Philip Kemp

“Sometimes I think of my death,’ wrote Kurosawa, ‘I think of ceasing to be... and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.’ The story of a man diagnosed with stomach cancer, Kurosawa’s film is a serious contemplation of the nature of existence and the question of how we find meaning in our lives.

Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character’s stomach, Ikiru, tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with a fatal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life. Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frentic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanabe - the film’s hero, finally finds satisfaction through building a children’s playground.

In this, the role of his career, Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a senior civil servant sunk in ossified routine - a man who, as the dispassionate narrator tells us, has lived like a corpse for twenty-five years. Confronted with the news that he has terminal cancer with only months to live, he finds himself driven to give some meaning to his life.

This was one of Kurosawa’s own favourites among his films. It grew, he said, out of a sense of his own mortality. Although he was only 42 and had yet to make most of his finest films, he was tormented with doubts about what his own life would be worth, saying, ‘I keep feeling I have lived so little. My heart aches with this feeling.’ From this angle, the film can be seen as a form of therapy, Kurosawa reassuring himself, and us, that life *can* be made to have meaning, even under the shadow of imminent death. As the critic Richard Brown wrote, Ikiru ‘consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when all’s said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task which is meaningful *to him*. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.”
― Philip Kemp