Theme Of Death In Ikiru

The Japanese film “Ikiru,” (1952) directed by Akira Kurosawa, follows protagonist Watanabe as he struggles to find meaning in life after realizing that he is terminally ill. Many philosophies regarding death are presented, but the film largely takes a Kierkegaardian approach to death; thinking of death as your teacher instead of your enemy, a rejection of simply ‘forgetting’ about death through sensory pleasures, working selflessly to achieve meaning in life, and acting upon the thought of death “earnestly,” instead of simply in a “mood.”
Watanabe is an elderly man working in the parks department, a place where work is routinely avoided and passed around to the detriment of local civilians. He’s introduced to the audience doing mindless work, …show more content…
Throughout the evening Watanabe is stoic and unamused as others drink and be merry. Of this it can be said that because Watanabe is so aware of his mortality, he doesn’t give in fully to the experience that the artist is trying to give to him. To Watanabe, everyone else isn’t thinking about death enough, they are simply trying to forget. Kierkegaard had this same problem with how many previous philosophers described death, they tried to defeat the idea of death, and viewed it not as a “teacher” as Kierkegaard calls it, but regarded it as an enemy to life. Epicurus specifically philosophized death away with “Where it is I am not, and where I am it is not.” (Kierkegaard, 73) Which like the drunkards around Watanabe merely leads to forgetting about death, and leaves the danger of living a meaningless life. Spontaneously Watanabe interrupts the merriment in a bar the Artist has brought him to, to request and sing a song; ‘Gondola no Uta.’ A song about living life to the fullest before you die, with solemn lyrics such as: “life is brief, fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips,” Similarly Kierkegaard comments on this definition of life as a reaction to death, “Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this sensuality’s cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.” (Kierkegaard, 83) The ‘meaning’ the Artist and the others find in these sensualities are not found in the ‘retroactive power’ of death, but as a tool to get over the imposing nature of death. They are not taking death as their teacher, but merely trying to forget about it. Watanabe then after realizing what it is to live selflessly from his coworker Kimura, is determined to start or complete one selfless