IKIRU (To Live) 1952

 "Sometimes I think of my death.  I think of ceasing to be... and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came." -Kurosawa

 

 

                            Cast                                 Credits

Takashi Shimura as Kanji Watanabe                Director  Akira Kurosawa

Nobuo Kankeko as Mitsuo Watanabe                Writers  Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo

Kyoko Seki as Kazue Watanabe                                       Oguni, and Akira Kurosawa

Makoto Kobori as Kiichi Watanabe                      Music    Fumio Hayasaka

Kumeko Urabe as Tatsu Watanabe

Miki Odagiri as Toyo Odagiri

Nobuo Nakamura as the Deputy mayor

Yunosuke Tanami as the Novelist

 

Inspired by Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich

 

 Movie Trailer

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

Kanji Watanabe, Section Chief of the Public Works department, discovers that he has stomach cancer and has less than a year to live.  Sadly, it is at this moment that Watanabe realizes his life has been empty and meaningless.  He has always faithfully performed his duties - at least as he perceived them.  He never missed a single day of work.  He refused to remarry after the death of this wife out of consideration for his son, Mitsuo.  In short, Watanabe has always done what (he thought) others expected of him.  After a failed attempt to tell his son of his disease, Watanabe begins to skip work for the first time in his life.  He takes 50,000 yen out of the bank and ends up going out for a night on the town with a novelist he just met.  This experience teaches Watanabe that  pursuing pleasure is not necessarily living.  In fact, Watanabe never feels more alone than when he is surrounded by a throng of dancing strangers, each desperately and greedily seeking pleasure.  On his way home from the previous night's debauch, Watanabe runs across Toyo, a vivacious female coworker.  She has actually been looking for Watanabe.  She needs him to stamp her resignation form.  She refuses to work in the Public Works department any longer.  She finds its boring, bureaucratic environment oppressive.  Watanabe, captivated by Toyo's energy and vitality, sees her as a possible antidote to this dull, meaningless existence.  They form a brief, platonic relationship in which Watanabe attempts to live vicariously through Toyo.  He confesses, in one poignant scene, that he wants her to show him how to live. Rebuffed by Toyo, Watanabe realizes that trying to live through another isn't really living either; but it is in that moment of despair and complete despondency that Watanabe, as he watches a toy rabbit hop across the table, discovers  the meaning - not of LIFE - but of his life.  He decides that he will try to build a park for the children.  Five months later Watanabe dies.  The last third of the movie takes place at Watanabe's wake where we discover that the park has been built.  All of Watanabe's former work associates and his family are present at the wake; and they proceed to debate, quite openly and drunkenly,  who should get credit for building the park. 

 

"He [Watanabe] must confront the emptiness of two conventional modes of being...the world of the pinball machine, the automatic vendor of dreams...and the other based in the effort to live through another person..."  -Stephen Prince

 

 

 Themes

• Outsider/Insider - The knowledge of Watanabe's own imminent death makes him an outsider.  He no longer perceives life through the same lens.
• Capitalism and Democracy -  Throughout the picture Kurosawa contrasts the rich with the poor.  Democracy, a great ideal, comes to a halt in the many bureaucratic departments of the  government.  Democracy doesn't work for the people.  Nothing gets done.
• The meaning of life-  "one man's life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task which to him is meaningful." -Richard Brown

   

• Individual vs. Society -  Watanabe's actions are shocking and strange to his co-workers.  People aren't supposed to make a stir.
• Illusion vs. Reality - What Watanabe actually does vs. what others think or say he did.

 

Music and Sound

 

 Music and sounds are strategically placed in the film to comment on the scene or carry the audience to another time and place.  The complete lack of sound in the scene in which Watanabe is walking down the street after learning of his cancer takes the audience inside Watanabe's head and shows how completely cut off he is now from life.

 

Gondola no Uta by Shinpei Nakayama

 

Life is short,

Fall in love, dear maiden,

While your lips are still red,

And before you are cold,

For there will be no tomorrow.

Life is short,

Fall in love, dear maiden,

While your hair is still black,

And before your heart withers,

For today will not come again.

 

Happy Birthday! - After Watanabe learns of his impending death, he is reborn.

 

                                                                Watanabe in the Park

 

 

 

 

Sources:

Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Los Angeles: University of California P, 1965. 86-96.

Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 100-113.

 

Websites:

Essay by Donald Richie

 1960 NYT movie review

 Criterion website

 "Kurosawas Quiet, Tragic Bureaucrat" by David Thomson

Background Information:

American Occupation