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Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru follows the final six months in the life of Kanji Watanabe, a downtrodden bureaucrat who, after 30 years of paper-pushing, discovers he has terminal stomach cancer and will die within a year. The sudden realisation forces him to seriously consider an almost clichéd hypothetical question: 'if you had six months left to live, what would you do?' Unfortunately for Watanabe, who has whiled away most of his life selflessly working to support his oblivious son, he has no idea what 'living' is, and is perplexed as to how to spend his final days. Having spent such a long time passively existing he begins a search for a way to actively live, at first throwing away money on drink, pachinko and debauched jazz clubs and then attaching himself to a feisty young girl named Toyo who has recently resigned from his office. Both of these pursuits provide little long-term comfort for Watanabe, but as Toyo finally tells him to get lost, finding his attachment to her slightly creepy, she provides him with the definition of living that he is looking for. Though she admits that there is little to her life apart from working and eating, she presents the old man with a toy rabbit that she has helped to produce at her factory, ordering him to 'make something.' After considering for a few moments Watanabe runs back to work, determined to make an impression on the world, however small, and thus begins the second half of the film, which focuses with a more satiric bent on the difficulty of doing good in the midst of the terrible bureaucracy and hypocrisy of post-war Japan.
The film confronts existential questions on a domestic scale, and as such is both philosophically engaging and incredibly touching. Masterfully played by Takashi Shimura, Watanabe is a slouching, sloping, stuttering old man, his huge soulful eyes in many scenes occupying most of the screen as Kurosawa draws our attention to the tentative, curious misery of his often grimacing face. At times it's also very funny – with his permanent scowl and doleful expression Watanabe has something of Eeyore about him, and his sudden change and the gossip that surrounds it fills the film with comic double-takes and raised eyebrows.
The link made between bureaucracy, where responsibility is passed from person to person so that nothing ever really happens, and the wasted years of Watanabe's life is a powerful one, the crux of the film's satirical message. The suggestion is that change, like life, doesn't just happen - it has to be effected through deliberate personal action. However, the criticism is never so implicit that it overshadows the other concerns here, which altogether make for an incredibly rich (though rather long) film about what it means to be alive, emotionally, socially and politically.
Ikiru is showing until 31st of July at the National Film Theatre as part of a BFI season of 'Japanese Gems', all of which are thoroughly recommended.
Adam Welch
London Kicks 2008
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