The Hip Pocket #20: IKIRU

Kurosawa's quiet masterpiece is a lesson in creating empathy

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

---

Ikiru
Takashi Shimura, Shin’ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki, Miki Odagiri, Bokuzen Hidari, Minosuke Yamada, Kamatari Fujiwara, Makoto Kobori, Nobuo Kaneko, Nobuo Nakamura, Atsushi Watanabe, Isao Kimura, Masao Shimizu, Yûnosuki Itô, Kumeko Urabe, Eiko Miyoshi, Noriko Honma, Yatsuko Tan’ami, Kin Sugai, Yoshie Minami, Kyôko Seki, Kusuo Abe, Tomo’o Nagai, Seiji Miyaguchi, Daisuke Katô, Hiroshi Hayashi, Fuyuki Murakami, Hirayoshi Aono, Toranosuke Ogawa, Taizô Fukami, Katao Kawasaki, Keiichirô Katsumoto, Fujio Nagahama, Akira Sera, Ichirô Chiba, Akira Tani, Yôyô Kojima, Haruko Toyama, Mie Asô, Toshiyuki Ichimura, Harue Kuramoto, Rasa Saya
cinematography by Asakazu Nakai
music by Fumio Hayasaka
screenplay by Akira Kurosawa & Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni
produced by Sôjirô Motoki
directed by Akira Kurosawa
not rated
2 hrs 23 mins
Commissioned by Alan Cerny

When we sat down recently to watch another of the titles on the Pull The Strings list, the “we” consisted of myself and my two boys. We made it about ten minutes into Night of the Living Dead before my youngest asked me to pause it.

“So, you know how I told you I’m not scared of anything?” he asked.

“Yep. You’re super-brave. You’re way braver than I am,” I replied.

“Well, I am sort of scared of something, and I just remembered.”

“What?”

“I’m scared of zombies. I’m scared of them because they’re dead, and being dead is pretty scary, actually. I’ve been thinking about death lately.”

“What have you been thinking about it?”

“I don’t like it.”

You and me both, buddy.

I’m not sure what a pre-teen thinks about when they think about death. I’m not sure if I can remember when I realized what death is. It’s a major developmental milestone, that realization that there was a world before you existed and there will be one after you are gone, and every living thing has a cycle and that includes you and there will come a time when you, like every other living person in history, are dead and gone. I have long since made my peace with the general idea.

But the specifics of death? That’s something else entirely, and it’s something that gets more real and more clearly defined each year I am alive. In the end, the way I die is irrelevant; what matters is how I live until that moment and how I feel about whatever it is I leave behind, and when it comes to considering your legacy and the value of what you do, I have had a full-blown existential meltdown for the last five years.

I believe films are very powerful mood-altering substances, and I carefully consider how I’m feeling and where I am in my life when I program the ongoing film festival that is my life. I am as careful about how I curate my movie intake as I am about how I curate my food intake. Hell, who am I kidding? For most of my life, I made way better choices about movies than I did about food, and I only recently started to realize that I have to treat that the same way.

Opening the doors for Pull The Strings introduces an element of the random to my world, and it’s been interesting so far. I’ve been pushed to see a classic I’d always put off as a possible rainy-day movie. I’ve learned that I intensely dislike a film I used to like. By far, though, the most challenging purchase made to date is also one of the greatest of the films anyone’s commissioned. It is a film I love dearly, but a film I am always intimidated to revisit precisely because it is one of the most expansive, profound films ever made about death, and there is no way to fully engage with the film that does not involve humbling oneself before the idea of your own mortality.

Ikiru, which translates simply as “To Live,” was the work of a filmmaker at the absolute height of his power. This was his thirteenth film, and he was on fire at this point. Out of his last six films, three of them were amazing signature works that pushed forward his identity as a storyteller. Kurosawa had been growing by leaps and bounds as a filmmaker, and watching him progress from Drunken Angel to Stray Dog to Rashomon, you can see someone who is more assured with every film, someone whose ambition was clear. He demonstrated a command of neorealism at least on par with his Italian peers working at the same time, but he was also able to put together masterful visual sequences that worked as silent cinema.

