akirakurosawa

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Human Studies 20: 137151, 1997. 137c

1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Kurosawas existential masterpiece:

A meditation on the meaning of life

JEFFREY GORDONDepartment of Philosophy, Southwest Texas State University, 601 University Drive, SanMarcos, TX 78666-4616, U.S.A.

Abstract. In the first part of the paper, I try to clarify the cluster of moods and questions werefer to generically asthe problem of the meaning of life. I propose thatthe question of meaningemerges when we perform a spontaneous transcendental reduction on the phenomenon mylife, a reduction that leaves us confronting an unjustified and unjustifiable curiosity. In Part 2,I turn to the film Ikiru, Kurosawas masterpiece of 1952, for an existentialist resolution of the

problem.

Human life is not a very serious thing,

but we are obliged to take it seriously.

And theres the pity of it.

Plato, Laws, Book VII

Questions about the meaning of life are often greeted with laughter. The

issues are vague, unwieldy, pretentiously overlarge. The person in company

who raises them naively is gently mocked and the merriment continues. Butfirst there is a pause, a hesitation. That silence filled with tension is what

interests me.

This is a problem toward which everyone has his public and his private

attitude. Publicly, a certain bravado is demanded. Privately, in the quiet of

ones room, or in a twilit field, few are immune to the disquietude it fosters.

The desire that motivates this paper is the will to find some way to live with

this disquietude or to resolve it. In the longer second part, I search for this

resolution through a close examination of a brilliant work of Kurosawas. But

first it is necessary to see the problem clearly, to understand its nature and its

source. The question of the meaning of life has many strands, nuances. It is

the generic term for a number of related doubts, fears, disillusionments. In

the first part of the paper, I try to see if the several forms the question takes

have a common source. Drawing on concepts forged by Husserl (1962) and

a formulation of existentialist insights proposed by Thomas Nagel (1986),


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138 JEFFREY GORDON

I suggest that the problem of life emerges in the dissonance between our

natural standpoint toward our lives and the transcendental perspective we can

adopt toward them. But this is a problem that begins with a mood, a worm

in the human heart. Lest we lose hold of the specific texture of the issuesat the outset by immersing ourselves too quickly in abstractions, I want to

seek clarification phenomenologically, by rediscovering that disquietude in

its natural home.

1.

A young man is speaking to a good friend in the back seat of a car. They

are being driven from the funeral of the young mans father. His anger was

remarkable, the young man says. He could be terrifying. The moral force

he could summon. He stops, looks out on the road. A great man, he says

softly. His friends earnest attention embarrasses him. Well, not great, hesays, looking out the window. There wont be a book about him. Great

wouldnt be the right word, but . . . Uncertain how to finish, he stops, stares

out on the road.

A young woman in a park rocking her two-year-old child is careful to

hold its head to keep it from bobbing uncontrollably. She looks at the other

children, laughing, playing energetically, and feels a stab of envy which is

immediately replaced by shame. It is the summer of 1973. Although she tries,

she cannot suppress the thought that if she had been pregnant now rather than

three years ago, this baby would not have been born.

As the credits roll at the end of Robert Altmans Come Back to the Five and

Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), a West Texas wind begins to blow

through the screen door of the small, cluttered, now abandoned dimestore

that had been the sole setting for this film, the site of many years of shared

dreams and self-disclosure. The wind gathers force, begins to rip the tawdry

decorations, tears down the glossy displays. It whips through the room with

such violence that in a few minutes nothing remains but the walls.

Finally, the last scene in Fellinis beautiful filmLa Strada (1954). Zampano,

the itinerant sideshow strongman, has learned that day that Gelsomina is dead.

The simple-minded born performer had been his assistant, much abused and

finally abandoned by him in an advanced stage of her emotional decline.

Against his drunken and belligerent protest, he has been thrown out of a bar.

It is night-time and he has wandered down to the sea. He is alone now with

the fact of her death. For the first time, he realizes the depth of his attachmentto her and allows himself to experience his loss and his grief. Then like a man

suddenly possessed by an idea so large he can hardly comprehend it, Zampano

looks up. He searches the star-filled sky with an expression of simultaneous


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MEDITATION ON THE MEANING OF LIFE 139

amazement and desperation. Like a startled animals, his eyes race over the

sky. Finally, he falls to the sand and cries uncontrollably.

If you want to transform a serious event into a humorous one, Bergson

wrote with insight (1912), then observe the same event (if you can) withoutemotional involvement. So thin a reed divides the serious from the ludicrous.

A similar epoche destroys the sense of meaning. Loosen a few strands of

thought at the base of the foundation, our habitual way of organizing our

world, and the edifice collapses. Something, some event or unbidden thought,

flashes a sudden light on our presuppositions, those so fundamental to our

way of living that we would till now have had no standpoint from which to

see them. Seeing them now, we realize that only habit has given them their

strength. But we are uncertain how to function without them.

In each of the four scenes the natural standpoint of the character and/or

our own has been disturbed, suspended. The character is thrust out of his

or her habitual domain of meaning. In each case the disturbing element is a

sudden withering objectivity. While immersed in the present circumstances,one is also observing those circumstances from a distance, a distance that

calls their meaning into question. One is observing the human situation, even

while continuing to live ones particular instantiation of it.

The young man is searching for the right words of praise for his father, the

words that will capture the man truly, and at the same time reflect the sons

feeling for him. That feeling, the importance the man has had for the son,

should play some part in any final assessment of his life, the son cant help

believing. The word great occurs to him, flows naturally from his lips, but

however well it may express his feeling, it is embarrassingly wrong. From the

standpoint of the world, his father has been a quite ordinary man. From the

standpoint of the world, the sons feelings about his father are an irrelevance.The discrepancy disturbs him. It is clear to him that the only reason his father

was so important to him is that he was his father. But this is a fact having no

objective significance whatsoever. As he looks out the car window, he cannot

avoid this further thought: the reason his own life is so important to him is

that it is his life. Withdraw his subjective involvement in it and what would

remain of its significance?

Her child would have been aborted, the young mother thinks, had the

option been available to her only three years earlier. This trivial accident of

timing has allowed a life and a world of attendant responsibilities where there

would have been none. And this unwelcome thought leads to others. For what

events in a human life were not defined by accident? Born of these parents

rather than others, of this social class rather than another, in this country,this place, having these dispositions, these weaknesses, marrying this man,

having this child. In which of these was there the slightest trace of necessity?


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140 JEFFREY GORDON

Of everything in her present range of vision, the same could be said: the

shouting children and their watchful mothers, the park with its hills and trees,

the clouds. It is here. It exists. Nothing more. (Cf. Sartre, 1959, pp. 170182.)

The last scene in Altmans film is a brilliant stroke. Here was this crowdedroom, whose very clutter had become meaningful for us; here were these lives

in which we had been immersed. And now here is that same room emptied

of the people who had given its clutter significance; here is the room, its

decorations and displays in their disquieting autonomy. And now the wind,

driving, relentless, indifferent, a metaphor for time, reducing all this first to

swirling rubble, then to a jot in oblivion. We are seeing the objects out of their

human context, in their non-relational autonomy. By extension, we are seeing

the objects of our lives, the objects that have become integral parts of our

circuits of significance; and we are seeing the fragility of that significance,

what becomes of those circuits once we are no longer there to complete them.

We are seeing the rooms of our lives from the standpoint of being.

What are we to make of Zampanos torment in the final moving scene ofLa Strada? There is, of course, his realization, tragically late, of his love for

Gelsomina. Were it not for the injustice to this beautifully innocent girl, we

would probably want Zampano to remain the callous brute upon learning of

her death, for the depth of his loss is a realization for which nothing in his

life has prepared him. But it is the moment when he turns to the sky that,

for our present context, interests me. What does he want and what does he

discover in his frantic search of the star-filled sky? What he wants is some

recognition of his agony, some sign that the depth of grief and helplessness he

is experiencing is acknowledged in the universe, that he is not utterly alone in

his anguish, that the passion of this moment is not confined to his own heart.

But the stars are unchanged in their course. Sky and sea are unmoved by hisneed. He discovers the abyss that separates his point of view from the point

of view of the universe. The significance of her death, his loss and grief exists

for him only. His isolation is absolute.

These are the contexts in which questions about the meaning of life emerge.

What is common to them is the schism between subjective and objective

perspectives, the superimposition upon subjective involvement of objective

detachment. Although such schisms are not part of ordinary life, there is an

analogue to them in common experience. For upon any event in our personal

lives, it is possible for a human being to focus two perspectives, one the

perspective provided by our immediate, short-term system of significances;

the other, the perspective of a more dispassionate distance. In the normal

course of life, we shift between these perspectives, in much the same waythat we shift between the antithetical Gestalts of seriousness and humor. We

save ourselves from heartbreak, for example, by viewing the disrupting event


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within a larger context, recovering the deeper well-springs of our lives that

had been obscured by the present crisis. Or we learn to appreciate the signif-

icance of anothers misfortune by reducing our distance from it, duplicating

in ourselves his or her subjective standpoint. The problem of life emergeswhen the opposing points of view come upon us with equal force, when each

asserts itself only long enough to be undermined by the other, when both

perspectives are maintained simultaneously in a state of mutual repulsion.

But this unstable antagonism between viewpoints is not the only difference

from our normal shifts in perspective. The other key difference is in the nature

of the viewpoints themselves. When we recover our equilibrium by reminding

ourselves of the larger context of commitments that will survive the present

crisis, we are shifting from one subjective system of significances to another,

broader one, one that allows us a measure of detachment from the immediate

event. A mans life is shattered by divorce. Every aspect of his life seems to

drift in a void. This marriage seemed to be the foundation of his hopes, the

center of all his daily arrangements. In time, however, he reminds himself thatthis does not destroy the possibility of love, that there remains the adventure

of ideas, etc. When questions about the meaning of life arise, on the contrary,

there is a vacillation between the standpoint of subjective engagement and a

standpoint of a wholly different order, one that not only allows detachment

from the immediacy of present events, but forces detachment from my entire

system of subjective meanings. That is why it is experienced as an intrusion,

unbidden and unwelcome, a radical and wholly alien thought. It is no longer

a case of my consoling myself in my present misfortune by reverting to a

deeper pattern of significance, one undisturbed by this passing turbulence.

The perspective in question is transcendental, and hence it is the limiting case

of such relativizing, the case in which every such pattern has been surpassed.It is not as though I can flee to some higher order of subjective significance

to escape the coldness of this transcendental view. It is my condition as a

seeker of meaning that has been relativized. Remaining involved in my life,

I suddenly see it from the standpoint of the stars.

It is as though I am performing a transcendental reduction on the phenom-

enon of my life, a reduction in which all my commitments remain in place

but are observed in supreme dispassion. The problem is that these are my

passions I am viewing with dispassion, that I have been called to a point of

view from which my struggle can be seen with benign indifference, and I am

struck as if by the realization of a simple and obvious truth. It would be a

very different matter if I could dismiss the perspective I had discovered for

its very coldness, its mute, uncomprehending distance, if I could rest contentwith the judgment that its alien, unsympathetic nature made it unworthy of

attention. The problem is that this point of view seems no less valid than my


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142 JEFFREY GORDON

committed one, that it finds resonances within me, that this infinite serenity is

a station of my own heart. The particular flavor of the significances in my life

exists for me alone. The lifespan of these meanings is identical to my own.

They will collapse without me to support them. Their destiny is silence, thevery oblivion I am sensing now in my transcendental gaze.

Religion and art have provided the traditional recourses from this diminu-

tion, religion by assuring us that we are not alone in our worlds of subjectivity,

that these very significances are the objects of eternal concern of a being of

transcendent value; art by wresting from the flux of our lives their timeless

essences. But many have seen religion as too obvious a contrivance. Their

suspicions are aroused by the perfect congruence between what is needed for

the consolation of the soul and what is claimed by religion to be true. The

most fervent claims of religion become on this reckoning a transmutation of

wishes. (Cf. Freud, 1964.) And others have been quick to assert what may

be a more destructive criticism: that even the Kingdom of Heaven can be

relativized, that if we take a sufficient distance on the human scene, even theidea of God as nurturer of his creatures, even the great emotional power with

which this idea has been invested become mere phenomena, habitual modes

of thought of the phenomenon man, more data to be viewed with serene

dispassion. (Cf. Nagel, 1986, pp. 1617.)

