Human Studies 20: 137–151, 1997. 137c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Kurosawa’s 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 as the problem of the meaning of life. I propose that the 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, Kurosawa’s masterpiece of 1952, for an existentialist resolution of theproblem.

Human life is not a very serious thing,but we are obliged to take it seriously.

And there’s the pity of it.

– Plato, Laws, Book VII

Questions about the meaning of life are often greeted with laughter. Theissues are vague, unwieldy, pretentiously overlarge. The person in companywho raises them naively is gently mocked and the merriment continues. Butfirst there is a pause, a hesitation. That silence filled with tension is whatinterests me.

This is a problem toward which everyone has his public and his privateattitude. Publicly, a certain bravado is demanded. Privately, in the quiet ofone’s 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 withthis disquietude or to resolve it. In the longer second part, I search for thisresolution through a close examination of a brilliant work of Kurosawa’s. Butfirst it is necessary to see the problem clearly, to understand its nature and itssource. The question of the meaning of life has many strands, nuances. It isthe generic term for a number of related doubts, fears, disillusionments. Inthe first part of the paper, I try to see if the several forms the question takeshave a common source. Drawing on concepts forged by Husserl (1962) anda formulation of existentialist insights proposed by Thomas Nagel (1986),

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I suggest that the problem of life emerges in the dissonance between ournatural standpoint toward our lives and the transcendental perspective we canadopt toward them. But this is a problem that begins with a mood, a wormin 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 toseek clarification phenomenologically, by rediscovering that disquietude inits natural home.

1.

A young man is speaking to a good friend in the back seat of a car. Theyare being driven from the funeral of the young man’s father. “His anger wasremarkable,” the young man says. “He could be terrifying. The moral forcehe could summon.” He stops, looks out on the road. “A great man,” he sayssoftly. His friend’s earnest attention embarrasses him. “Well, not great,” hesays, looking out the window. “There won’t be a book about him. Greatwouldn’t be the right word, but . . .” Uncertain how to finish, he stops, staresout on the road.

A young woman in a park rocking her two-year-old child is careful tohold its head to keep it from bobbing uncontrollably. She looks at the otherchildren, laughing, playing energetically, and feels a stab of envy which isimmediately 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 thanthree years ago, this baby would not have been born.

As the credits roll at the end of Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five andDime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), a West Texas wind begins to blowthrough the screen door of the small, cluttered, now abandoned dimestorethat had been the sole setting for this film, the site of many years of shareddreams and self-disclosure. The wind gathers force, begins to rip the tawdrydecorations, tears down the glossy displays. It whips through the room withsuch violence that in a few minutes nothing remains but the walls.

Finally, the last scene in Fellini’s beautiful film La 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 andfinally 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 withthe 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 mansuddenly possessed by an idea so large he can hardly comprehend it, Zampanolooks up. He searches the star-filled sky with an expression of simultaneous

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amazement and desperation. Like a startled animal’s, his eyes race over thesky. Finally, he falls to the sand and cries uncontrollably.

If you want to transform a serious event into a humorous one, Bergsonwrote 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 ofthought at the base of the foundation, our habitual way of organizing ourworld, and the edifice collapses. Something, some event or unbidden thought,flashes a sudden light on our presuppositions, those so fundamental to ourway of living that we would till now have had no standpoint from which tosee them. Seeing them now, we realize that only habit has given them theirstrength. But we are uncertain how to function without them.

In each of the four scenes the natural standpoint of the character and/orour own has been disturbed, suspended. The character is thrust out of hisor her habitual domain of meaning. In each case the disturbing element is asudden withering objectivity. While immersed in the present circumstances,one is also observing those circumstances from a distance, a distance thatcalls their meaning into question. One is observing the human situation, evenwhile continuing to live one’s particular instantiation of it.

The young man is searching for the right words of praise for his father, thewords that will capture the man truly, and at the same time reflect the son’sfeeling 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 can’t helpbelieving. The word “great” occurs to him, flows naturally from his lips, buthowever well it may express his feeling, it is embarrassingly wrong. From thestandpoint of the world, his father has been a quite ordinary man. From thestandpoint of the world, the son’s feelings about his father are an irrelevance.The discrepancy disturbs him. It is clear to him that the only reason his fatherwas so important to him is that he was his father. But this is a fact having noobjective significance whatsoever. As he looks out the car window, he cannotavoid this further thought: the reason his own life is so important to him isthat it is his life. Withdraw his subjective involvement in it and what wouldremain of its significance?

