The first image we see in the film after the opening credits is an X-ray of the man’s stomach, and the giant white blot in the middle representing his cancerous stomach dominates our perception of him. He is a man who is being eaten away from the inside—literally and figuratively—and doesn’t know it yet. When he does find out, it becomes a catalyst for him to question everything that had come before and possibly change everything that comes after. The cancer in his stomach is the only true marker in his life that divides him from what he was and what he becomes. He finally heeds Plato’s advice that the unexamined life is not worth living, and part of the film’s inherent sadness is that it has taken him so long to do so.

The man, Kanji Watanabe, is played by Takashi Shimura, a great character actor who starred in 11 of Kurosawa’s films. In Ikiru, he hits all the right notes of melancholy and inner turmoil without once coming across as pathetic. Indeed, one of Ikiru’s chief strengths is the way in which it studiously avoids all the melodramatic pitfalls usually associated with movies about dying characters. Rather than slipping into disease-of-the-week theatrics, it maintains a vigorously spiritual outlook that emphasizes the story’s philosophical dimensions. It is, after all, not so much about a man who is dying as it is about a man who finally learns to live.

The first part of the film is told largely through Watanabe’s eyes and traces his slow realization of how he will deal with his eventual death by leaving his mark. The scenes in the hospital in which he learns about his cancer are devastating, particularly in the way the doctor, following Japanese medical protocol at that time, lies to Watanabe by telling him he simply has a stomach ulcer. Watanabe, having been told he would hear this from a man in the waiting room, literally crumbles before our eyes. When he goes home that night, he finds that he cannot talk to his son, Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko), because he and his wife are more concerned about how they will take advantage of Watanabe’s pension and life savings to buy themselves their own home (the fact that they talk about this without knowing he’s dying of cancer shows how he is essentially dead to them anyway). As Watanabe is a widower, his wife having died several decades ago, he is virtually alone in the world with the knowledge of his impending death.

He tries to find ways to “live,” including going out all night drinking with a writer he meets in a bar. Eventually, he finds solace in Toyo (Miki Odagiri), a feisty young woman who works in his office. His family misinterprets their relationships as a sexually desperate older man making advances on a pretty young woman, and even Toyo doubts the motives behind Watanabe buying her presents and taking her out to dinner. Eventually, he confides to her his situation, and it is she who gives him the idea that, to make his life worth something, he has to leave a mark—something that matters. In this case, Watanabe decides to make his job work by following through on a petition brought by a group of concerned mothers to turn a cesspool in their neighborhood into a children’s park. This park—so simple, yet so profound—becomes Watanabe’s legacy.

Had the film ended there, it would be a neat, effective, but ultimately simplistic lesson about the importance of living one’s life proactively. However, as he did in several of his films, Kurosawa split Ikiru in half so that we could see the film’s events through a different point of view. The second half of the film takes place after Watanbe’s death, almost entirely at his wake, where his colleagues weep for his loss and reminisce about the changed man who came into their office and, for six months, ensured that the park was completed. They declare that they will learn from his example and make their static government bureaucracy work for the people … yet it doesn’t. Once back in the office, it is business as usual, and when one of them tries to speak up, he is immediately put back in his place. The poetic final shot finds him walking by Watanabe’s park, which comes to represent the conflicting sides of humanity, the one side that can accomplish so much and the other side that is so mired in conformity and stasis that nothing significant can be accomplished.

Ikiru was made right after Akira Kurosawa had earned worldwide fame with his breakthrough film Rashomon (1950), which more than any other film was responsible for getting postwar Japanese cinema recognized in the West. The 1950s were Kurosawa’s most prolific period, as he was at the height of his talents, so it is not surprising that Ikiru is one of his most beloved works, both in Japan and abroad.

In terms of Japanese culture, the film plays as a sharp critique of the postwar bureaucratic structure imposed by the Allied occupation forces who were trying to bring democracy to the shattered country. The montage of wipes in which the mothers complaining about the cesspool are shuffled from one desk to another is a bitingly funny account of the impossibility of getting anything done in the government. Kurosawa’s impeccable framing of Watanabe in his office surrounded on all sides by towering bundles of papers and blank-faced assistants going about their daily routines suggests a kind of claustrophobia that is, to him, reassuring.

On a larger scale, though, Ikiru resonates with anyone who has ever felt that he or she isn’t doing enough in life. Watanabe is not just a particular character, but a reflection of the tendency of people everywhere to get comfortable in their rut, fearing that, if they make waves, they will lose all they have. That it takes his impending death to shake him out of his complacency is sad, but the film maintains a life-affirming, if ultimately ironic, view of his eventual redemption. Even if Watanabe’s last-minute reversal doesn’t do much to change the lives of those around him, it changed his life by giving it meaning, and that, the film argues, is what ultimately matters.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick