To Live and Die In a Tokyo Office

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 23
Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru

Fiftyish Tokyo bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) lives like a man already dead. Widowed and bored, he repeats the same meaningless tasks so frequently, he no longer remembers names and faces. His grown son and daughter-in-law live with him, but largely ignore him. Then one day a routine doctor’s visit turns sour when he gets the news: he has a stomach ulcer. Except it’s an open secret, “ulcer” is a euphemism for cancer. He’s dying.

Writer-director Akira Kurosawa is famous for making black-and-white samurai epics, and indeed, this is a rare Kurosawa film not featuring legendary samurai actor Toshiro Mifune. Its mid-century setting, as Japan makes the transition to industrial modernism, reflects a nation without much sense of identity. But by demonstrating a grey-faced bureaucrat’s struggle to discover himself, it gives Japan a hero of liberty and initiative. Kanji isn’t yoked to Japan’s past, Kurosawa says, so neither are you.

The story involves a neighborhood association’s attempts to turn a marshy, mosquito-infested vacant lot into a playground. Kanji Watanabe is just one among dozens of bureaucrats who bounce the association from office to office: parks, public health, land use, the fire department. Nobody wants to take responsibility for making a change. But Kanji, suddenly conscious of his own mortality, and aware how his ex-assistant has become more vibrant doing work she loves, finally steps up.

Stomach cancer forces Kanji to make choices. Formerly, he assumed he had decades to improve his job, correct his self-centered children, and generally do something worthwhile. Now he has under a year. He pursues his ex-assistant, who assumes he has untoward romantic interests, but when pushed, he only wants to understand why she seems so much happier. She reveals her secret; he is moved; he greets mortality as the crowd sings “Happy Birthday To You.”

Ikiru: original theatrical poster. Click to enlarge

Remarkably for a big-screen movie, the protagonist dies before the halfway mark. The entire back half of the film (this was before three-act structures dominated filmmaking) deals with Kanji’s co-workers, half-drunk at his memorial dinner, gradually realizing how he turned his life around during his final months. Told through flashback and dialog, their dawning awareness speaks volumes in a country that, to this day, still prizes collective action, and sees change as progressive, not revolutionary.

This movie bears consideration in light of America’s recent romance with zombies. It’s easy to forget, following franchises like The Walking Dead and World War Z, that in the original myth, zombies weren’t ravening murderers. Zombies repeated their living roles, like job or family life, infinitely, mindlessly. The fear of zombies wasn’t getting eaten, it was getting trapped in a meaningless life without even being aware. Kanji is a zombie. But he’s given another chance.

Even Kanji Watanabe’s name reveals his essential meaninglessness. His personal name, Kanji, also signifies the Japanese writing system: this man spends his life signing papers. “Watanabe” is one of Japan’s most common surnames. Japanese culture conditions citizens to work toward the common good, and Kanji Watanabe, the bureaucrat, is the apotheosis of this. Except that, by denying himself, he’s not helping anybody else, either. Living without meaning has left him, and his job, without direction.

Released just months after America’s occupation of Japan ended, this movie represents a conscious attempt to redirect Japanese culture. Though Japan’s feudal aristocracy was formally abolished in 1869, the dispossessed lords shifted focus, became capitalists, and continued dominating the country. People like Kanji have always done the state’s grunt work. By suggesting that an ordinary sararīman (a slur for suit-wearing white-collar worker) could change his community, Kurosawa urged other Japanese wage workers to actually live.

Kurosawa was famous for introducing Western literature and art into Japanese film. Before this film, he adapted Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; five years after, he turned Shakespeare’s Macbeth into The Throne of Blood. This film borrows heavily from Leo Tolstoy, particularly The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kingdom of God is Within You. This cross-cultural borrowing probably explains Kurosawa’s popularity in America and Europe. Though slow-moving by Hollywood standards, Ikiru is definitely a multicultural undertaking.

This movie requires a patient audience. It lacks Kurosawa’s signature action sequences, has almost no background music, and is driven by dialog. Viewers accustomed to movies telling them how to feel may find this disorienting. But viewers willing to embrace Kurosawa’s cerebral storytelling will find a life-affirming message carried by a character we genuinely root for. Even if we’re not Japanese, we all risk becoming Kanji Watanabe. And we all have the choice to live.