Her child would have been aborted, the young mother thinks, had theoption been available to her only three years earlier. This trivial accident oftiming has allowed a life and a world of attendant responsibilities where therewould have been none. And this unwelcome thought leads to others. For whatevents in a human life were not defined by accident? Born of these parentsrather 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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Of everything in her present range of vision, the same could be said: theshouting 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. 170–182.)

The last scene in Altman’s film is a brilliant stroke. Here was this crowdedroom, whose very clutter had become meaningful for us; here were these livesin which we had been immersed. And now here is that same room emptiedof the people who had given its clutter significance; here is the room, itsdecorations and displays in their disquieting autonomy. And now the wind,driving, relentless, indifferent, a metaphor for time, reducing all this first toswirling rubble, then to a jot in oblivion. We are seeing the objects out of theirhuman context, in their non-relational autonomy. By extension, we are seeingthe objects of our lives, the objects that have become integral parts of ourcircuits 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 Zampano’s torment in the final moving scene ofLa Strada? There is, of course, his realization, tragically late, of his love forGelsomina. Were it not for the injustice to this beautifully innocent girl, wewould probably want Zampano to remain the callous brute upon learning ofher death, for the depth of his loss is a realization for which nothing in hislife 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 hediscover in his frantic search of the star-filled sky? What he wants is somerecognition of his agony, some sign that the depth of grief and helplessness heis experiencing is acknowledged in the universe, that he is not utterly alone inhis 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 pointof view of the universe. The significance of her death, his loss and grief existsfor 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 objectiveperspectives, the superimposition upon subjective involvement of objectivedetachment. Although such schisms are not part of ordinary life, there is ananalogue to them in common experience. For upon any event in our personallives, it is possible for a human being to focus two perspectives, one theperspective provided by our immediate, short-term system of significances;the other, the perspective of a more dispassionate distance. In the normalcourse of life, we shift between these perspectives, in much the same waythat we shift between the antithetical Gestalts of seriousness and humor. Wesave 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 thathad been obscured by the present crisis. Or we learn to appreciate the signif-icance of another’s misfortune by reducing our distance from it, duplicatingin ourselves his or her subjective standpoint. The “problem of life” emergeswhen the opposing points of view come upon us with equal force, when eachasserts itself only long enough to be undermined by the other, when bothperspectives are maintained simultaneously in a state of mutual repulsion.

But this unstable antagonism between viewpoints is not the only differencefrom our normal shifts in perspective. The other key difference is in the natureof the viewpoints themselves. When we recover our equilibrium by remindingourselves of the larger context of commitments that will survive the presentcrisis, we are shifting from one subjective system of significances to another,broader one, one that allows us a measure of detachment from the immediateevent. A man’s life is shattered by divorce. Every aspect of his life seems todrift in a void. This marriage seemed to be the foundation of his hopes, thecenter of all his daily arrangements. In time, however, he reminds himself thatthis does not destroy the possibility of love, that there remains the adventureof ideas, etc. When questions about the meaning of life arise, on the contrary,there is a vacillation between the standpoint of subjective engagement and astandpoint of a wholly different order, one that not only allows detachmentfrom the immediacy of present events, but forces detachment from my entiresystem of subjective meanings. That is why it is experienced as an intrusion,unbidden and unwelcome, a radical and wholly alien thought. It is no longera case of my consoling myself in my present misfortune by reverting to adeeper pattern of significance, one undisturbed by this passing turbulence.The perspective in question is transcendental, and hence it is the limiting caseof 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 significanceto escape the coldness of this transcendental view. It is my condition as aseeker 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 placebut are observed in supreme dispassion. The problem is that these are mypassions I am viewing with dispassion, that I have been called to a point ofview from which my struggle can be seen with benign indifference, and I amstruck as if by the realization of a simple and obvious truth. It would be avery different matter if I could dismiss the perspective I had discovered forits very coldness, its mute, uncomprehending distance, if I could rest contentwith the judgment that its alien, unsympathetic nature made it unworthy ofattention. The problem is that this point of view seems no less valid than my

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committed one, that it finds resonances within me, that this infinite serenity isa station of my own heart. The particular flavor of the significances in my lifeexists 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 oftranscendent value; art by wresting from the flux of our lives their timelessessences. But many have seen religion as too obvious a contrivance. Theirsuspicions are aroused by the perfect congruence between what is needed forthe consolation of the soul and what is claimed by religion to be true. Themost fervent claims of religion become on this reckoning a transmutation ofwishes. (Cf. Freud, 1964.) And others have been quick to assert what maybe a more destructive criticism: that even the Kingdom of Heaven can berelativized, 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 withwhich this idea has been invested become mere phenomena, habitual modesof thought of the phenomenon man, more data to be viewed with serenedispassion. (Cf. Nagel, 1986, pp. 16–17.)

