Roger Ebert called Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru — which in Japanese means “to live” — “one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently.” It is the story of an aging, feckless bureaucrat who discovers he is dying of stomach cancer and realizes he has wasted most of his life as a cog in a broken machine. He tries to reconcile with his adult son but finds him distant, caught up in his own dramas. He skips work and goes on an epic bender. He chases a younger girl. Then, in an epiphany driven by exhaustion and desperation as much as anything, he finds purpose and meaning in his last moments by guiding a proposal to turn an abandoned cesspool into a children’s playground through the Kafkaesque maze of city hall.
It’s a film that tackles the high-comic absurdity of bureaucracy, the inevitable gulf that grows between elderly parents and adult children and the disorder of post-World War II Japanese society, but, most of all, it’s about the simple but profound quest to find what really matters in life. We find ways to complicate our lives and distract ourselves with trivialities, but, ultimately, nothing will bring us happiness but simple decency.
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