Ikiru

• 1. Introduction

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  Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa's 1952 drama, introduces Kanji Watanabe in a government office where he has worked for thirty years. His wife is dead. His son lives with him only to eventually claim the inheritance. A group of neighborhood mothers has been trying for weeks to get permission to drain a cesspool so their children can have a playground. Watanabe watches their requests go nowhere, and does nothing. Then he learns he has stomach cancer and has less than a year to live. The question Kurosawa sets in motion is not whether Watanabe will die. It is whether what remains of his life can be made to mean something. The film's title translates simply as 'to live,' and even that word sparked debate among the screenwriters. Shinobu Hashimoto, who co-wrote the script, called it pretentious. His collaborator Hideo Oguni disagreed and won the argument.

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• 2. Writing Towards Death

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  Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich was central to how Ikiru's screenplay took shape. Kurosawa and his writing team consulted it directly. According to Oguni, the project began with Kurosawa's wish to portray a dying man searching for a reason to carry on. Kurosawa described the film as emerging from his own thinking about mortality and his desire to make a portrait of contemporary Japan. Early in development, he told Hashimoto that the essential premise was a character given 75 days to live. That character's profession barely mattered. A criminal, a homeless man, or a government minister were all acceptable options.

  The first draft ended with Watanabe's death in the final minutes. Oguni changed that structure. He moved the death to the film's midpoint. The second half would then reconstruct what Watanabe had done through the eyes of former colleagues gathered at his wake. The screenplay was complete by the 5th of February 1952. Rehearsals had begun in mid-January. Filming started on the 14th of March and paused in early June when Toho employees took a summer break. The production resumed on the 17th of June and wrapped in mid-September.

  During scripting, Kurosawa dictated the scene where Watanabe sits on a swing and sings. He provided the opening lines of Gondola no Uta, a ballad none of the younger men on the production team had heard before. They tracked down the full lyrics by consulting the eldest receptionist at the production office. After the film was completed, Toho's vice president argued that the long sequence at Watanabe's funeral wake was unnecessary. Ikiru marked the first collaboration between Kurosawa and Oguni. Kurosawa refused to cut a single scene from the wake.

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• 3. Pleasure, Then Purpose

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  In a nightclub, Watanabe approaches a piano player and makes a request. He sings Gondola no Uta, a 1915 ballad, with such sadness that the people around him fall silent. The song belongs to the Taisho era, a Japan that preceded the economic collapse of the 1930s. Singing it in a modern nightclub expresses Watanabe's longing for a world that no longer exists. It also signals his growing awareness that pleasure cannot substitute for meaning.

  Watanabe's guide into the city's nightlife is an eccentric novelist he has just met. The novelist provides entertainment and diversion. But Watanabe's real change arrives through an unlikely source: a young female employee in his office named Toyo Odagiri, played by the actress Miki Odagiri. She appears initially because she needs his signature on her resignation form. He begins seeking out her company, drawn by what looks like an uncomplicated joy in being alive. She grows wary of his intentions. When he finally persuades her to meet him one last time, he asks for the secret to her happiness. She says she cannot explain it. What she knows is that she found joy in her new job making toys, as if she were playing with all the children of Japan. Author Donald Richie noted that the film's title could suggest that 'existence is enough.' Watanabe finds, though, that mere existence has been his torment. Toyo's answer converts that torment into a specific goal.

  Watanabe's decision led him back through the same bureaucratic office he had occupied for decades. He pushed the playground project forward by overcoming objections that he was intruding on the jurisdiction of other departments. In those offices, crossing departmental lines normally killed any initiative before it began.

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• 4. An Indictment of Bureaucracy

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  Historian David Conrad described Ikiru as an indictment of Japanese bureaucracy, and the film earns that label through accumulation. At the time Ikiru was made, Japan had spent seven years under American occupation. That occupation had relied heavily on bureaucratic systems to administer the country. Postwar salarymen were expected to operate predictably within the rules of their organizations. Individual initiative was, by design, suppressed.

  The mothers who sought permission for a neighborhood playground encountered what critics have called a 'farcical runaround.' Each time they arrived at the city office, a bureaucrat listened briefly and directed them to the next desk. They were eventually asked to file a written request. The paperwork, in the film's framing, is not a step toward action but a substitute for it. Watanabe, immersed in this world, watches without intervening. That he could change things but does not is the film's first charge against him.