And similar criticisms will be made of the possibility of art to redeem our

lives from meaninglessness. For art, it will be said, is a product of its time

that speaks to the unique issues of its age. It requires for its appreciation a

sympathetic understanding of the subjective commitments that made those

issues important to the artist and his day. The timeless essences of art

always bear the marks of its historical epoch, rarely if ever communicating

to successive generations the meanings felt by the artist. The claim of art totranscend the particular circle of significances that provokes its creation is an

idle pretense. Art can stand as a record of what human beings in a given age

took to be important. But it cannot break out of its subjective and historical

bounds; it cannot teach us what is significant. Nor can it be itself an instance

of timeless value. (Cf. Hernstein Smith, 1989.) And again the transcendental

argument can be made: Even an art that communicated to all ages the original

meanings of the artist would have succeeded only in uncovering a universal

preoccupation of mankind. Proof of the significance of such an insight must

await a demonstration of the significance of mankind, a thesis that remains

in indefinite suspension under our reduction. Like the concept of God, this

sacred aesthetic object would be transformed under the transcendental gaze

into another mere phenomenon, another curiosity of man.It would seem that by this means every road is blocked. But conclusions

of gravity should not be arrived at on the basis of generalizations. It would


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be helpful to deal with many specific examples. Let us turn to one. The case

I have chosen is from cinematic art. With the close-up as the visage of the

human soul, film is arguably the iconographic art par excellence. (Cf. Balazs,

1966, pp. 201215.). Should it not enable us to transcend our subjectiveconfinements? In Ikiru, his masterpiece of 1952, Akira Kurosawa has dealt

with precisely our problem of meaning. Can he carry our reflections further?

Has he anything to teach us?

2.

Ikiru (To Live) is the story of a mummified Japanese bureaucrat who is

awakened to life in his final six months and achieves an unmistakable if nearly

ineffable triumph. The main character, whom we will come to know as Kanji

Watanabe, a middle-aged petty official in a hopelessly stagnant government

office, is referred to by the dispassionately ironic narrator as our hero, andthe film begins with a close-up of an x-ray showing us our heros cancer.

This is followed with scenes detailing the deadened work environment and

our heros generous contribution to it. Soon, the second-in-command at the

office is shown looking at Watanabes empty desk and we cut to a hospital,

where Watanabe meets a garrulous fellow-patient who proceeds to describe

Watanabes symptoms and the code the doctors will use to conceal from him

the severity of his condition. If they tell you you can eat whatever you like,

the fellow-patient says, then you have less than a year. The scene with the

doctors goes exactly as predicted, so although they have told him nothing of

the kind, Watanabe knows when he leaves the hospital that he is doomed. The

terms of the film are thus set. It is clear to us at once that the question that

interests the director is how should one live with this news: What meaning is

possible in face of imminent death?

Kurosawas film is not the first work of narrative art to present the struggle

for meaning of a man condemned to death. Tolstoys Death of Ivan Ilych

(1960, pp. 95156) and Camus Stranger(1946) come immediately to mind.

There are many parallels between the film and both these works, not the least

of which is their comparable depth and power. Why is this so fruitful a way

to raise the problem of meaning? Because the challenge to meaningfulness

posed by this situation is only quantitatively distinct from the challenge for

us all. The question it forces, What meaning is possible in face of imminent

death, is a question applicable to any of us at any time. Watanabe, with the

breath of oblivion already on him, is forced to see his life from the standpointof his own death. This is a standpoint we are not likely to assume except on

those rare occasions when it comes upon us willy-nilly. But when it does, we

realize that, like troubling questions we are reluctant to raise, this standpoint


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144 JEFFREY GORDON

and its challenge are always there, whether we turn to them or not. The benefit

of this artistic contrivance is that it very quickly launches the character and

his audience in the limbo of the transcendental perspective.

Why are we unlikely to see our lives from the standpoint of our death? Theanswer is not necessarily, I think, that the vision is too shattering, too demor-

alizing. It can be both, of course. But there is a simpler possible explanation.

The presupposition of all my thoughts is that I am present to the reality I am

contemplating. Even my thoughts about the far distant past or the far distant

future include my presence as implicit observer. The closest I can come to

imagining my own oblivion is to disengage myself from my personal val-

ues, commitments, passions, to bracket or suspend them, to reduce myself

as far as possible to pure, impersonal regard. But this is so contrary to our

natural standpoint, the standpoint required of our getting on with life, that

only extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary effort can evoke it. When

Watanabe leaves the hospital, walks through heavy traffic to a soundtrack of

total silence, he is experiencing the extraordinary circumstances, and we, whoare beginning to feel empathy for this man, are provoked to the effort.

It should be said at once that the fact that we are watching a film reduces the

amount of effort required in achieving the transcendental perspective. The film

asks us to experience and contemplate an organization of reality different from

our own. Its hope is to fascinate us; that is, to impel us to enter its world, hence,

for this time, to abandon our own. We are already encouraged to suspend

our personal commitments, to entertain new possibilities, to acknowledge

implicitly that human life may be constructed in many different ways, that

our particular creation of significance is not privileged, not the equivalent of

reality. Once upon a time, the fable begins, but I understand immediately that

the adventure to follow is in no time at all; it is fabulous time, the time of merepossibility; and my life, too, I am asked to acknowledge, is a mere possibility

which I happen daily to actualize. One way to understand what we are doing

when we perform a transcendental reduction on our own lives is that we are

withdrawing from our values and commitments the sense of necessity with

which we normally endow them, that we are seeing them as comprising one

among many possible organizations of reality. The transcendental reduction

is facilitated, then, by the fact that we are spectators of fictional art, for the

terrain we move upon is characterized by a time out of time and a space out

of space, the realm of pure possibility.

Watanabe is forced to see his every action under the aspect of irreversibility,

for the last time, and his first reaction is paralysis, for this perspective is

particularly alien to him. He has lived the last twenty-five years in grindingrepetition, thus nurturing the illusion that his days are interchangeable, that

the passage of time is a matter of indifference. Paralysis is his first reaction, but


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then he is seized with panic. What has been the significance of his life? What

has it amounted to? What meaning can it have now and after his death? Since

the time of his wifes death, he has convinced himself that he has lived for his

son. He immerses himself in memories. But the son, grown and married, isshown to us and to Watanabe as egotistical and insensitive, unappreciative and

even resentful of his father. Watanabe withdraws his life savings and resolves

to abandon his numbing sobriety, to live his last days for pleasure. He meets

a writer of cheap novels who is moved by his situation, tells him, Up to now

youve beenlifes slave, but now youre going to be its master, andpromisesto

be his Mephistopheles. He leads Watanabe into a dazzling, noisy, kinesthetic

night of lively, Western-inspired music, jammed dancefloors, shiny neon-

reflecting cars, stripshows and prostitutes. The sequence ends with Watanabe,

having vomited blood in the street, exchanging a long look with the writer,

the soundtrack blaring with a train hurtling forward overhead. (Cf. Richie,

1984, p. 93.) Time has intruded to single him out, to undermine his efforts to

lose himself in the shimmering mass.With strong transitional elements, this sequence slides into the text. The

unshaven Watanabe is trudging the next morning on a bright street, his face a

death mask of hopelessness. A simple vibrant young girl from his office sees

him, has been looking for him, since he has not returned to work, and she

needs his stamp in order to quit. Soon he turns to her for his salvation, drawn

to her verve and joy. Her vitality warms his mummys heart, as he explains

to her, and he yearns to find the key to it. He cannot see enough of her, but

she, who is perhaps thirty years younger than Watanabe, quickly bores of

his desperate attentions. The man who had been a bureaucratic cipher is now

nothing more than his need, his need to redeem his empty life, to know and

taste what it is to live.Their last meeting is in a coffeehouse, a favorite haunt of the young, and

they sit at a table in a balcony while in a further balcony a lively party of

people the girls age is going on. She has told him she doesnt want to see

him. With light-hearted music in the background and the joyous commotion

of the party, Watanabe, stooped, eyes fixed on her intently, explains himself,

tells her he has less than a year to live, that he is envious of her vitality, that if

only for a single day he would like to be like her before he dies. He implores

her to help him, frightening her with his intensity. She is at a loss; there is

nothing unusual about her; all she does is work and eat. I just make toys

like this, she says, her new job being in a toy factory, and she puts down

a white mechanical rabbit which hops inanely before Watanabes downcast

eyes. It is too late, he despairs. But now something comes over him. His facelights up, frightening her even more. No, it isnt too late, he says. It isnt