I can’t imagine many filmmakers having the kind of range today that Kurosawa did, and he wasn’t just leaning into existing genres and forms; he was inventing them. The modern action epic has its roots in his work, and Seven Samurai may be one of the most influential films in any language in the 20th century. But he could do anything, and it just depended on which story he was telling. Here, he built something that’s structurally unlike anything else he ever made, and he did it to deliver one of the most powerful emotional sledgehammers of his entire career.

The opening 20 minutes or so of Ikiru are nakedly satirical, a look at the ways the machinery of local government seemed to exist to frustrate people out of trying to accomplish anything. A group of concerned mothers is trying to get the city to address an open sewage leak, and they get shuttled from office to office until they finally break, and in the process, they attract the attention of someone from the office of Public Affairs. It’s the office run by Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), and in the film’s opening moments, a narrator explains that the cancer is already growing in Kanji’s stomach, but he doesn’t know it yet. Those two threads… the insane bureaucracy and Kanji’s stomach cancer… are the defining guardrails of all of Ikiru, and it’s amazing how simple the film is narratively and how deep and rich it is thematically. It may be the greatest magic trick of Kurosawa’s career.

The narrator is an interesting choice by Kurosawa. It allows him to comment directly on characters, and there’s nothing neutral about the language he uses. The script, written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni, almost seems angry at Kanji Watanabe and the way he coasts through life. “The truth is, he’s been dead for twenty years,” the narrator practically snarls as they introduce him and talk about how his job is just an excuse to hold down a chair. I love the way he literally uses his youthful proposal for ways to fix his department as scrap paper. It’s a great touch in a film filled with great touches.

Watanabe misses work for the first time in 30 years, and immediately, everyone in his department starts speculating about how serious it must be because of how reliable he is. They’re kidding about picking his replacement, but his doctor’s visit is a worst-case-possible scenario. The doctor tries to soft-sell the diagnosis, but an encounter with another patient is enough to tell Watanabe the truth. He’s going to die, and it’s going to be sooner rather than later. There’s a moment right after the diagnosis when he’s walking home, and at first, it’s silent. Kurosawa maintains that silence for a long time, longer than seems possible, as Watanabe walks along, lost in thoughts about the news he’s just received. As he steps into the street, a truck narrowly misses him, and suddenly all the sounds of the city around him come crashing in, and it’s almost deafening. It’s this blast, this cacophony, and the idea that he was so wrapped up in his own head that he didn’t hear any of it is offered up so gracefully, so powerfully.

One of the things I love about Brazil is the way Terry Gilliam creates the labyrinth of paperwork and machinery where Sam Lowry toils away in anonymity, constantly blissfully close to being swallowed up by it all. Watanabe’s office is the same way, this mountain of paperwork where he can hide in the shadows of it, all of his underlings moving even more paper around, none of it actually accomplishing anything. There’s something slightly heightened about the world where Watanabe works. Like Sam Lowry, he’s entirely satisfied with his anonymity. He’s secure in his invisibility.

There’s an interesting rhythm to the film. The first 20 minutes is setting up the office, the problem with the sewage, and Watanabe’s diagnosis. Then it sort of drifts for a little while as he falls in and out of memory, reeling from the news. In this stretch, Shimura is almost giving a silent movie star performance. He’s got such a great face, and he’s able to play the younger and older versions of Watanabe with just a slight adjustment here or there, effortlessly communicating whatever it is he needs to in each scene. I always feel it like a punch in the chest when Watanabe breaks down sobbing while looking at a certificate he’s got hanging on his wall commending him for 25 years of civil service. The loss of time that represents, the absolute nothing that he’s accomplished, is just overwhelming, and he basically breaks.

