Ikimino no kiroku

Akira Kurosawa (1955)

The BFI’s Kurosawa season is being sponsored by Suntory and the films are preceded by a Suntory commercial, which it’s hard to take seriously after Lost in Translation.   There’s no difficulty taking seriously I Live in Fear (also known as Record of a Living Being) but it was – just when Still Walking had raised hopes that I might get to love Japanese cinema – a back-to-square-one experience.   I Live in Fear, which Kurosawa co-wrote with Shinobu Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka and Hideo Oguni, is the story of Nakajima, an elderly man who owns a foundry and, convinced that Japan will be destroyed in an imminent nuclear war, wants to emigrate to Brazil with his wife and children and grandchildren (and mistresses).  They oppose Nakajima’s plans and a family court, one of whose newly-appointed members is Harada, a local dentist, is asked to arbitrate.  The family contends that Nakajima is in no fit state to decide his and their future and the court rules against him.   Harada feels increasingly uneasy about the court’s judgment:  in the film’s concluding scene he visits Nakajima, who is now locked up in a mental institution.

These final sequences are very powerful – especially the image of Harada. on a steeply sloping descent from the upper level of the institution, passing Nakajima’s daughter and her baby who are walking up to visit the old man.  By this point, Nakajima believes he is on a different planet, that he’s escaped from an Earth which has been incinerated:  we realise that he’ll be relieved to think that his daughter and grandchild have escaped too.    Throughout I Live in Fear, Kurosawa creates an apocalyptic atmosphere – through menacingly noisy trains as well as planes, through scary storms and other ‘weird weather’, as Nakajima describes it at one point.  The crowd scenes at the foundry after a fire there are impressive too.   But the performers mostly play in the traditional style of Japanese screen acting which I can’t read – it looks to me coarsely melodramatic.   There are exceptions:  as Hamada, Takashi Shimura (who played Watanabe in Ikiru) shows that quietly eloquent, persuasive naturalism was an option in Japanese cinema of the time.  But the picture is dominated by the presence of Toshiro Mifune as Nakajima.  Mifune was only in his mid-thirties when he made I Live in Fear and it shows:  he gives a strenuously stagy impression of an old man’s hobbling movement and his eyes stare obsessively from the word go.   Mifune’s Nakajima is a Lear-like geriatric (although with a bigger family) who seems spectacularly mad long before he’s in the psychiatric ward.

The prevailing unreality of the proceedings to some extent works in Kurosawa’s favour.  The audience may be less inclined to ask questions that would occur with a more naturalistic presentation.  Yet I found I still did ask questions.  Why is Nakajima a lone voice?   Why does no one else – in a story which takes place at a time in which there was, across the civilised world, a deep dread of nuclear annihilation; and which is set in the one country in the world where that dread was already rooted in national experience – see things the way the old man does?   Is the idea that Nakajima’s family are so pettily mercenary that they refuse to do so?  What is it causes some of them to start having second thoughts at a family gathering?  (Perhaps Kurosawa’s desire to replicate the theatrically orchestrated changes of heart among the guests at the wake for Watanabe in Ikiru.)  Why do those who continue to hold out against the old man also delay advancing what sound like  reasonable arguments – that nowhere on Earth is safe from the threat of nuclear holocaust, that Nakajima should think about emigrating to a different planet if he’s as alarmed as this?    The fact that he does just that is neat but dramatic neatness seems inappropriate to the material.

17 June 2010