impossible. He clutches the rabbit in both hands and runs for the stairs. At


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146 JEFFREY GORDON

the same time there is a burst of excitement among the partiers, and a birthday

cake is brought in. As the inspired Watanabe rushes down the stairs, hands

around the rabbit, a young girl goes up the stairs, and the scene closes with the

exuberant party gathered at the banister, loudly singing Happy Birthday.The spirit of this scene is carried into the next. We see Watanabe back at

work, searching for a neglected petition requesting that a dangerous sump

be turned into a playground. Earlier in the film we had seen the petitioners

parlayed from one indifferent bureau to another. He clutches the petition,

orders a government car, races out of the office, two bewildered assistants

straining to follow him. On the soundtrack has been a jubilant Happy Birth-

day horn solo. As Watanabe stands at the top of the steps to Town Hall, the

glass door to the building still swinging behind him, a very loud siren heralds

his transformation.

Here Kurosawa brings the first half of the film to an abrupt end, for the

next shot is a photograph of a wise and peaceful Watanabe, the centerpiece

of his garlanded funeral altar. Five months later, the narrator tells us, ourhero was dead.

The remainder of the film shows us Watanabes fellow workers, seated

around his altar at his wake, trying with increasing inebriation, to work

through their deceptions to an honest celebration of the mans accomplish-

ment, while we try, with the help of many flashbacks to his last five months,

to understand the key he had discovered, the answer he had found to the ques-

tion, What meaning is possible in face of imminent death? What we see in

these flashbacks is a man of patient but unyielding determination, a man who

defies the conspiracy of paralysis of the bureaucracy in devotion to a single

end. To the surprise, bemusement, and irritation of his superiors, he insists

that the park be built. He presses the petition from office to office, waiting,importuning humbly, sometimes sitting for what seems hours in front of an

official, but refusing to go. Still stooped with humility and advancing illness,

his face begins to look simultaneously intent and peaceful. In repeated view-

ings of the altar photograph, he becomes for us a man humble, centered, and

fearless. Claimed by death, he burns with vibrancy and a kind of humor. With

the cancer hurling each moment to oblivion, he has become this clear-eyed

indomitable will. Where he had been entrapped in his condition, a drowning

man in his lumbering coat, he is released, light.

One sceneis particularly telling. A group of thugs wants to build a tavern on

the site of Watanabes proposed park. Watanabe, accompanied by his second-

in-command, is on his way to an officials office. The thugs, all well-dressed in

business suits, are waiting in the corridor, leaning against the walls. Intent onhis purpose, not noticing them at all, he walks toward the large double-doors.

Several block his way. He sees them, bows, movesforward, hisassistant urging


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him with a tug to withdraw. A large man with sunglasses asks him, Are you

the chief of the Citizens Section? We wanted to see you. The thugs move

in. A tall man shoves aside the second-in-command. The spokesman smiles,

brushes off Watanabes coat. Mister, he says, dont be so meddlesome. Hetakes off his sun-glasses, revealing smiling sadistic eyes. Im advising you to

withdraw quietly. The bent Watanabe makes no reply. The large man grabs

him roughly by the collar. Why dont you say something? Dont you value

your life? Watanabe looks down, slowly raises his eyes to the large man,

his face breaking into an unearthly smile. The menacing man is confused,

disarmed. A lean, stony man exits from the double-doors behind them. This

is Watanabe, the large one tells him. The stony man, the leader of the thugs,

looks at him. There is a full close-up of Watanabes face, looking directly at

this man; he is glowing, smiling, otherworldly. The leader looks at him out of

the corner of his eyes, looks down, turns and walks away down the corridor,

the group following in silence.

