Ashes or Dust: Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru

Kurosawa’s 1952 film is about a man who’s wasted his life and learns how to use it.

Grade: A

It’s one of those films that grabs your heart with both hands and never lets go. Such is the power of its story, its hero and its creator and, depending on who you are, it may inspire you, haunt you, or, ideally, it should do both.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru is about a man who’s wasted his life and learns how to use it. It stars Takashi Shimura as the elderly bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe. Watanabe finds out he has stomach cancer and six months to live and sees that for the past thirty years of his life he’s not been living. That’s made bluntly clear by the opening narration but why Kurosawa feels he needs to tells us that Watanabe is a ‘mummy’ is a bit of a mystery. Watanabe spends the opening scene stamping forms amidst a forest of paperwork. Kurosawa makes it clear without the narrator’s intervention that this man’s whole life has been shuffling papers from A to B.

Kurosawa’s primary output was costume dramas set in Japan’s feudal past about samurais, princesses and emperors. Ikiru is much smaller in the physical territory it covers but not in the breadth of its artistic and human landscape.

Kurosawa hits you just as hard as he does in any of his more epic films. When Watanabe gets his diagnosis, the sound drops out of the film. He wanders the streets but neither the cars nor the flickering light shot from a metal worker’s welder inside a warehouse he passes have any sound. His doctor can’t even be honest with him. As they sit inside the same mid shot, Watanabe leans over the desk, imploring his doctor to tell him the truth, but his doctor sits back in his chair calmly repeating the lie that the stomach cancer is just an ulcer. The doctor’s smiling face floating mere inches away from Watanabe’s imploring one only makes his deception more sickening. As Watanabe goes to bed weeping that night, the certificate above his bed awarding him for 25 years of service is put in a close up and becomes like a tombstone. Kurosawa is a cinematic technician who’s fantastically delicate without reducing his impact. His style isn’t obvious yet lands like a sucker punch. It gives you some sense of how Watanabe feels. On the surface he seems fine, but inside is a black hole threatening to devour him.

What will make Watanabe’s story haunt you is your fear that it will be your story. Towards the film’s end, Watanabe’s colleagues attend his funeral. The scene is very long, but by the end his colleagues are weeping, partially drunk, and sagging onto the floor (in Japanese style, they’re sitting on the floor and not in chairs). They see what you will have seen by the film’s end: that they’ve squandered the gift of life. Watanabe’s terminal diagnosis brings into focus a truth so far off in the distance for us that we often forget it to our detriment. We are going to die and before that time we should do something with our time.

We should live. Just what that is, that’s the question Watanabe spends the whole film trying to answer and the solution that he reaches at the end only makes his colleagues see how they too have done nothing but sit at their desks and spin red tape. They have not gotten drunk and ran naked into the sun and sunburnt themselves to a crisp nor climbed a mountain to pick a flower to gift to a woman or done something as seemingly small but good as build a playground for local children. The funeral scene is a metamorphosis in slow motion as these machine men disintegrate, like mummies exposed too quickly to the air. Because that’s what their lives of sheer thoughtless inertia have made them. Like Watanabe at the beginning of the film, and maybe like you yourself, they are mummies.

You could be them or you could be Watanabe at the end of the film after he has discovered how to live and the discovery allows him to smile, sing and swing on a children’s playground swing as snow rains down around him. That is the truth of life Kurosawa exposes in all its naked and terrifying glory in Ikiru. To paraphrase Jack London, you can be dust or you can be ashes. Choose now. Don’t want until you have just six months to live.