Human Studies 20: 137151, 1997. c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Kurosawas existential masterpiece: A meditation on the meaning of life

JEFFREY GORDON
Department of Philosophy, Southwest Texas State University, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666-4616, U.S.A.

Abstract. In the rst part of the paper, I try to clarify the cluster of moods and questions we refer to generically as the problem of the meaning of life. I propose that the question of meaning emerges when we perform a spontaneous transcendental reduction on the phenomenon my life, a reduction that leaves us confronting an unjustied and unjustiable curiosity. In Part 2, I turn to the lm 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. But rst there is a pause, a hesitation. That silence lled 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 eld, few are immune to the disquietude it fosters. The desire that motivates this paper is the will to nd 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 rst 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 rst 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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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 specic texture of the issues at the outset by immersing ourselves too quickly in abstractions, I want to seek clarication 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, he says, looking out the window. There wont be a book about him. Great wouldnt be the right word, but . . . Uncertain how to nish, 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 lm, 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 lm 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 and nally 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 rst time, he realizes the depth of his attachment to 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-lled sky with an expression of simultaneous

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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) without emotional 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 edice collapses. Something, some event or unbidden thought, ashes 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 reect the sons feeling for him. That feeling, the importance the man has had for the son, should play some part in any nal assessment of his life, the son cant help believing. The word great occurs to him, ows 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 signicance 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 signicance? 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 dened 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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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 lm is a brilliant stroke. Here was this crowded room, 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 signicance; 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 rst 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 signicance; and we are seeing the fragility of that signicance, 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 nal moving scene of La 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-lled 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 conned to his own heart. But the stars are unchanged in their course. Sky and sea are unmoved by his need. He discovers the abyss that separates his point of view from the point of view of the universe. The signicance 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 signicances; the other, the perspective of a more dispassionate distance. In the normal course of life, we shift between these perspectives, in much the same way that 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 significance of anothers misfortune by reducing our distance from it, duplicating in ourselves his or her subjective standpoint. The problem of life emerges when 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 signicances 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 that this 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 signicance, 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 ee to some higher order of subjective signicance 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 phenomenon 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 content with 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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committed one, that it nds resonances within me, that this innite serenity is a station of my own heart. The particular avor of the signicances 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, the very oblivion I am sensing now in my transcendental gaze. Religion and art have provided the traditional recourses from this diminution, religion by assuring us that we are not alone in our worlds of subjectivity, that these very signicances are the objects of eternal concern of a being of transcendent value; art by wresting from the ux 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 sufcient distance on the human scene, even the idea 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 to transcend the particular circle of signicances 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 signicant. 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 signicance of such an insight must await a demonstration of the signicance of mankind, a thesis that remains in indenite 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 specic 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, lm is arguably the iconographic art par excellence. (Cf. Balazs, 1966, pp. 201215.). Should it not enable us to transcend our subjective connements? In Ikiru, his masterpiece of 1952, Akira Kurosawa has dealt with precisely our problem of meaning. Can he carry our reections further? Has he anything to teach us? 2. Ikiru (To Live) is the story of a mummied Japanese bureaucrat who is awakened to life in his nal 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 ofcial in a hopelessly stagnant government ofce, is referred to by the dispassionately ironic narrator as our hero, and the lm 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 ofce 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 lm 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 lm is not the rst 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 lm 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 standpoint of 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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and its challenge are always there, whether we turn to them or not. The benet 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? The answer is not necessarily, I think, that the vision is too shattering, too demoralizing. 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 values, 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 trafc to a soundtrack of total silence, he is experiencing the extraordinary circumstances, and we, who are 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 lm reduces the amount of effort required in achieving the transcendental perspective. The lm 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 signicance 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 mere possibility; 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 ctional 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 rst reaction is paralysis, for this perspective is particularly alien to him. He has lived the last twenty-ve years in grinding repetition, thus nurturing the illusion that his days are interchangeable, that the passage of time is a matter of indifference. Paralysis is his rst reaction, but

