At the funeral, the only fully living person in the room is dead. His photograph looks down upon government officials who are breathing, drinking and arguing, but who have surrendered so completely to habit and hierarchy that they appear less alive than the man they have come to bury. Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is the clearest artistic exposition I have ever encountered of the Talmudic teaching that the righteous remain alive even in death, while others may be dead even during life.

The man in the photograph is Kanji Watanabe, a minor bureaucrat who has spent nearly thirty years behind the same desk. Early in the film, the narrator tells us that he has not really lived during that time. He has kept himself busy while carefully avoiding anything that might require him to act. Papers move across his desk; petitions move from one department to another; years move silently past him. His colleagues call him “the mummy.” He is not approaching death. In the sense that matters most, he is already dead.

Then Watanabe learns that he has terminal cancer.

At first, the diagnosis does not teach him how to live. It merely terrifies him. He tries pleasure, nightlife and distraction, as if intensity could compensate for decades of absence. It cannot. Stimulation is not life. Nor can he simply borrow the vitality of a young employee whose delight in ordinary things fascinates him. What she possesses cannot be transferred to him. He must discover his own reason to live.

He finds it in a petition that his office had previously helped bury. A group of mothers wants a fetid neighborhood cesspool drained and replaced with a playground. Until then, the women and their children had been abstractions to him, another complaint to stamp, redirect and forget. Now he sees them.

Dr. Robert Rhondell Gibson, a teacher whose work influenced me, distinguished between the man-made world and the real world. The man-made world consists of our titles, procedures, categories, expectations and hierarchies. It is not inherently evil; much of it is necessary. But it becomes spiritually dangerous when the map replaces the territory, the role replaces the person and the procedure relieves us of the burden of responding to what is actually before us.

Watanabe’s city office is the man-made world perfected. A cesspool is converted into a petition. The petition becomes paperwork. The paperwork is passed between departments until no person remains responsible for the suffering that produced it. Everyone is working, yet nothing is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)