Akira Kurosawa is known mostly for his samurai films – Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, Ran, Kagemusha – but while you will see some of these mentioned films on the list at some point, it is Ikiru (Japanese for “to live”) that shows the range and wisdom beyond his years that Kurosawa has always had. While the film focuses on an elderly man seeking passion in his life after receiving the news that he has less than a year to live, it also touches on issues that plagued Japan in the 1950s, particularly the decline of the family and bureaucratic wastefulness.

Watanabe has had the same job for 30 years – an unnamed office job where he handles paperwork and complaints by shifting responsibility to coworkers (which they all do, so no one is particularly offended). Watanabe cannot wait to be done with his job as the monotony is weighing on him heavily, and he is excited by the thought of his upcoming retirement. At home, his wife has since passed on, so he lives with his son and daughter-in-law, but there is little love between them, and his son seems to concern himself solely with his inheritance from his father. One of his cases that he keeps passing around at work is a group of parents’ attempt to get a cesspool near their houses cleaned up and replaced with a playground for their children. One day, Watanabe receives the news that he has stomach cancer and has less than a year to live. He struggles to accept it, but even after he does, he does not find opportunity to tell his son the news because of his son’s visible disdain for him. Watanabe grows depressed and looks for joy in the Tokyo nightlife. At a club, he requests a song from the piano player and sings along. The song’s lyrics and Watanabe’s singing make his sadness clear to the other patrons, and he determines there is no joy to be found in the nightlife. Later, one of his coworkers, a young woman named Toyo, requires his signature on her letter of resignation from the office. He sees in Toyo’s youth the enthusiastic love for life that he’s been seeking and orchestrates ways to spend as much time with Toyo as possible. Toyo becomes concerned that Watanabe has romantic feelings for her, but agrees to one last meeting between the two of them. At this meeting, Watanabe asks directly what makes Toyo so happy, and she tells him of her new job making toys. Her happiness comes from the idea of making the children of Japan happy. Energized, Watanabe remembers the parents wanting a playground, and he lobbies hard for it. His coworkers notice the change in Watanabe’s attitude. Watanabe finally dies, and at his wake, his coworkers talk amongst themselves about the change in Watanabe just before he passes and are inspired to change as well. However, when they return to work, they cowardly return to their routines. Someone who claims to have seen Watanabe just before he passed away says he sat in a swing at the playground he successfully got built. As the snow fell around him, Watanabe sang the same song he sang at the club with newfound joy and love for his life.

Kurosawa’s love of Western literature comes through in Ikiru, which is partly inspired by the Leo Tolstoy novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It also showcases a similar sadness for the post-World War II state of Japanese family life that Tokyo Story presents – a lament of the older generation regarding the carelessness of the younger generation. The thematic attention to weightier issues is what puts Ikiru on the list over the likes of Rashomon or Kagemusha. I also think the more modern timeframe of the story might make it more accessible to others. The scene at the end with Watanabe on the swing is one of the most iconic images of all time.

Bonus Review: Rashomon

Rashomon is not necessarily a whodunit, but a who’s telling the truth about whodunit. Based on a couple of short stories by Japanese author, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon is a story within a story about an event that takes place in a bamboo grove from four different perspectives – a samurai, his wife, a bandit, and a woodcutter. Their contradicting stories of the same event have since become a rather common storytelling device, called the “Rashomon Effect”, and you can find its influence throughout film and television – Hoodwinked!, Courage Under Fire, JFK, The Usual Suspects, Gone Girl, Witness for the Prosecution, Gigi, The Last Jedi, The Last Duel, Harry Potter, and episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, 30 Rock, Everybody Loves Raymond, All in the Family, ER, House, CSI, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Northern Exposure, The X-Files, Seinfeld, and Supernatural. The film was incredibly low budget, even for its time, and is considerably minimalist because of it. There are only three sets in the entire film and only eight actors.

The present story begins with a woodcutter and a priest as they shelter from a terrible rain under the Rashomon gate. As a commoner joins them, the woodcutter begins to tell the priest of a recent assault and murder that was brought to trial. However, the first perspective comes from the now-captured bandit. The bandit tells how he found a samurai and his wife walking through a bamboo grove. He tells the samurai of a burial pit with rare artifacts nearby and gets them to follow him off the trail. He then ties up the samurai and attempts to rape his wife. The wife fights the bandit off with a dagger, but then the bandit successfully seduces her. She is ashamed of her deed and convinces the bandit to fight her husband so that she may leave with the victor. The bandit kills the samurai during their duel, but when he turns back, the wife is gone. The wife gives her version of the events next, claiming the bandit left after assaulting her. After she frees her husband, he looks at her with contempt, and thinking he will kill her for being assaulted, uses the knife to defend herself. However, in a panic, she faints, and when she wakes up, her husband is dead with the knife in his chest. The samurai’s perspective is told through a psychic. In his version, the bandit asks his wife to marry him after he assaults her. She agrees, but demands that first the bandit must kill her husband. The bandit is disgusted by this, and gives the samurai the option to let her go or kill her. The wife runs away after hearing this, and the bandit follows but loses her. He returns and sets the samurai free before leaving. The samurai, ashamed of the turn of events, kills himself with the dagger. He also adds that he later felt the dagger leave his chest, but does not know who took it. The woodcutter then reveals that he himself witnessed the events and that all three stories are lies. He then reveals the “truth”: The bandit does ask the wife to marry him, but instead, she uses the dagger to free her husband, expecting him to kill the bandit. He does not feel like risking his life for a now “tainted” woman, and the bandit also rescinds his proposal. The wife berates both of them for not being men of their words, and so the two reluctantly duel. The bandit wins, killing the samurai and taking his sword. He and the wife flee in opposite directions. The woodcutter, priest and commoner then hear the sound of a crying baby. They find a baby in a basket, with an amulet and kimono. The commoner takes the kimono and amulet and also claims he believes the woodcutter’s story is also at least slightly false and that the woodcutter himself took the dagger so he might sell it for food. The commoner runs away, and while the priest soothes the baby, the woodcutter asks to take it and raise it as his own. The storm quits and the sun comes out.

Because the main events take place in a bamboo grove, the film plays with light a lot. The sun peeks through the stalks and trees, lighting the characters in patches. No one is completely in the light or darkness. In fact, the only time the sunlight is unobstructed is at the very end, when the rain stops and the woodcutter takes the baby home. The beginning of the film, during the credits, the camera is pointed directly at the sun, but through the canopy of the bamboo grove, so the sunlight peeks through in spots – an interesting shot in its own right and an odd filmmaking milestone (Kurosawa is considered the first filmmaker to point the camera directly at the sun because it was originally feared that the sun’s rays would burn the filmstock), it further emphasizes the unreliability and murkiness of the narrators. No one is completely lying or telling the truth. The entirety of the film, and therefore the use of sunlight, is ambiguous.