Ikiru
Director: Akira Kurasawa
1952
11 March 2025
See
The title translates from Japanese as To Live and the film follows Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) that he doesn’t have long left. After 30 years in civil service as a bureaucrat in a Tokyo City Hall office, he receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and realises he’s never really lived.
Think
Kanji is a widower and tried to connect with his son Mitsuo (Nabuo Kaneko) but even though they cohabit a home, he’s caught up in his own life with his wife, and the son wants what he’s due from his father. So Kanji doesn’t tell him he’s dying.
He goes through the stages of grief in a way, before determining he wants to do things differently with the time he has left. First he tries the pursuit of pleasure with a novelist (Yunosuke Ito), together they indulge in a night on the town and the hedonism Tokyo has to offer; drinking sake, dancing a nightclubs, gambling at pachinko parlours. Revellers stop to hear what Kanji has to say when a piano player asks for requests and he beautifully, mournfully, almost imperceptibly accompanies Gondola via Uta (Life is short – Fall in Love, Dear Maid).
Kanji is drawn to Toyo (Miki Odagiri) a junior colleague also on her way out, but to a different job. Her joie de vivre is infectious. Together they go to lunch. He’s abstemious, she’s ravenous. They too spend time together, drinking, talking, playing pachinko, out and about ravenous for experiences. She becomes wary but he wants to simply know the secret of her happiness. It’s in her new job making toys, which she sees as if she’s playing with all the children of Tokyo.
Feel
The structure of Ikiru is deceptively simple. It takes place at Kanji’s wake. With all the scenes of his life seeming turns points, or course corrections towards the end. His supposed nearest and dearest reminisce about who was responsible for the building of a children’s park. Kanji had observed the women of a community dealing with the inefficiency and inaction of bureaucrats in his office. He became a man on a mission to turn a vacant lot into the playground. And so doing leaving behind a legacy and example to give back more than one takes.