The film was released in 1952, so this is less than ten years after WWII. I love Kurosawa’s films for the window they offer into that time and place. I could just wander around in the world itself soaking up the details because he does such a meticulous job of setting every scene. His son Mitsuo and his daughter-in-law live with him, and they’re tired of the way things are. They’re not close to him, and it’s no one’s specific fault. He’s just never known how to be close to them. Watanabe’s wife died when his son was very young, and he vanished into his work. He never remarried, always using his son as the excuse. They really only see him in terms of his value… his pension, his savings, what they could earn from selling his house. His continued existence is inconvenient, and they say as much when they come home one night, only to find him sitting there in the dark. He doesn’t even talk to them. He just leaves. Later, he tries to talk to Mitsuo again. It’s not working, but then suddenly Mitsuo calls out to his father, who is lost in thoughts of regret. You see Watanabe light up. He runs to the stairs, ready for whatever his son wants from him. When it’s just a curt, dismissive “Good night, we’re going to bed,” it nearly crushes him.

If a great film is a collection of great scenes, then one of the best in this film starts about a half-hour in. Watanabe goes to a bar. He’s incredibly, painfully lonely, and he just wants to talk to someone about what he’s going through. He meets a novelist (Yūnosuke Itō) and the two men fall into an immediate intimate conversation. Watanabe realizes he’s spent so much time not living that he has no idea how to even begin to do it now that he’s out of time. He doesn’t know how to order a drink in a bar. He doesn’t know where to go to enjoy himself. He knows that every drink of alcohol is going to tear a new hole in his stomach, and he almost sees it as a penance. He is so raw, so open about his pain, that the novelist has no choice but to stay and sit with him.

Watanabe offers to pay for a night on the town. It’s a tempting offer, a full 50,000 yen that he can do anything he wants with, and the novelist is moved by how naked the desperation is. It’s so human that he tells Watanabe to put his money away. He takes him out to show him a good time, but as a friend now, not a stranger. “Let’s go reclaim the life you’ve wasted,” he says as the two of them embark on their debauched adventure. They play arcade games. They go to a noisy beer hall. They find women to dance with. And finally, late in the night, they find music. This unlikely duo settles into an easy comic rhythm, and there’s a sort of drunken lurching energy that carries them along for almost a full half-hour before they end up crashed at a piano bar. The piano player asks for “The Gondola Song,” and while it’s not at all the same energy as what he’s been playing, he starts in. People rise to dance. Watanabe starts to sing, and everyone freezes. There’s such enormous sorrow in the way he sings, and the lyrics are all about looking back at youth and regretting missed opportunity.

“Life is brief
Fall in love, maidens
Before the raven tresses
Begin to fade
Before the flames in your hearts
Flicker and die
For those to whom
Today will never return”

He sings like he is already gone, and Kurosawa shoots the entire final verse in close-up, tears hanging heavy on Shimura’s eyelids. The novelist drags him from the club, determined to cheer him up. More noise. More chaos. More clubs, and there’s this one particular spot I love where there’s a Cuban brass band playing and this undulating sea of dancers, spotlights cutting across the tops of the crowd, smoke in the air. It’s gorgeous. It’s an amazing descent into that kind of slurred foggy haze that mark the best worst nights of our lives.

I love that the script was the result of a fairly contentious development between the three writers. Kurosawa had the broad-strokes-idea and created what is arguably the film’s most indelible image, but it was Oguni who unlocked the film’s very tricky structure. Hashimoto, the initial collaborator on the film, was the one who wanted the film to focus on a low-level bureaucrat who is coming to grips with leaving no mark on the world, but he found many of the choices made by Kurosawa and Oguni to be frustrating or too sentimental, including the film’s eventual title. By an hour into the film, we’ve seen very little about the office or the work he’s abandoned. It’s only five days that he skips out, but considering his uninterrupted perfect record before that, it’s like a seismic event in his office. Besides, everything has to have his seal on it before it’s official, so nothing’s actually getting done. Or even more nothing than normal. It’s Toyo (Miki Odagiri) who finally makes the effort to reach out to Watanabe to see what he’s doing.

