Exploring Selfhood and Mortality in Kurosawa's Ikiru

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Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru Follows the story of an elderly government worker, Mr. Watanabe, who discovers he has a terminal stomach cancer and must figure out what to do with the time he has left to live. While trying to decide on how to live out the rest of his day, Mr. Watanabe discovers he really hasn’t been living his life the way he would have liked all these years, yet he struggles to determine exactly how he would like to live it. In this film Kurosawa seem’s to be taking Heidegger’s ideas presented within Being and Time, about the they-self and authentic-self and how death can enhance one’s awareness of those selves, and applies them to an actual human being; demonstrating how an actual person passes through both forms of being and the danger one faces when living too long as only a they-self without realizing the potential for an authentic-self. In order to best see this transition between forms of beings one must first understand the difference between a they-self and an authentic-self. A they-self is someone who does not take hold of their lives making decisions for themselves based off what they want. They-selves fit within a …show more content…

Watanabe is alone drinking in a bar. He’s drinking even though he knows it will make his stomach worse, a sign he’s given up on life. When he is confronted by a novelist about his drinking he says “ It's suicide to drink when you have stomach cancer. But... I can't die. I'll just give up and die on them. I want to, but… I can't... die. In other words, I can't bring myself to die.”. What he’s saying here is he knows he’s going to die, and he’s given up on his life for the most part. Even though he’s given up and knows he’s going to die anyway, he can’t bring himself to take his death into his own hands. Instead he drinks as a passive way to bring himself closer to death while also avoiding the actuality of it. At this point he is merely waiting for his death to happen to

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