Ikiru and How 'To Live'

I was very lucky to not have money as a young man, and to have certain role models in my life.

We borrowed a VCR from a relative, who eventually let us have it when it was clear that we were the bigger film fans, and I began to learn all I could about tracking, setting the time properly (a real rite of passage), and timing it for the shows I would miss due to school and work. I still have a set of tapes neatly arranged and labelled somewhere in my mother's house, and they are also numbered, meaning that I can see where I began and where I ended up.

There was also the example of my mother, who worked for over thirty years in a nursing home. She would often tell stories about the regrets the residents had when they knew they were approaching the end. There were tears over careers never pursued, lovers and lives abandoned, paths untaken, etc. And I heard it all and wondered if I would be any better at handling the choices life would make of me.

These things matter to me when I consider how restricted my sense of culture was. I grew up in a house that did not have many books. We never played classical music on my dad's stereo. And I had to watch what was available on regular television networks. We did not have cable television - no one dared to ask for pay-per-view privileges - and the local video store was not yet a weekly habit. I had a job, and the money made was for me to either travel to work, or to get another blank tape. There was only one other place where I could find movies for free.

The library.

It still amazes me what a rich source of culture the central branch of my hometown library is. Yes, there was the literary material that I loved, but also audio sources I never imagined I would find - my first-time exposure to a Richard Pryor album was at a listening station there - and then, the movies.

Because I had very little money, I would borrow tapes from them. Because it was the library, I was not confronted with the latest releases from Hollywood, and that meant the films that were not very popular with the patrons:

The foreign film.

I watched Bergman, Ozu, Fellini, Truffaut, and was unknowingly educating myself in what film was capable of (much different from the latest work of Spielberg and Lucas). I was discovering that it was an art form that could move beyond the page or the sound of music and become deeper and richer.

And that is why I am grateful for my poverty, and the work of Akira Kurosawa.

Ikiru, released in 1952, was my first Kurosawa film. I knew about some of the samurai work, and that he was the inspiration behind the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and the Star Wars films, but I could not find any of those raw action-based films. Instead, I found myself with a film about the redemption of a low-level government clerk (Takashi Shimura, in a wonderful performance) who receives a fatal diagnosis that forces him to reassess his life.

And it forced me to rethink my own.

I do not want to give away the whole plot. The man decides to devote his remaining days to building a park for the children of a rather rundown neighbourhood. And he does live up to the film's title (translation: ‘To Live’). I still wonder what would have happened if I had seen any other of the man's films. Would I have understood what a director could say about time and compromise, and how we all need to reassess what we think of as important?

Doubtful.

To this day, I still thank the great master of Japanese film for creating the remarkably moving story of a life and the determination to do good before the tale ends. It is never too late to be the one that makes the world just that much better.

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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