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then he is seized with panic. What has been the signicance 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, is shown 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 been lifes slave, but now youre going to be its master, and promises to be his Mephistopheles. He leads Watanabe into a dazzling, noisy, kinesthetic night of lively, Western-inspired music, jammed danceoors, shiny neonreecting 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 ofce 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 nd 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 xed 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 face lights 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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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 lm we had seen the petitioners parlayed from one indifferent bureau to another. He clutches the petition, orders a government car, races out of the ofce, two bewildered assistants straining to follow him. On the soundtrack has been a jubilant Happy Birthday 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 rst half of the lm 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, our hero was dead. The remainder of the lm 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 accomplishment, while we try, with the help of many ashbacks to his last ve months, to understand the key he had discovered, the answer he had found to the question, What meaning is possible in face of imminent death? What we see in these ashbacks is a man of patient but unyielding determination, a man who dees 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 ofce to ofce, waiting, importuning humbly, sometimes sitting for what seems hours in front of an ofcial, but refusing to go. Still stooped with humility and advancing illness, his face begins to look simultaneously intent and peaceful. In repeated viewings 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 scene is particularly telling. A group of thugs wants to build a tavern on the site of Watanabes proposed park. Watanabe, accompanied by his secondin-command, is on his way to an ofcials ofce. The thugs, all well-dressed in business suits, are waiting in the corridor, leaning against the walls. Intent on his 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 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. He takes 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 difculty that Watanabes mourners, his fellowworkers, nally 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 wake ends with 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 reection, the new chief instructs that 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 xedly at the man. The protester never speaks, but slowly sinks into his chair, then behind his wall of papers. The lm 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 nal ashback 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-reecting snow. Then we see him full front, in his overcoat and the hat he had bought to 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 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 a close-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 lm, 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 difcult 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 ve 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 impossible to accomplish anything, he did his job, as one of his fellow-workers said. But there is a tension running through this lm, 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-distant future 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 rst sight as though the others, the workers in the bureaucracy, 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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since your identity is exhausted in your standing relative to others. Such an identity is as eeting as your fortunes and the judgment of others. Furthermore, it assures self-alienation, since it can never really be yours. The niches are already there, their societal meanings set down. The niche has preceded you and will survive you. Whether you occupy it or someone else does is a matter of supreme indifference. The life dened by its niche is the life of anyone, a cipher. If life is short, it must be lived, but whatever else it may be, to live is not 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 Watanabes profound understanding of the brevity of life that nothing we do survives the meaninglessness of oblivion. Watanabes triumph is not in overcoming meaninglessness, but in seeing it clearly and resolving to live 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 be undermined by time. The collective joy and anguish of humanity makes not the slightest reverberation in the cosmos. From the transcendental perspective that we ourselves entertain sympathetically, we are this highly particular form of life, this curiosity. The signicances with which I endow my experience will be extinguished with my death. This present moment of life is my only certainty. But the only life I can experience to its depth is the life of a man or a woman, the life of these passions, this connection, this compassion, this creative 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 be meaningful only for me and perhaps for some others whose signicance is as fragile as mine. The fellow-workers at the wake are struck by Watanabes humility. In one scene we see him bowing in turn to each underling in a bureaucratic ofce. Encroaching death had taught him both the modesty of human effort and its singular importance. He was building a small park for children, not a sacred shrine. With whatever he would build, it would be the same: the decay would set in at once. The small inane rabbit beside his altar, the rabbit he clutched with both hands in his epiphany, was the clearest symbol of this recognition. These fellow-workers in their weakness, their cowardice, were essential parts of the given, the terms. They also had higher possibilities, those he chose to address in them in his bows. He was too busy making his rabbit; there was no time to condemn. When he rst learned of his imminent death, he felt that he was drowning, that there was no one to help, nothing to grasp to stop sinking. He saves himself when he stops looking to someone else, when he stops 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 is to live as a man, limited and nite, in this human community, that this is the

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necessary eld of his action, all of whose signicances 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 creative commitment, nds 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 lm. 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, his death with the serenity of the sunset. Does he value his life, this eeting jot, this curiosity? If you want to know the truth, sir, the answer must be no. But he has chosen to endorse this nite, eeting, 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 afrmation of his onnection with nite and wretched humanity, and it is that connection, that eeting 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 to sufce, 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 nal superb irony of the lm and Watanabes ultimate triumph. The photograph on the altar is rst 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 signicance greater than any 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 signicance 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 signicance in any possible world. The key to the achievement of meaning will be the clear and humble comprehension 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 innite stakes. We are perceiving this man from within the transcendental domain, the perspective so wonderfully evoked and realized in this lm, and to our gratied amazement, he remains meaningful there. What he did will be destroyed; what he 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 innite amusement. By the close of the lm, 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.