And similar criticisms will be made of the possibility of art to redeem ourlives from meaninglessness. For art, it will be said, is a product of its timethat speaks to the unique issues of its age. It requires for its appreciation asympathetic understanding of the subjective commitments that made thoseissues important to the artist and his day. The “timeless essences” of artalways bear the marks of its historical epoch, rarely if ever communicatingto successive generations the meanings felt by the artist. The claim of art totranscend the particular circle of significances that provokes its creation is anidle pretense. Art can stand as a record of what human beings in a given agetook to be important. But it cannot break out of its subjective and historicalbounds; it cannot teach us what is significant. Nor can it be itself an instanceof timeless value. (Cf. Hernstein Smith, 1989.) And again the transcendentalargument can be made: Even an art that communicated to all ages the originalmeanings of the artist would have succeeded only in uncovering a universalpreoccupation of mankind. Proof of the significance of such an insight mustawait a demonstration of the significance of mankind, a thesis that remainsin indefinite suspension under our reduction. Like the concept of God, thissacred aesthetic object would be transformed under the transcendental gazeinto another mere phenomenon, another curiosity of man.

It would seem that by this means every road is blocked. But conclusionsof 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 caseI have chosen is from cinematic art. With the close-up as the visage of thehuman soul, film is arguably the iconographic art par excellence. (Cf. Balazs,1966, pp. 201–215.). Should it not enable us to transcend our subjectiveconfinements? In Ikiru, his masterpiece of 1952, Akira Kurosawa has dealtwith 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 isawakened to life in his final six months and achieves an unmistakable if nearlyineffable triumph. The main character, whom we will come to know as KanjiWatanabe, a middle-aged petty official in a hopelessly stagnant governmentoffice, 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 hero’s” cancer.This is followed with scenes detailing the deadened work environment andour hero’s generous contribution to it. Soon, the second-in-command at theoffice is shown looking at Watanabe’s empty desk and we cut to a hospital,where Watanabe meets a garrulous fellow-patient who proceeds to describeWatanabe’s symptoms and the code the doctors will use to conceal from himthe 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 thedoctors goes exactly as predicted, so although they have told him nothing ofthe kind, Watanabe knows when he leaves the hospital that he is doomed. Theterms of the film are thus set. It is clear to us at once that the question thatinterests the director is how should one live with this news: What meaning ispossible in face of imminent death?

Kurosawa’s film is not the first work of narrative art to present the strugglefor meaning of a man condemned to death. Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych(1960, pp. 95–156) and Camus’ Stranger (1946) come immediately to mind.There are many parallels between the film and both these works, not the leastof which is their comparable depth and power. Why is this so fruitful a wayto raise the problem of meaning? Because the challenge to meaningfulnessposed by this situation is only quantitatively distinct from the challenge forus all. The question it forces, What meaning is possible in face of imminentdeath, is a question applicable to any of us at any time. Watanabe, with thebreath 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 onthose rare occasions when it comes upon us willy-nilly. But when it does, werealize that, like troubling questions we are reluctant to raise, this standpoint

