Ikiru
1952, Japan
Why are we here? What purpose does our existence serve? How can we tell if our lives have meaning, if they are worth living? What is a life that is worth living? These are questions for which art—be it literature, poetry, painting, or cinema—is uniquely poised to answer. Other things, such as science and law may purport to hold the answers. However, their answers will always be unsatisfactory, will always seem like half-truths and theories when compared to the mysteries, conundrums, and paradoxes that are inherent to artistic explorations of those aforementioned questions.
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is a fine example of this. While Kurosawa is best known for his samurai epics and period pieces (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran), Ikiru (lit. “To Live”) is no less a masterpiece. What’s more, it’s one that feels vaguely biblical at that, as it takes on topics and expounds upon themes that could have easily come from that most existential of books: Ecclesiastes.
Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura, best known for his role as Seven Samurai‘s elderly samurai leader) is about as sad a sack as one can imagine. He’s spent nearly 30 years of his life working in the city offices, but even after such tenure, he’s still little more than a faceless cog in post-WWII Japan’s bureaucratic machine. He spends his days stamping documents, oblivious to the machinations of his underlings, who constantly wonder when the old man is going to die so they can move up the totem pole.
It’s a predictable existence, but also a safe one. That is, until Watanabe discovers that he has stomach cancer. The viewer learns this fact at the very beginning of the movie, when an emotionless narrator informs us of his imminent demise, which only makes us feel even more pity for the man.