She has an ulterior motive, though. She’s looking to quit City Hall, and she needs his seal to make her resignation final. She’s found another job, something she really wants to do. Odagiri is terrific in the role, still young enough to not be beaten down by the system. She still has a joy and a curiosity and a belief that she can make some kind of difference in the world. She seems blown away by the thirty years he spent on the job. He has seen her before, noticed her before, but he’s never really talked to her. She makes him laugh, and the time they spend together is very different than his decadent night out with the novelist. At one point, she’s sharing nicknames she privately gave to everyone in the office, and when he asks what his was, she demurs. “I had you all wrong.” Finally, he gets her to admit that she called him “The Mummy,” and he can’t even be upset about it. It’s a perfect description. He is indeed the walking dead and has been for as long as he can remember. He tries to explain that he did it all for his son, but Toyo won’t let him get away with it. She tells him that his son didn’t ask him to become a mummy or to work as hard as he did and that it’s not fair to say he did it “for his son.” Toyo challenges him in a number of ways, and he is moved by her youth, by the way she still seems to enjoy her life so freely.

We see how strained things are between Watanabe and his son. The younger man calls out his father for what he sees as a shameful affair with Toyo, shocking Watanabe deeply. Even Toyo starts to get creeped out by his constant attentions, though, and finally tells him that their relationship feels wrong to her. She agrees to see him one last time, and as they sit silently together, she watches all the interactions around them. Couples in love. Kids having a party. She’s suspicious about his intentions, and she’s freaked out by the way he can’t articulate what it is that he wants from her. When he does finally try to explain it, the scene just destroys me. Shimura’s performance is a marvel of minimalism. It’s like he’s fading in and out of existence. His voice is thin, like it hurts to push the air out. His eyes look through everything and everyone, like he can already see death rushing towards him. He tells her that he’s simply trying to enjoy some of the youth and health that she radiates so strongly. He asks her to explain what it is that makes her that way, and he wants to try to understand so he can spend at least one day living with that same joy and hunger for life. It becomes desperate, almost scary. She tells him that she doesn’t have a big secret. All she does is work and eat. She tells him that she loves her new job making toys because it feels like she’s “making friends with all the babies in Japan” when she does it. She tells him he should try making something, that he should quit his job, and at first, the mere thought seems to depress him even more.

But then he has an idea, and as he rushes out of the restaurant, it’s just as a girl arrives for her surprise party and the whole restaurant breaks out singing “Happy Birthday.” The way it’s staged, it’s like they’re singing it for Watanabe as he lights up, born anew, suddenly filled with the vigor from this new idea of his, whatever it is. The next day, he returns to work for the first time in two weeks, and his department isn’t sure what to make of his return. They were already making plans for how to replace him and how to carry on without him. He finds the original petition that was filed by the women at the start of the film, the one about the open sewage leak, and he tells his team that he wants them to start putting together a report immediately about how to fix the problem. They seem stunned. They aren’t supposed to fix things. They’re just supposed to shuffle paperwork. Watanabe seems like a man possessed, though, and after he tells everyone how to get started, he leaves, excited by his own tasks. It’s the first time we see him excited or engaged at all, and it’s thrilling.

The very next cut takes us five months into the future, according to the narrator, and Watanabe is already dead. It’s the day of his funeral. With almost an hour left to go, his funeral turns into a sort of mystery, with everyone trying to piece together what changed in Watanabe and why he acted the way he did for the last five months of his life. It’s almost the inverse of Rashomon, where we see three different interpretations of the same events. Here, we see a number of different perspectives come together to finally present a portrait of who Watanabe actually was. It’s clear that there was a park built on the site of the former sewage leak, and that Watanabe died in the park. Reporters speculate that his death might have been a form of protest against city officials. It’s fascinating that we watch these faceless, nameless bureaucrats struggle to understand what changed in Watanabe instead of actually watching Watanabe build the park. It is emotionally distancing at first. We don’t care about any of these people, and they didn’t really know Watanabe. They’re no closer to him than his own son, who didn’t even fully understand how sick his father was. Watanabe stopped living for other people and stopped worrying about what they thought of him and threw himself into his project whole-heartedly. We see several flashbacks and the Watanabe we see in these scenes is much more assertive, a sly smile now sneaking onto his face from time to time. We see how frustrating the process was and how determined Watanabe was, and simply telling the story, we see it start to pierce all of the inertia that surrounds these men. Each story they tell leads to a different story, gradually chipping away at the reserved exterior of the group.

Finally, near the end of the funeral, a policeman arrives to return Watanabe’s hat. He tells the story of how he came to have the hat in the first place, and he explains, obviously wracked with guilt, that he saw Watanabe in the park the previous night. He feels terrible that he didn’t bring Watanabe indoors, since it was snowing, but he says something stopped him. He talks about seeing Watanabe sitting in a swing, singing “The Gondola Song” again, and we flashback to the moment.

image courtesy of Toho

This time when he sings, regret is not the overwhelming note. There’s something hopeful, something peaceful in it this time. It may be one of the most striking images in Kurosawa’s entire career, which is saying something. It is simultaneously one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen and joyous, a celebration of the fragility of life that manages to pierce because of the way it captures the bitter and the sweet at the same time. As we return to the funeral, we see the truth settle on Watanabe’s son, who is shattered by the way his father kept everything a secret. All of Watanabe’s peers are drunk now, grieving, swearing they’ll do better in the future. They claim they are inspired by what they’ve finally pieced together, by the realization that Watanabe spent his final months struggling to do good for people. The way Kurosawa draws all these threads together in the film’s final moments is a testament to just how delicate a touch he could have, and there is a quiet power that is cumulative, allowing you room for your own reaction instead of bludgeoning it out of you.

This feels like an old man’s movie, while Ran, Kurosawa’s late-in-life masterpiece, feels like the work of someone much younger and hungrier. This is a film that comes fairly early in his life as a major international audience. For anyone else, this would be the summation of a life’s work in film, a final statement on everything, but for Kurosawa, it was a run-up to a whole string of masterworks. It remains one of the most remarkable of his films, singular in both subject matter and approach, and watching it at 50 lands in a whole different way than it did when I saw it in my 20s. I feel the way time is slipping away from me more acutely every year, and I’m not sure I’ve done enough of anything yet. I hope I have done some good in the world, if only through the children I’m raising to be better people than I was, and I hope when I am gone, there is some sign I’ve been here, some small way in which I leave this world better than I found it.

One final note: there was a period of time when Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg talked about remaking this movie. I would argue that would be redundant, and not for the typical reasons I might say that about a remake. I think they already did it. Joe Versus The Volcano, the John Patrick Shanley film that Hanks starred in for Spielberg as a producer, may be an absurdist comedy featuring Tom Waits songs and Pacific Islanders with a fetish for orange soda, but it is also an incredibly potent movie about what you do when you learn you have limited time left. There is great swooning beauty in Joe, and the way Hanks handles his own transformation from sickly office drone to wide-open adventurer is beautiful and nuanced. It feels like a film that is inspired by the wisdom of Ikiru rather than a direct remake of it, and that feels to me like a better way to honor it. The entire message of the film is that we do good in this world when we create, when we make things for other people, and that we can inspire by example, and by that standard, Kurosawa’s film, and indeed his career as a whole, is proof that he spent his time very, very well.

---

If you enjoyed this, you can subscribe to my newsletter and get access to the full archive of Library titles, as well as everything else I’ve published here.

It’s just $7 per month, and it’s even less if you buy a full year at once!