patient and, what do you know, the doctor tells Watanabe exactly what that patient warned. Suddenly facing his imminent mortality, Watanabe is naturally scared, confused, and, above all, despaired. As he looks back on his whole life via a series of brief flashbacks, he belatedly comes to realize how meaningless it has been for years, and that makes him all the more morose and regretful.

What follows next is Watanabe’s hilariously clumsy attempts for fully live. (“Ikiru” means “To Live” in Japanese, by the way). He drinks a lot, even though that is the last thing he should do as a stomach cancer patient. He comes to have a wild night along with a jaded novelist who takes a pity on him after listening to his story. When a young pretty woman working under him approaches him for her resignation, he comes to spend more time with her for reasons he cannot articulate well. This is pitiful indeed, but we cannot help but be amused by the absurd irony of his grim situation. 

Not so surprisingly, none of these new experiences help Watanabe much, with his approaching death remaining as an undeniable fact to face. During one particularly haunting scene, he flatly but sorrowfully sings an old song at a nightclub, and everyone around him becomes silent, sensing a lot of melancholy and sorrow from his quiet singing voice. One brief but striking visual moment later shows Watanabe’s drunken face filled with more darkness and despair, and the mood between him and that generous novelist becomes far less joyful than before.

In the case of that young woman, she does not have any answer to Watanabe’s urgent life issue either, but he eventually gets a small but possible idea during his conversation with her. At that point, we are served with a memorably dramatic moment, which effectively utilizes a certain well-known song cheerfully sung in the background. This may look a bit too obvious, but Kurosawa skillfully develops this scene into an electric epiphany for Watanabe, who is pretty much born again.

And then the screenplay by Kurosawa and his co-writers Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, which was partially inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, does what can be regarded as a masterstroke of storytelling. The last act of the movie immediately leaps forward to Watanabe’s eventual death, which happens several months later. At his following funeral, his colleagues gather for condolences and then drinking a lot together, and their gradually drunken conversation comes to focus on how Watanabe suddenly became much more active than before to everyone’s confusion and surprise. To be frank with you, it is very funny for us to observe how ridiculously they try to ignore what has been so apparent to them from the very beginning, and how absurdly they end up becoming more aware of that instead. Reminded more of how pathetic they have been just like Watanabe once was, they seem to learn something at last, but, to our bitter amusement, things go back to usual business for them on the very next day.

While tickled a lot by this acerbically sardonic satire on bureaucracy, we are also touched by a series of harrowing flashback scenes showing what Watanabe did during his last several months. Throughout the film, Takashi Shimura, who was one of the frequent actors in many of Kurosawa’s works including “Seven Samurai” (1954), gives a subtly expressive performance to remember. His meekly static face conveys to us Watanabe’s deep sadness and desperation without signifying too much, and his seemingly inert façade becomes more mesmerizing as we come to sense more of Watanabe’s gradual inner change along the story. Around the end of the film, his serenely calm face does not feel timid or pathetic anymore, more than enough for us to see that Watanabe is more alive than ever. 

“Ikiru” was recently adapted into British film “Living” (2022), which incidentally garnered Bill Nighy a well-deserved Oscar nomination. While being one or two steps below “Ikiru,” this remake version is also worthwhile to watch for many good reasons including Nighy’s excellent performance, which will remind you that, as Roger Ebert once said, great actors don’t follow rules but illustrate them.