  Japan's health care system comes under similar scrutiny in a scene that both David Conrad and Pico Iyer have examined. The doctor delivers Watanabe's diagnosis obliquely. Conrad and Iyer suggest this reflects a cultural tendency in Japan for difficult medical news to be reported in indirect terms. The doctor is paternalistic. Watanabe does not challenge his authority.

  At Watanabe's wake, his former colleagues spend the evening trying to understand what drove him to change. They piece together what happened and make promises to follow his example. They return to their offices the next morning and fall back into the same patterns within minutes. Except for one. The film ends on that single unnamed figure, looking out at the playground and admiring the sky. He stands just as Watanabe stood in his final hours.

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• 5. Family in Decay

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  Author Timothy Iles compares Ikiru to Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 film Tokyo Story, describing both as bleak portraits of family life in modern Japan. In Tokyo Story, adult children treat their aging parents as a burden. In Ikiru, the same dynamic plays out in a Tokyo government employee's house. Watanabe and his son Mitsuo have shared a roof for years, but they are no longer father and son in any practical sense. Mitsuo regards Watanabe primarily as the holder of a will. He sees his father as an obstacle to what he will eventually inherit.

  When Mitsuo was ten years old, he required medical treatment. Watanabe was absent. Iles notes that this fits a recurring pattern in Kurosawa's work. Sons in his films tend to be excessively harsh toward their fathers. Watanabe's preoccupation with his work is another cause the film identifies. The film does not present a single explanation for the breakdown but accumulates several.

  Mitsuo's relationship to his father's transformation reveals the family dynamic most directly. Mitsuo, living in the same house as his father, had not known that Watanabe was dying. When the truth emerged among those gathered after his death, Mitsuo denied it. The film uses this moment to argue that material preoccupations in the younger generation produce a kind of indifference to whatever their parents actually experience. The contrast with Toyo makes the argument more specific. Toyo had found meaning in work that connected her to others. Mitsuo calculated inheritance.

  In Japan, both the Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Film Awards recognized Ikiru with their Best Film prize in 1953.

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• 6. Across Seven Decades

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  When Ikiru arrived in the United States, it carried a different name. California audiences in 1956 saw it as Doomed. Its New York opening came on the 29th of January 1960, when Brandon Films released it under the original Japanese title. The company president held a press conference that day, claiming customs officials had detained his print and questioned certain scenes. The customs office replied that Brandon was seeking publicity. The film was released uncut. The promotional poster featured the stripper visible briefly in the film, not Watanabe.

  Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, called it 'a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point.' He praised Takashi Shimura's performance specifically. Variety called it 'a tour-de-force.' Shimura was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Foreign Actor in 1960. Kurosawa received the Special Prize of the Senate of Berlin at the 4th Berlin International Film Festival.

  Roger Ebert added Ikiru to his Great Movies list in 1996. He wrote that he had been returning to the film roughly every five years. Each time, it moved him and made him think. The older he grew, the less Watanabe resembled a pathetic old man, and the more he seemed like every one of us. In a separate essay on Seven Samurai, Ebert called Ikiru Kurosawa's greatest film.

  In 1972, Sight and Sound critics ranked Ikiru 12th among the greatest films ever made. By 2012, the same survey placed it at 127th in the critics' poll and 132nd in the directors' poll. In 2009, Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo placed it 13th on its list of the greatest Japanese films of all time. The film holds a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 55 reviews. Martin Scorsese named it among 39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker. The BBC included it on its 2018 list of the 100 greatest foreign language films. The Daily Telegraph, in 2016, named it one of the ten most overrated.

  Ikiru has generated multiple adaptations. In 1971, the Indian-Hindi film Anand drew inspiration from it. A Japanese television remake aired on TV Asahi on the 9th of September 2007, starring the kabuki actor Matsumoto Koshiro IX. A 2020 Japanese musical, with music by Jason Howland and book by Chikae Takahashi, brought the story to the stage. A British remake titled Living, with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, direction by Oliver Hermanus, and Bill Nighy in the lead, was released in 2022. Kurosawa himself connected the material to Shakespeare: he believed Macbeth could serve as a cautionary complement to Ikiru, and directed Throne of Blood in 1957.

  Toho carried out a 4K restoration of Ikiru alongside one of Seven Samurai. The original negatives could not be found, so the transfer was made from a master positive and duplicate negative elements. DreamWorks had planned an American remake in 2003, with Tom Hanks set to star and Jim Sheridan agreeing to direct in 2004. That film was never made.

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