'Ikiru'

As someone haunted and often terrified of death, my mortality and general existence as I internally grapple with the mysteries of meaning, a film like Ikiru, or To Live, strikes at my very core. I don’t know if it soothes my inner demons, but it helps knowing that it’s a universal rock in the shoe. 

Watanabe is a mid-aged mid-management bureaucrat in “public affairs” – a position where he hears the complaints of the public only to marginalize their problem or pawn it off on another group.

He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, both ugly and unforgiving as they care more for their father’s death and subsequent inheritance than they do anything else.

After learning he has stomach cancer and a few months to live, he searches for meaning or perhaps a quick fix to the anxiety that he’s wasted his life, including an understated fear that he somehow caused some sort of ruin upon his son, no thanks to the early death of Watanabe’s wife.

Watanabe seeks solace. He ventures into the wild underbelly of earthly pleasures such as a striptease and club. He partners with a young female co-worker in searching for the secret of happiness. It’s not until he learns that the most immediate impact can be made in his existing job where he works tirelessly (sorta) in having a park created in a blighted part of town.

The final quarter of the film are his co-workers at his wake, getting drunk and putting together the pieces as to Watanabe’s change in attitude the last five months.

It’s as poignant of film as you’ll find. No explosions, unfortunately. But there is a swing.