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and its challenge are always there, whether we turn to them or not. The benefitof this artistic contrivance is that it very quickly launches the character andhis 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 amcontemplating. Even my thoughts about the far distant past or the far distantfuture include my presence as implicit observer. The closest I can come toimagining my own oblivion is to disengage myself from my personal val-ues, commitments, passions, to bracket or suspend them, to reduce myselfas far as possible to pure, impersonal regard. But this is so contrary to ournatural standpoint, the standpoint required of our getting on with life, thatonly extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary effort can evoke it. WhenWatanabe leaves the hospital, walks through heavy traffic to a soundtrack oftotal 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 theamount of effort required in achieving the transcendental perspective. The filmasks us to experience and contemplate an organization of reality different fromour 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 suspendour personal commitments, to entertain new possibilities, to acknowledgeimplicitly that human life may be constructed in many different ways, thatour particular creation of significance is not privileged, not the equivalent ofreality. ‘Once upon a time,’ the fable begins, but I understand immediately thatthe 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 possibilitywhich I happen daily to actualize. One way to understand what we are doingwhen we perform a transcendental reduction on our own lives is that we arewithdrawing from our values and commitments the sense of necessity withwhich we normally endow them, that we are seeing them as comprising oneamong many possible organizations of reality. The transcendental reductionis facilitated, then, by the fact that we are spectators of fictional art, for theterrain we move upon is characterized by a time out of time and a space outof 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 isparticularly alien to him. He has lived the last twenty-five years in grindingrepetition, thus nurturing the illusion that his days are interchangeable, thatthe 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? Whathas it amounted to? What meaning can it have now and after his death? Sincethe time of his wife’s death, he has convinced himself that he has lived for hisson. He immerses himself in memories. But the son, grown and married, isshown to us and to Watanabe as egotistical and insensitive, unappreciative andeven resentful of his father. Watanabe withdraws his life savings and resolvesto abandon his numbing sobriety, to live his last days for pleasure. He meetsa writer of cheap novels who is moved by his situation, tells him, “Up to nowyou’ve been life’s slave, but now you’re going to be its master,” and promises tobe his Mephistopheles. He leads Watanabe into a dazzling, noisy, kinestheticnight 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 tolose himself in the shimmering mass.

With strong transitional elements, this sequence slides into the text. Theunshaven Watanabe is trudging the next morning on a bright street, his face adeath mask of hopelessness. A simple vibrant young girl from his office seeshim, has been looking for him, since he has not returned to work, and sheneeds his stamp in order to quit. Soon he turns to her for his salvation, drawnto her verve and joy. Her vitality “warms his mummy’s heart,” as he explainsto her, and he yearns to find the key to it. He cannot see enough of her, butshe, who is perhaps thirty years younger than Watanabe, quickly bores ofhis desperate attentions. The man who had been a bureaucratic cipher is nownothing more than his need, his need to redeem his empty life, to know andtaste what it is to live.

Their last meeting is in a coffeehouse, a favorite haunt of the young, andthey sit at a table in a balcony while in a further balcony a lively party ofpeople the girl’s age is going on. She has told him she doesn’t want to seehim. With light-hearted music in the background and the joyous commotionof 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 ifonly for a single day he would like to be like her before he dies. He imploresher to help him, frightening her with his intensity. She is at a loss; there isnothing unusual about her; all she does is work and eat. “I just make toyslike this,” she says, her new job being in a toy factory, and she puts downa white mechanical rabbit which hops inanely before Watanabe’s downcasteyes. “It is too late,” he despairs. But now something comes over him. His facelights up, frightening her even more. “No, it isn’t too late,” he says. “It isn’timpossible.” He clutches the rabbit in both hands and runs for the stairs. At

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the same time there is a burst of excitement among the partiers, and a birthdaycake is brought in. As the inspired Watanabe rushes down the stairs, handsaround the rabbit, a young girl goes up the stairs, and the scene closes with theexuberant party gathered at the banister, loudly singing “Happy Birthday.”

The spirit of this scene is carried into the next. We see Watanabe back atwork, searching for a neglected petition requesting that a dangerous sumpbe turned into a playground. Earlier in the film we had seen the petitionersparlayed from one indifferent bureau to another. He clutches the petition,orders a government car, races out of the office, two bewildered assistantsstraining 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, theglass door to the building still swinging behind him, a very loud siren heraldshis transformation.

Here Kurosawa brings the first half of the film to an abrupt end, for thenext shot is a photograph of a wise and peaceful Watanabe, the centerpieceof his garlanded funeral altar. “Five months later,” the narrator tells us, “ourhero was dead.”

The remainder of the film shows us Watanabe’s fellow workers, seatedaround his altar at his wake, trying with increasing inebriation, to workthrough their deceptions to an honest celebration of the man’s 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 inthese flashbacks is a man of patient but unyielding determination, a man whodefies the conspiracy of paralysis of the bureaucracy in devotion to a singleend. To the surprise, bemusement, and irritation of his superiors, he insiststhat the park be built. He presses the petition from office to office, waiting,importuning humbly, sometimes sitting for what seems hours in front of anofficial, 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, andfearless. Claimed by death, he burns with vibrancy and a kind of humor. Withthe cancer hurling each moment to oblivion, he has become this clear-eyedindomitable will. Where he had been entrapped in his condition, a drowningman in his lumbering coat, he is released, light.

One scene is particularly telling. A group of thugs wants to build a tavern onthe site of Watanabe’s proposed park. Watanabe, accompanied by his second-in-command, is on his way to an official’s office. The thugs, all well-dressed inbusiness 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, moves forward, his assistant urging

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him with a tug to withdraw. A large man with sunglasses asks him, “Are youthe chief of the Citizens’ Section? We wanted to see you.” The thugs movein. A tall man shoves aside the second-in-command. The spokesman smiles,brushes off Watanabe’s coat. “Mister,” he says, “don’t be so meddlesome.” Hetakes off his sun-glasses, revealing smiling sadistic eyes. “I’m advising you towithdraw quietly.” The bent Watanabe makes no reply. The large man grabshim roughly by the collar. “Why don’t you say something? Don’t you valueyour 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. “Thisis Watanabe,” the large one tells him. The stony man, the leader of the thugs,looks at him. There is a full close-up of Watanabe’s face, looking directly atthis man; he is glowing, smiling, otherworldly. The leader looks at him out ofthe 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 Watanabe’s mourners, his fellow-workers, finally admit what a sensitive and sober member of their party hadinsisted upon from the start, that Watanabe built the park, that only the force ofhis persistence provoked the bureaucracy to action, that the Deputy Mayor’sspeech at the opening of the park, in which Watanabe’s role was neglectedin favor of his own, was a pack of cynical lies, that the mothers who wept atWatanabe’s altar understood the truth. In a system that rewards paralysis, asone of the workers put it, “Watanabe did his job.” The wake ends with the groupshouting resolutions. They will follow Watanabe’s example, they will act withhis dedication, and so on. The next scene shows the Citizens’ Section, withthe second-in-command promoted to Watanabe’s desk. A citizens’ request isbrought to him. Without even a pause for reflection, the new chief instructsthat it be brought to the next bureau. The sensitive, sober member of thewake jumps to his feet, glares indignantly at the new chief, who removes hisglasses 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 endswith this man, wearing a hat like Watanabe’s, standing in twilight on thebridge overlooking the park, which is bustling with children. He stands whereWatanabe had admired the sunset then crosses the bridge with bent head.

We had learned in the final flashback that Watanabe died in the park. Ourlast view of him is on a swing in the new park, alone on a snowy night, thenight he dies. The camera pans around him slowly at a distance, and we seehim through a maze of jungle gym bars and the gently falling, light-reflectingsnow. 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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is so short,” he sings. “Fall in love, dear maiden,/ While your hair is stillblack/ And before your heart withers,/ For today will not come again.” Hisvoice is soft, peaceful. On the soundtrack are gentle bells, a harp. His faceis 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 thismoment, we see that he is happy.

The last time we hear from the narrator is with the introduction to thesecond half of the film, the wake, when he announces to us that our hero isdead. There are no further ironic references, then, to “our hero,” but the ironyturns on itself: By imperceptible degrees, we do begin to see this simple manas heroic, as in some difficult sense triumphant. Why? What is the natureof his triumph? He defeated the bureaucracy, to be sure. But with no lastingeffect. No lesson has been learned, except perhaps, that the bureaucracy willnow know how to deal more effectively with its next cancer-ridden zealot. Forthe 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. Butthere is a tension running through this film, and the lyrical way in which thepark is shown exacerbates that tension, for that poetic treatment has a doublemeaning. The park is Watanabe’s dream, and so it is appropriate that it beshown as magical, shimmering, not wholly real. But these very elements –the glistening snow, the gentle bells and harp, the storybook picket fence, thelighting that allows nothing to be too distinct – remind us of another qualityof dreams: their evanescence. Watanabe is dying as he sings his lullaby, andalthough this children’s park will survive him, like everything else we bringinto being with our passion and our labour, it will not live very long. Thebulldozers we saw transforming this land will return in some not-too-distantfuture to destroy it. Watanabe seemed to understand this. He sings his songpeacefully, happily: “Life is Short.” He had learned to live under the shadowof oblivion. But why should this man with his humble accomplishment, whichhe 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 aswell as Watanabe the shortness of life, for Watanabe became the picture of theimprudent 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 youcan. Watanabe’s 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, thengrabbing for comfort, status, the trappings of success is surely meaningless,

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since your identity is exhausted in your standing relative to others. Such anidentity is as fleeting as your fortunes and the judgment of others. Furthermore,it assures self-alienation, since it can never really be yours. The niches arealready there, their societal meanings set down. The niche has preceded youand will survive you. Whether you occupy it or someone else does is a matterof supreme indifference. The life defined by its niche is the life of anyone, acipher. If life is short, it must be lived, but whatever else it may be, to live isnot to be a cipher. What is it, then? What is it to live? And can this living,whatever it is, survive the meaninglessness of our eternal oblivion?

