Darrell, Davis. “Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi.” Cinema Journal 40.4 (2001): 55-80. 

    This article, published in a cinema journal in 2001, reviews Kitano Takeshi’s 1997 film Hana-Bi, or “Fireworks,” in the context of Takeshi’s use of traditional Japanese icons in a modern, global gangster-film market. Immediately, the other main subject of the article is Akira Kurosawa, as demonstrated in the first sentence. In order to catch the audience’s interest, Takeshi is introduced as the greatest Japanese filmmaker since Akira Kurosawa by generic Western critics. The author, Darrell Davis, interrogates Takeshi’s personal message, however, when he questions whether “Japaneseness” in cinema is merely a marketing ploy by the filmmakers. He points to Takeshi’s meticulous attention to traditional Japanese customs in his films despite his public desire to be disavowed from a primarily Japanese identity. In a New York Times interview, for example, he criticizes Kurosawa’s adherence to stereotypical Japanese representations, while the next day asks for Kurosawa’s particular input and recommendations. Darrell asserts that perhaps Takeshi exploits the icon of Japanese cinema, Kurosawa, to garter a particular image for himself publicly, and then by censuring him plays a keen political tactic. Darrell moves on to the study of Takeshi’s work and Japanese cinema. He uses the three types of Japanese film as described by Kurosawa to structure the remainder of her analysis. According to Kurosawa, the three modes of Japanese film are the reflectionist, dialogic, and contamination models. Darrell ends by commenting on Hana-Bi’s release at the Cannes Film Festival and an ending remark on the work and Takeshi.

This article is useful to my study of Kurosawa’s Rashomon for two main reasons. First, the detailed descriptions of Kurosawa’s labeling of film genres offer a new level of discussion applicable to the film Rashomon. Secondly, the discourse about Kurosawa’s samurai films among the modern industry provides a look into the sustainability of Kurosawa’s films over time, of which his masterpiece Rashomon is included. Particularly, while many articles today celebrate Kurosawa’s work from a Western perspective, it is interesting to see how he is discussed by his Japanese peers.

Richie begins his analysis of Ikiru by going over Kanji Watanabe’s, the protagonist’s, actions in the film and explains how they relate to Watanabe’s search for affirmation, for life.  He explains how Watanabe searches for solace in self-pity, family, pleasure, his job and devotion to someone (his female coworker), all of which do not work in giving him solace.  He ends up finding solace and meaning in devotion to something, an idea, which is embodied by the park he wants to build in a poor Tokyo neighborhood.
Richie’s analysis of Ikiru focuses on the translation of the title, Ikiru, which is “to live.”  Richie touches on Kurosawa’s fondness for Dostoevsky, an existentialist, in order to frame Ikiru as a story of a man trying to validate his existence.  As Watanabe “layer after layer peeled away,”  we realize that it is Watanabe’s actions that make him exist both while he is alive and posthumously.  Richie explains how Kurosawa highlights the “irony of the film,”  by splitting the film into two parts: one told by an omniscient narrator while Watanabe is alive and one told by the attendees at his wake.  The men at the wake, mostly Watanabe’s co-workers, misrepresent Watanabe’s actions at first, but when they finally begin to understand what Watanabe accomplished and why, they are too drunk to follow through with anything.  Only one of the office workers takes Watanabe’s actions to heart, but as Kurosawa shows us, after being reprimanded, “he disappears behind his piles of papers as though he were being buried alive.”
An interesting element that Richie brings up in his analysis is the music used in the film.  The classical piece used in the opening, is known as a ricercare, which, Richie explains, “means to search for again, to hunt for, or to follow.”   While Richie acknowledges that there is nothing to suggest whether this was intentional or not, “this, after all, is what the film is about.”   Watanabe’s search for meaning in his life is the impetus behind the action in Ikiru.  Perhaps because of this, Richie’s analysis seems correct, because we all, as humans, search for meaning in our life and hope that our actions can speak for themselves both during our lives and after we are deceased.
    Richie’s final conclusion (which is actually a quote by Richard Brown), that “the meaning of [Watanabe’s] life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be,”  is a very positive take on the film, but the films beauty comes from the fact that it can be read many ways.  Richie harms his argument though, by using lengthy quotations from the film, which are not always completely relevant and ending his analysis with a description of the film by Kurosawa himself which does little to enhance Richie’s argument and only serves to show Kurosawa’s unhappiness with both the film’s creation and the final product.  The negativity of Kurosawa’s own analysis of his film puts a damper on the positive reading by Richie and the sense one gets after seeing the film that he or she has just seen one of the greatest films of all time.

Russell talks about Kurosawa’s entire career and also focuses on his two most oft-used actors, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, who plays Watanabe in Ikiru.  Russell acknowledges Ikiru as “one of Kurosawa’s finest films,”  but compares it to other Kurosawa films in her analysis.  She writes, “This is a director who was not afraid to use fast motion, slow motion, or extreme high or low angles.  He turns off the soundtrack altogether for a moment in Ikiru, and in High and Low throws a dash of color into a black-and-white film.”   Instead of doing an in-depth analysis of Ikiru, Russell talks about the film in relation to stages in Kurosawa’s career and the career of Takashi Shimura, saying of Shimura, “his starring role in Ikiru is perhaps the most memorable.”   Russell relates the film to other Kurosawa films of around the same time and notes their similarities and differences, in narrative, structure, and themes.  Talking about the two-part structure of the films Seven Samurai and High and Low, Russell explains that, unlike Ikiru, the structure of these films is “exposition followed by action.”   Russell compares Ikiru to Rashomon, saying, “in Ikiru, as in Rashomon, the heroic action is retold by others, and performed in flashback.”
    Russell also shows the similarities in setting among various Kurosawa films.  She writes, “Ikiru is also an important film in Kurosawa’s cinema because it deals directly with the issue of urban development.”   Most of Kurosawa’s non-period films have an urban setting, but the city itself is integral to the plot of Ikiru, because Watanabe’s quest is against Tokyo itself, the stagnant bureaucracy, the icy social interactions, etc. and this is all embodied by the cesspool, which is a product of urban life.  Russell also notices that the “extreme weather conditions […] In city films, they soften the urban setting into a site of humanist compassion, exemplified by the final soft snowfall in Ikiru.”   The urban setting provides a good backdrop to the actions of Kurosawa’s gangster films (“gendai-geki” ), but it provides the impetus behind the action in Ikiru.  Russell’s article separates her discussion of Kurosawa into two parts, his movies about “men with suits” (of which Ikiru is one) and his movies about “men with swords,” which is ironic considering the two-part structure of Ikiru and many other Kurosawa’s other films.  Russell makes some interesting points that are not touched on by other authors, because, like Prince’s book,  she analyzes the film in comparison to other Kurosawa films.

Like Goodwin’s book, Yoshimoto looks for allegorical meaning in Ikiru.  He focuses on different things than Goodwin, asking questions about the narrator and images in the background, which escaped the attention of Goodwin (or they just didn’t relate to his argument).  The first question Yoshimoto raises about the film is the opening image, which provides the starting point for Yoshimoto’s analysis of impossibility and disorientation in Ikiru.  Yoshimoto writes, “the opening x-ray image of Watanabe’s stomach is an “impossible” image whose origin cannot be accounted for diegetically [sic].”   The author then proceeds to explain why the image is “impossible.”
    Yoshimoto follows this with a shot breakdown of the opening scene in Watanabe’s department and surmises from the shots used by Kurosawa that, “Watanabe is consistently denied the subject position of the look; instead he is placed in the position of the other’s look.”   This establishes a theme that Yoshimoto then expands on, the theme of Watanabe as a subject, which is a offshoot of the theme of self-reflexivity.  Another self-reflexive image Yoshimoto recognizes is in the silent scene in which Watanabe leaves the hospital.  “On the wall behind Watanabe are many identical posters, advertisements for “Morinaga Penicillin Ointment.”  The medical reference reminds us of the immediately preceding scene at the hospital, and the word “penicillin” also emphasizes the incurability of Watanabe’s disease.”   Kurosawa also allows for self-reflexivity in the ‘nightlife scenes,’ “Mirrors are sued to disorient our perception of scenes’ spatial unity.”   All of these examples highlight Kurosawa’s use of self-reflexivity in the film, which bring the viewers attention on the process of watching the movie.  Yoshimoto argues that Kurosawa is commenting on the film itself and the audience’s perception of events in the film.  The audience members thus becomes aware that they are watching a film, which succeeds in distancing them from the protagonist, Watanabe, and calling into question the images on the screen (i.e. the ‘stories’ told by the coworkers at the wake).  In relation to this last idea, Yoshimoto writes, “[Ikiru] demonstrates the problematic relation of narration and subjectivity.”
    The most interesting self-reflexive element in the film I found was the actual structure of the film.  Yoshimoto writes, “when the protagonist of Ikiru abruptly disappears about two-thirds of the way through, his death surprises us as something utterly shocking, even though it is totally expected,”  and this is because “We assume that biological death and closure of our lives somehow coincide with each other.  What surprises us is that this is hardly the case.”   Yoshimoto’s argument concerns self-reflexivity in Ikiru and how this aids the goals of the film.  The questions that the two-part structure forces the audience members to ask themselves are just one example of the various techniques Kurosawa employs to force the viewer to change with Watanabe; the movie itself becomes catharsis.

The title of the third chapter in Prince’s book is “Willpower Can Cure,” and its opening paragraphs deal with postwar Japan and its need to cure its ills through sheer willpower (which it did).  The title also has relevance to Ikiru, because it is Watanabe’s willpower that gets the park built and gives meaning to his life (in his own eyes).    Prince begins his analysis of Ikiru talking about the nature of the “heroes of Kurosawa’s films,”  Watanabe included, and how their “lessons in responsible living are filtered through, altered, and sometimes deformed by the social order.”   Prince begins this analysis comparing the heroic character of Ikiru, Watanabe, to characters in other Kurosawa films, but then analyzes the film on its own.  Prince says of Kurosawa, “In Ikiru, he is concerned to contain and to limit the viewer’s empathic response so that it may yield enlightenment rather than catharsis.”   Prince then proves his hypothesis by analyzing various scenes in the film and how Kurosawa’s use of editing creates a narrative style that limits the viewers’ empathy with Watanabe.  Prince explains his theory that “the basic structure of the film” means “Watanabe will be manifest as a textual gap that the narrative tries to fill in and reclaim by inventing hypotheses for his behavior,”  with the term “narrative cavity.”   An example of a narrative cavity is the scene following Watanabe nearly getting hit by a car, where we expect to see Watanabe returning, but instead see his son and wife, which Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto comments on in his book.   Prince tracks the plot sequence of the film and explains various meanings and themes through Kurosawa’s use of camera angles and imagery.  He compares the “office scenes [where] human beings are contained and confined by an overwhelming and alienating environment” to Michelangelo Antonioni’s later films.   Prince frames Ikiru as the culmination of his earlier works, such as Scandal, Drunken Angel, and Stray Dog in its “new and more extensive bounding of the social challenges with which the forms of the earlier films grappled.”

Penntext link. 

Full text not available online, but the journal is available in the library.

Penntext link to article in University of Toronto Quarterly, full text available from EPSCOhost Academic Search Premier.