Ikiru

As you age, you may have these half-wispy thoughts enter your consciousness --- have I done anything worthwhile? Why, if at all, will I be remembered? It may not be a subject that’s brought up in polite company, but it was the arena for one of the most moving films of a director who made many --- Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa was famous for his samurai films, for his remarkable achievement in portraying how a single event may be seen in different ways in Rashomon, in his repositioning of Shakespeare’s work or works of a Shakespearean nature seen through a Japanese lens. But one of his quietest but most moving films deals with how we spend our days --- Ikiru, or roughly translated, to live. It’s a film that causes, in its first half, jolts of recognition for family members, for what were termed salarymen or plain old bureaucrats, with victims of disease, with the old, with the young. But in the second half of the film, Kurosawa unveils the ability of humans to change, to make a monumental turn and in their own way, to make their days count, even if those days are painfully few. 

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