After getting back from the trip to Japan, I’ve noticed a very marked change where… my future-pondering is uncapped for the first time in a long time? In 2019 I was focusing on settling into a new job and short term goals like that, once the pandemic started I was locked into ‘I’ll just sit tight’ mode, and it was only this year with the different trips and visits to plan for that the ice was broken on that, but I was so focused on the trip that I didn’t think beyond that. Now that the trip is over… well I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. And anyway I felt especially preoccupied with those kinds of thoughts the entire workday one Friday, and I was in a weird mood, and I struggled to decide what exactly I should put my time into to break myself out of it, or at least forget it for a while. And I feel oddly proud that I settled on objectively the right call: watching Ikiru. I’ve seen it before, but it was I think in high school, and I didn’t really remember anything except the general premise and tone and a few key moments. I hadn’t recalled just how much about Watanabe’s work the whole thing is. But it really did end up being the perfect thing to do in the mood I was in at the time, and I loved it all over again. It’s a very… sentimental and parable-ish kind of movie, sort of like It’s a Wonderful Life or something, but I think sometimes that kind of sincerity can really be wonderful and it is here. Takashi Shimura is always a welcome sight, and he’s really phenomenal I think here as this poorミイラ. The scene in the bar singing, him stopped on the stairs deciding not to interrupt his son to tell him the news… all just completely heart-wrenching.
I think it really is the kind of movie to think of at times and use as inspiration. I don’t know exactly how the next handful of years are going to go for me, and I don’t know if there’s so direct a cause I could throw myself into and be helpful in the way the fictional character does here, but I think it is good to strive to at least be present in one’s work, and not lose sight of whatever impact you can make on people in life. At a particular time when I was in definite danger of fully checking out and chickening out from making any new change, I appreciated that.
I watched this with Japanese subtitles (I bought a Japanese UHD blu ray — looks nice but there aren’t really any special features so I was pretty much paying for the subtitles).