It is only with the greatest difficulty that Watanabes mourners, his fellow-workers, finally admit what a sensitive and sober member of their party had

insisted upon from the start, that Watanabe built the park, that only the force of

his persistence provoked the bureaucracy to action, that the Deputy Mayors

speech at the opening of the park, in which Watanabes role was neglected

in favor of his own, was a pack of cynical lies, that the mothers who wept at

Watanabes altar understood the truth. In a system that rewards paralysis, as

one of the workers put it, Watanabe did his job. The wakeendswith the group

shouting resolutions. They will follow Watanabes example, they will act with

his dedication, and so on. The next scene shows the Citizens Section, with

the second-in-command promoted to Watanabes desk. A citizens request is

brought to him. Without even a pause for reflection, the new chief instructsthat it be brought to the next bureau. The sensitive, sober member of the

wake jumps to his feet, glares indignantly at the new chief, who removes his

glasses assertively and stares fixedly at the man. The protester never speaks,

but slowly sinks into his chair, then behind his wall of papers. The film ends

with this man, wearing a hat like Watanabes, standing in twilight on the

bridge overlooking the park, which is bustling with children. He stands where

Watanabe had admired the sunset then crosses the bridge with bent head.

We had learned in the final flashback that Watanabe died in the park. Our

last view of him is on a swing in the new park, alone on a snowy night, the

night he dies. The camera pans around him slowly at a distance, and we see

him through a maze of jungle gym bars and the gently falling, light-reflecting

snow. Then we see him full front, in his overcoat and the hat he had boughtto symbolize his new life. He is swinging slowly in time to the song he sings,

the same song he had sung in despair during his nighttown adventure. Life


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148 JEFFREY GORDON

is so short, he sings. Fall in love, dear maiden,/ While your hair is still

black/ And before your heart withers,/ For today will not come again. His

voice is soft, peaceful. On the soundtrack are gentle bells, a harp. His face

is in darkness except for one brief moment, while the scene dissolves into aclose-up of the altar photograph, which has become for us now iconic. In this

moment, we see that he is happy.

The last time we hear from the narrator is with the introduction to the

second half of the film, the wake, when he announces to us that our hero is

dead. There are no further ironic references, then, to our hero, but the irony

turns on itself: By imperceptible degrees, we do begin to see this simple man

as heroic, as in some difficult sense triumphant. Why? What is the nature

of his triumph? He defeated the bureaucracy, to be sure. But with no lasting

effect. No lesson has been learned, except perhaps, that the bureaucracy will

now know how to deal more effectively with its next cancer-ridden zealot. For

the last five months of his life, he burned with a single-minded passion, yes,

and he saw his park to completion. In an organization where it is impossibleto accomplish anything, he did his job, as one of his fellow-workers said. But

there is a tension running through this film, and the lyrical way in which the

park is shown exacerbates that tension, for that poetic treatment has a double

meaning. The park is Watanabes dream, and so it is appropriate that it be

shown as magical, shimmering, not wholly real. But these very elements

the glistening snow, the gentle bells and harp, the storybook picket fence, the

lighting that allows nothing to be too distinct remind us of another quality

of dreams: their evanescence. Watanabe is dying as he sings his lullaby, and

although this childrens park will survive him, like everything else we bring

into being with our passion and our labour, it will not live very long. The

bulldozers we saw transforming this land will return in some not-too-distantfuture to destroy it. Watanabe seemed to understand this. He sings his song

peacefully, happily: Life is Short. He had learned to live under the shadow

of oblivion. But why should this man with his humble accomplishment, which

he sees as we do, as a passing dream why should this man seem triumphant?

It may seem at first sight as though the others, the workers in the bureau-

cracy, and no one more than the venal Deputy Mayor, understood at least as

well as Watanabe the shortness of life, for Watanabe became the picture of the

imprudent dreamer while they were eminently practical men. Life is short,

they must have reasoned, and so the point is to keep safe and grab what you

can. Watanabes example makes them feel slight, inconsequential, cowardly.

But why? In what way did he become large, courageous?

His heroism begins with his profound understanding of the shortness of life,an understanding very different from theirs. For if life is short, he reasons, then

grabbing for comfort, status, the trappings of success is surely meaningless,


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150 JEFFREY GORDON

necessary field of his action, all of whose significances are fragile. Letting go

all concern with relative standing, abandoning the safety of the grid of niches,

seeing it clearly as concealment, as elaborate obstruction to living, he turns

into himself, allows himself to become a conduit for compassion and creativecommitment, finds his personal entering point to the circle of vitality that is

human assertion against the void.