It is part of Watanabe’s profound understanding of the brevity of life thatnothing we do survives the meaninglessness of oblivion. Watanabe’s triumphis not in overcoming meaninglessness, but in seeing it clearly and resolving tolive in its void. What I am as a human being is a passion hurling toward death,a passion for the discovery and expression of my soul. All my actions will beundermined by time. The collective joy and anguish of humanity makes notthe slightest reverberation in the cosmos. From the transcendental perspectivethat we ourselves entertain sympathetically, we are this highly particular formof life, this curiosity. The significances with which I endow my experiencewill be extinguished with my death. This present moment of life is my onlycertainty. But the only life I can experience to its depth is the life of a manor a woman, the life of these passions, this connection, this compassion, thiscreative drive. My sole opportunity for living is to live these passions fully,but humbly, in full recognition of the fact that whatever they build will bemeaningful only for me and perhaps for some others whose significance is asfragile as mine.

The fellow-workers at the wake are struck by Watanabe’s humility. In onescene we see him bowing in turn to each underling in a bureaucratic office.Encroaching death had taught him both the modesty of human effort and itssingular importance. He was building a small park for children, not a sacredshrine. With whatever he would build, it would be the same: the decay wouldset in at once. The small inane rabbit beside his altar, the rabbit he clutchedwith both hands in his epiphany, was the clearest symbol of this recognition.These fellow-workers in their weakness, their cowardice, were essential partsof the given, the terms. They also had higher possibilities, those he chose toaddress in them in his bows. He was too busy making his rabbit; there wasno time to condemn. When he first learned of his imminent death, he feltthat he was drowning, that there was no one to help, nothing to grasp to stopsinking. He saves himself when he stops looking to someone else, when hestops grasping for a meaning and redemption not possible for a human being.It is imperative that he acknowledge the terms: that his only chance to live isto live as a man, limited and finite, in this human community, that this is the

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necessary field of his action, all of whose significances are fragile. Letting goall concern with relative standing, abandoning the safety of the grid of niches,seeing it clearly as concealment, as elaborate obstruction to living, he turnsinto himself, allows himself to become a conduit for compassion and creativecommitment, finds his personal entering point to the circle of vitality that ishuman assertion against the void.

The scene with the thugs is the most revealing of the central theme of thefilm. For here the key question is asked directly, put, of course, in the mouthof a thug who has no idea of its profundity: “Don’t you value your life?” AndWatanabe’s response is a remarkable smile, the smile of one who has achievedsome ineffable enlightenment. And this is precisely so, since he smiles as anemissary from the abyss. “Don’t you value your life?” The question bursts inWatanabe’s mind with irresistibly ludicrous irony, not because he has so littlelife 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 passionhas 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, wretchedlytruncated mode of existence, for he has resolved to live. And so he would needa blaring siren to help him cry “Yes!” loudly enough. Still, to make mattersworse, 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 andwretched humanity, and it is that connection, that fleeting humanity whichis the source of his passion. At the moment he is accosted by the thugs, hehas 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 ironyof the film and Watanabe’s ultimate triumph. The photograph on the altaris first shown to us at the opening of the wake. We see a humble manhappy, at peace, nothing more. Before long this photograph, to which thecamera returns us repeatedly, becomes iconic, the visage of a hero, the faceof a man of enlightenment, of transcendent power. Life is short, our actionsirremediably the actions of a human, this anomaly of time. Nothing we dosurvives very long, nothing is of ultimate consequence. But when we seethis photograph for the last time, with the image of Watanabe on the swingsuperimposed 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 fewmonths before his death forged his human soul. These words could be spokenwith significance in any possible world; which is to say, there will be thistruth even when no consciousness remains to comprehend it.

The meaningfulness of a human life will be conditional upon its humancontext; its meaningfulness can appear only in human terms. To this extent, itis irremediably relative, modest. But the meaning achieved in these terms isan 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 theseconditions provide for the articulation of a soul. The enraptured Watanabeclutching the rabbit is the perfect expression of this dual and paradoxicalrealization: the modesty, the infinite stakes.

We are perceiving this man from within the transcendental domain, theperspective so wonderfully evoked and realized in this film, and to our gratifiedamazement, he remains meaningful there. What he did will be destroyed; whathe was cannot be. We remember Watanabe at the ceremony we never saw, theopening 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. Bythe 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.

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