The scene with the thugs is the most revealing of the central theme of the

film. For here the key question is asked directly, put, of course, in the mouth

of a thug who has no idea of its profundity: Dont you value your life? And

Watanabes response is a remarkable smile, the smile of one who has achieved

some ineffable enlightenment. And this is precisely so, since he smiles as an

emissary from the abyss. Dont you value your life? The question bursts in

Watanabes mind with irresistibly ludicrous irony, not because he has so little

life left, but because the answer to this is both a ghostly No and a resounding

Yes. Watanabe has been living in the transcendental perspective; his passion

has not concealed the terms. He has looked upon human striving, his life, hisdeath with the serenity of the sunset. Does he value his life, this fleeting jot,

this curiosity? If you want to know the truth, sir, the answer must be no.

But he has chosen to endorse this finite, fleeting, inconsequential, wretchedly

truncated mode of existence,for he has resolved to live. And so he would need

a blaring siren to help him cry Yes! loudly enough. Still, to make matters

worse, it is not strictly his own life that he values. For his humble action,

the building of the park, is an affirmation of his onnection with finite and

wretched humanity, and it is that connection, that fleeting humanity which

is the source of his passion. At the moment he is accosted by the thugs, he

has business to conduct, and so there is no time for a transcendental exegesis.

This ironic, glowing, fearless smile of unearthly enlightenment will have tosuffice, and the thugs, confronted with such a world-shattering expression,

recognize at once a man of transcendent power.

This, of course, is what we, too, recognize, and it is the final superb irony

of the film and Watanabes ultimate triumph. The photograph on the altar

is first shown to us at the opening of the wake. We see a humble man

happy, at peace, nothing more. Before long this photograph, to which the

camera returns us repeatedly, becomes iconic, the visage of a hero, the face

of a man of enlightenment, of transcendent power. Life is short, our actions

irremediably the actions of a human, this anomaly of time. Nothing we do

survives very long, nothing is of ultimate consequence. But when we see

this photograph for the last time, with the image of Watanabe on the swing

superimposed upon it, he has assumed a stature and significance greater thanany possible action. A lucid man who lived his passion, humble and fearless.

We are perceiving his essence. Once on earth, the home of humanity, there


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was a man who learned what it is to live as a human being and in the few

months before his death forged his human soul. These words could be spoken

with significance in any possible world; which is to say, there will be this

truth even when no consciousness remains to comprehend it.The meaningfulness of a human life will be conditional upon its human

context; its meaningfulness can appear only in human terms. To this extent, it

is irremediably relative, modest. But the meaning achieved in these terms is

an eternal truth, a truth bearing the same significance in any possible world.

The key to the achievement of meaning will be the clear and humble compre-

hension of its conditional nature and the certain grasp of the opportunity these

conditions provide for the articulation of a soul. The enraptured Watanabe

clutching the rabbit is the perfect expression of this dual and paradoxical

realization: the modesty, the infinite stakes.

We are perceiving this man from within the transcendental domain, the

perspective so wonderfully evoked andrealized in this film, and to ourgratified

amazement, he remains meaningful there. What he did will be destroyed; whathe was cannot be. We remember Watanabe at the ceremony we never saw, the

opening of the park, where, we are told, he is relegated to a seat in the back,

his contribution ignored. We leave him smiling with infinite amusement. By

the close of the film, the indifferent gods have embraced him.

References

Balazs, B. (1966). Theory of the Film. In: D. Talbot (Ed.), Film: An Anthology. Berkeley:University of California.

Bergson, H. (1912). Laughter. Trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell. New York: Macmillan.

Camus, A. (1946). The Stranger. Trans. S. Gilbert. New York: Vintage.Freud, S. (1964). The Future of An Illusion. Trans. W.D. Robson-Scott. New York: Anchor.Herrnstein Smith, B. (1989). Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical

Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Husserl, E. (1962). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Boyce

Gibson. New York: Collier.Nagel, T. (1986). The View From Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press.Richie, D. (1984). The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Berkeley: University of California.Sartre, J.-P. (1959). Nausea. Trans. L. Alexander. New York: New Directions.Tolstoy, L. (1960). The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. Trans. J.D. Duff and A. Maude.

New York: New American Library.

akirakurosawa

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